Farming With the Wild 379food, oil and fibre needs; a mere dozen account for 80 per cent of the modern
world’s annual tonnage of all crops (Diamond, 1997, p132). In the 500-year
period starting with Columbus’s first voyage to the New World, colonization and
world trade have transformed the biology and cultures of the Earth at dizzying
speeds. It is hard to imagine that tomatoes were not a native element of Italian
cuisine, that pre-Colombian Mexican food had no cheese, that Thai food’s spicy
chiles were adopted from Central America, or that potatoes were strictly South
American and coffee East African. In the US, however, 98 per cent of the food
production can be attributed to non-native species such as wheat, corn and cattle
(Baskin, 2002, p26). According to Peter Vitousek at Stanford University, 40 per
cent of the Earth’s solar energy is directed toward food and fibre production for
humans; up to 60 per cent of the world’s freshwater resources are currently diverted
for agriculture. With the rise of global corporate agribusiness over the past 60 years,
the family farm has become a vanishing way of life in the US and elsewhere, and
farming is no longer even officially recognized as an occupation by the Census
Bureau. As farms that combined row crops and livestock gave way to specialized
factory-oriented monocultures at war with pests, diseases and weeds, ever larger
machinery necessitated ever larger areas to operate in. Fencerow-to-fencerow con-
version of hedgerows, shelterbelts, wetlands and wildways increased the distance
between agriculture and the natural world. Mechanical systems engineered to
pump deeper and deeper groundwater disrupted basic hydrological functions in
most farming regions. Corporate consolidation of farmland led to an ever increas-
ing amount of rented acreage, on which landscape improvements became a low
priority. Today, even the small farmer who is conscientious enough to manage farm-
land responsibly is continually squeezed by the pressure to produce more output for
less money. Overgrazing, overplanting, overplowing, chemical-intensive regimens,
extensive monocultures and other forms of land misuse are all symptomatic of efforts
to make up for low prices by increasing production. Forced to compete in a globally
oriented food and fibre system, farmers have often had to forsake goals such as wild-
life preservation and long-term landscape conservation (as well as health care and
other basic needs) in favour of short-term economic survival.
All the while, the correlation between our shopping lists and the Endangered
Species List has been growing at an alarming rate. Farming and ranching activities
now involve roughly two-thirds of the US land base in the Lower 48 states and are
primary contributors to the imperiling of threatened species and ecosystems. Hab-
itat destruction and fragmentation, the displacement of native species and the
introduction of exotic species, pollution of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, soil
erosion, the persecution of predators, the release of genetically modified organisms
and the over-exploitation of non-renewable resources for food production and
distribution are among the many ecologically devastating consequences of modern
agriculture. In America’s Private Land: A Geography of Hope published in 1996, for
example, the US Department of Agriculture reported that farming activities con-
tributed to 46 per cent of species listed as threatened or endangered, and ranching
activities to 26 per cent (USDA, 1999, p54).