This arrangement has been shaken. Large scale industrial farming is rampaging through rural America and abroad as well. Family farms are giving way to agribusiness with absentee owners. Technical formu-las and fixes are substituted for personal knowledge. Giant machines and massive use of chemicals are substituted for watchful farmers working the land.
Mixed crops give way to monocultures single crop systems spreading for miles in all directions.
Such crops are often not selected for local needs, but for export. Local farmers, communities and economies become disconnected from traditional livelihoods. It has been replaced by love of the bottom line, with grave ecological results. Killing the soil Without topsoil, there is no food. But every inch of good topsoil the thin surface layer of nutritionally rich soil takes 500 to 1,000 years to create.