• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 630 0

land is like the skeleton of a sick man…Formerly, many of the mountains were arable. The plains that were full of rich soil are now marshes. Hills that were once covered with forests and produced abundant pasture now produce only food for bees. Once the land was enriched by yearly rains, which were not lost, as they are now, by flowing from the bare land into the sea. The soil was deep, it absorbed and kept the water in loamy soil, and the water that soaked into the hills fed springs and running streams everywhere. Now the abandoned shrines at spots where formerly there were springs attest that our description of the land is true.

Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

Rosset, Peter M. The Multiple Functions and Benefits of Small Farm Agriculture (Oakland: Food First, 1999). Rosset documents the ways in which small diversified farms are actually more efficient than large ones.

Sligh, Michael, and Carolyn Christman. Who Owns Organic? (Pittsboro, NC: RAFI-USA, 2003).

Stoll, Steven. The Fruits of Natural Advantage: Making the Industrial Countryside in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

Tilman, David. “The Greening of the Green Revolution,” Nature, 396 (November 19, 1998).

Wargo, John. Our Children’s Toxic Legacy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).

Wirzba, Norman, ed. The Essential Agrarian Reader (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2003).

Wolfe, M. S. “Crop Strength Through Diversity,” Nature 406, no. 17 (August 2000).

On the complex and contentious subject of energy use in conventional and organic agriculture, I relied on many sources, including David Pimentel, Rich Pirog at the Leopold Center, Marty Bender at the Land Institute, and Karen Klonsky and Peter Livingston at the University of California at Davis, as well as the indefatigable work of my researcher Chad Heeter. Pimental helped us calculate the energy required to grow, pack, wash, cool, and ship across country a pound of organic lettuce, using his data and additional information graciously provided by Earthbound Farm. Pimentel’s numbers are sometimes criticized as high because he includes “embodied energy,” i.e., the fossil fuel required to manufacture things like tractors. His numbers remain the most comprehensive, however, and whenever a specific figure is in dispute I’ve used the more conservative number or stated the range. On energetics in agriculture see also:

Carlsson-Kanyama, Annika, and Mireille Faist. Energy Use in the Food Sector: A Data Survey. AFN-report 291 (Swedish Environmental Protection Agency: Stockholm, Sweden, 2000).

Heller, Martin C., and Gregory A. Keoleian. Life Cycle-Based Sustainability Indicators for Assessment of the U.S. Food System, Report No. CSS00-04. (Center for Sustainable Systems, University of Michigan, 2000). This study is the source for my figures on the portion of U.S. energy consumption devoted to the food system (one-fifth) and the portion of that amount (one-fifth) accounted for by farming (as opposed to packing, cooling, or shipping).

Livingston, Peter. “A Comparison of Economic Viability and Measured Energy Required for Conventional, Low Input, and Organic Farming Systems over a Rotational Period.” Unpublished thesis. California State University, Chico, CA, 1995.

Lovins, Amory, L. Hunter Lovins, and Marty Bender. “Agriculture and Energy,” Encyclopedia of Energy Technology and the Environment (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1995).

Pimentel, David, ed. Handbook of Energy Utilization in Agriculture (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 1980).

Pimentel, David, and Marcia Pimentel, eds. Food, Energy, and Society (Niwot, CO: University Press of Colorado, 1996).

Pimentel, David, et al. “Environmental, Energetic, and Economic Comparisons of Organic and Conventional Farming Systems,” BioScience 55, no. 7 (July 2005), 573–82. The statistic on the energy savings of organic production (30 percent) comes from this study, though as Pimentel acknowledges, if the farm’s fertility is not generated on the farm or nearby, this savings quickly disappears.