We asked him to share some of his insights into the interplay between the human, ecological, and community dimensions of food and agriculture. There's a direct relationship. Agriculture as practiced by agribusiness tends to displace workers and communities and everything else that stands in the way of productivity. It's just not important to agribusiness to preserve community, people, or natural systems. Moreover, industrial agriculture has gotten on what some writers refer to as a technological treadmill.
Agriculture is continually mechanized, and that tends to displace labor.
Let me give two examples. The development of bovine growth hormone, was a solution looking for a problem. We didn't have a problem with dairy productivity. What Monsanto and other chemical companies found was a capacity to increase productivity even though we suffered from a milk glut . The industrial mindset says, regardless of the effect on communities and on dairy farmers - particularly the smaller farmers, we'll sell bovine growth hormone.