A Grim Parable of the Modern Food System
18,000 cows went up in smoke but will we learn our lesson?
Last week, news came in from Texas about an explosion — and an unusual explosion at that. Normally, explosions that hit the headlines are the result of terrorist attacks, war, or those which have caused human death – but not this one. No, this event was different, very different. For in this absurd event, it was 18,000 dairy cows on a huge factory farm who met a gruesome and explosive end.
This story captured the public’s attention and provoked a plethora of questions. Many were along the lines of “How could/did this happen?” – the usual suite of questions asked after such an odd event. One question though stood out. This was when someone asked, “What kind of a farm keeps 18,000 cows under one roof?” Whereas all the other questions remained at the surface level of analysis, asking about the dynamics of what happened (and perhaps betraying a gruesome schoolboy fascination with the fact that 18,000 cows “exploded”) a question like this got to the heart of the issue as it started to ask normative questions: not “how could this happen?” but “how could we let this happen?”. In asking what kind of farm…, the question implied there are two types of farm: one ‘Good’ and another ‘Bad’ and we can place the 18,000-cow mega factory farm squarely in the Bad Farm category. Perhaps we could even place it in a third category — an evil farm — a gross perversity that should not exist.
The uncomfortable truth we all must, though, reckon with is that this kind of farm is more common than we tell ourselves. The idyllic picture-perfect farm of our children's books that we kid ourselves is normal is, in fact, a rare oasis of a ‘Good Farm’ among the expansive and barren ‘Bad Farm’ desert that covers our landscapes (even our supposedly “green and pleasant” ones). Ultimately what this tragic event did was blow the cover off our modern food system and the illusions about it that we held to reveal the hidden ‘factory farm industrial complex’ and associated perversions that underpin much of what we consume. We are thus forced to confront the stark reality of the pitiful state of many of our farms and the perversion behind our desires for cheap food.
The emergence and subsequent market dominance of the factory farm is inseparably intertwined with modernity’s infatuation with efficiency. The factory farm may be a monstrosity that should under no circumstances exist, but it is the inevitable end goal of a society transfixed upon the twin idols of efficiency and economic growth. The aim of the factory farm is to not though just be efficient, but hyper-efficient and by carbon-copying the principles of the industrial factory and applying them to the farm environment, the factory farm has achieved efficiency on a monumental and inhumane scale. The principles that the factory farm has commandeered include the removal of dead time (no need to gather the cows from the field in this set-up); energy efficiency (preventing cows from moving means more energy is invested in producing milk or meat); hyper-simplification of a normally complex and resilient system; continuous/seemingly limitless production; and intensive input-output cycles (pump high-energy grain in, extract milk out — all over a relatively small spatial area). Judged by simple1 measures of efficiency, the system works incredibly well. It pumps out milk and meat to our shops and into our fridges at a phenomenal rate and does so seamlessly and cheaply — which is said to be good for the consumer and an unquestionable bonus for business.
As all “good” MBAs will indoctrinate, efficiency often leads to huge profits. This comes through economies-of-scale, time-, labour-, and energy-saving all helping to drastically lower the costs of production — which, when coupled with huge demand, leads to rich rewards. There are other big winners too. The sheer volume of food produced by the factory farm complex has flooded humanity with cheap abundant food. In one sense this is laudable — global rates of poverty have dramatically declined in recent times (although factory farming is not solely or even largely responsible for this). However, the sinister side of cheap abundance has been the concentration of power in the agricultural sector in the hands of the mega-corporations (Big-Ag) and a list of injustices that dwarf the length of “War and Peace”.
But this is something we are all too ready to overlook. Cheap abundant food has become the expected and demanded norm in society. We all hate to spend heavily on food, and our governments have cannily realised that keeping food prices low is highly desirable for when elections come calling. Cheap food is also seen as one of the primary fuels for economic growth by feeding hungry workers and freeing up disposable income which can be spent on the latest gadgets, machines, or entertainment. Cheap food has thus become a “societal good”, an entrenched norm, and a political rallying cry. No wonder Earl Butz proclaimed to farmers decades ago that fateful clarion call: “Get big or get out”. The implicit message to small farmers was “You are in the way, stifling progress, are an economic bad, and are a disservice to society”. Make way for the big (factory) farms!
Farmers who wish to keep on farming well (of whom there are many) struggle to cope in the free-market free-for-all, caused by Butzian agricultural doctrine and the emergence and dominance of the factory farms, their lobbyists, Big-Ag corporations, and supporting governments. Small farms are either clobbered and undercut by cheap imports with lax standards flooding the market or they are pressed down by supermarkets in their price wars or pressed into toxic contracts with Big-Ag. It is a race to the bottom – of standards, virtues, and rock-bottom prices. Depopulation of our rural spaces has ensued, and Good farmers (as I have argued are almost always small farm farmers by virtue of natural limitations) have been driven to the brink of extinction.
One of the main drivers of this mass extinction event is overproduction. A prevalent practice of factory farms is to deliberately overproduce in order to keep prices low2. This ensures a plethora of ready and eager buyers and forces governments to intervene through buying up any surpluses. This, governments would argue, is necessary to ensure these “essential institutions” remain financially profitable so that society can continue to feed itself as cheaply as possible (and so politicians can point to low food prices at the next election). All this may sound benevolent. But the reality is the opposite. What we do not see is this cheapness comes at an immeasurable (though often hidden) cost — and our Good farmers, their agri-environments, and rural communities are the ones that bear it. And ultimately so do we — for we are apt to forget in this hyper-connected media age that we are more closely connected and dependent on our natural environments than we ever realise.
The ‘hidden’ costs can be readily uncovered by those who care to look deeper. For starters, rather than investing profits in local communities, factory farms “suck out to distant lands” and shareholders pockets the wealth of rural communities3 while at the same time breaking down (sometimes deliberately) the institutions and cultures of healthy rural life. With the breakdown of rural life and the economic pressures of unfavourable competition, the Good farmers who farm with wisdom, care and virtue die out. These are the farmers who were locally attuned to their environments and rooted in place for the long haul. They poured their life and soul into their soils and brought forth fruit, crops and livestock that flourished. They knew the names of their cattle and loved them as they would family. They were the farmers who produced good nutritious food bursting with flavour. And they were the farmers who left the land in a better state than when they inherited it. It is a tragedy therefore that in many places, they have all but died out. And with every farmer (no matter how small) who goes under, the grip and scale of the factory farms grow ever larger, ever more dominant — and ever more vulnerable.
Vulnerable might be an unexpected word to appear here. Surely by enlarging their market share the factory farms become ever stronger? Perhaps in the short-term they do. The long-term outlook however looks decidedly bleak. As Wendell Berry said, factory farms are “Stupidity in Concentration”, and by becoming ever larger and ever more concentrated, they weaken their prospects for long-term survival. Berry highlights in his essay on factory farming4 three areas of weakness inherent to the factory farm: confinement, concentration, and separation along with the internal dynamics of these attributes that cause these farms to come to ruin. For example, concentration leads to the rapid spread of disease through the herd and separating livestock from wider ecological relationships reduces their resilience. Paradoxically though, these attributes of weakness are actually the aims and modus operandi of the factory farm set-up: keep the animals confined, concentrate as many together as possible, and separate them from the unpredictable environment in return for the predictable and manageable environment of the factory (farm). The factory farmers naively believe this will lead to long-term success. Berry has shown that the opposite will eventually confront them and that in meeting their aims, the factory farmers are hastening their inevitable downfall. Truly this is stupidity in concentration indeed.
Is inevitable too strong a word for me to use here? No. If someone pushes a system hard enough, forcing it to do what it wasn’t designed to do or able to cope with, it will eventually overheat, collapse, and be destroyed. This is (or should be) common wisdom. We know full well that any electrical machine worked too hard will fail and burn out. What we have collectively forgotten is the same dynamic is true with our farm systems — and that is what happened here in Texas — with the tragic result that 18,000 cows under the stewardship of humans went up in flames. One could struggle to think of a greater reneging of our duty for wise and loving stewardship of the beasts entrusted to our care than this horrendous example of pushing a farm system way too far and seeking to conform the creatures to alien principles and environments.
These cows were created to roam in the fields, to frolic and play, and to choose what they eat. The fields are a conducive environment to their flourishing and care and are a place where the virtues of good farming readily exist. Converse this with the factory farm. Whereas the factory-farmed animal may pile on the pounds at an astronomical rate compared to its free-range cousin, the factory-farm environment it is only conducive to one thing — death. This death comes in two forms: the intended death of the slaughter (which is hastened by the factory), or the unintended death brought about by being confined and concentrated in an environment riddled with disease, despair, danger, and as we saw in Texas, disaster.
It is worth noting in addition that it is not only an environment of death, despair, and danger for the livestock. Industrial and factory farms use cheap, often immigrant labour, in extremely gruesome working conditions. Workers are often as confined as the animals they are tending to and are subject to a depressing sensory overload of noise, horrendous stench, and near-constant animal death. However, it is not just the workers and livestock that are abused. All components of the farm are abused: workers, animals, soil, the land, and even the food (the quality of the food produced is lower).
It is a basic rule in farming that the farm, its soil, its crops, and its livestock take care of those who take care of them5. But factory farming makes this impossible and as Berry points out, has “made an economic virtue out of heartlessness.”6. Having so many livestock crammed into one space – among many other perversities — removes the possibility of mētis7 (locally attuned and applied knowledge which is full of virtue) to the particularities of each beast. Each cow has unique needs, personalities, and quirks and these need to be known, respected, and embraced if the beast is to flourish. All these particularities are hidden and obscured by the factory farm which treats the herd as a uniform whole. Inappropriate treatment is thus certain. For the sake of hyper-efficiency, the factory farm removes the possibility of true flourishing of each cow in the herd and instead causes untold damage to the animals entrusted to its care. A system such as this — built on vice and death — will eventually meet its comeuppance.
We must remember that what happened in Texas is not an aberration. In our global food system, degradation, destruction, and delinquency are the norm. We intensively farm our soils and watch as heavy rains wash away these most precious commodities into our streams and rivers. We pour pesticides onto our fields and wonder why insect numbers have collapsed. We select varieties which are conducive to the machine (easy to transport, harvest, and store) and lament that they taste so poor. Our food systems are fundamentally broken and in urgent need of transformation no matter how much industrial proponents champion declining rates of poverty8 or the abundance of cheap food. Food security is a long-term goal. By focusing on short-term gains, the global food system is jeopardising its capacity to provide for the long-term — and with potentially catastrophic results.
Let what happened in Texas be a warning and a “parable” to us all. Our global food system is overheating and headed towards ecological and economic collapse. A system founded upon and fuelled by vice, greed, and death cannot stand. And we are losing daily those Good Farmers along with their locally attuned wisdom who could help us out of this mess. We need to support and advocate for those Good farmers who remain more than ever — for the sake of our soils, our livestock, our environment, and ultimately our food.
As the Master parable teller once said: “He who has ears to hear let him hear”.
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If you would like to explore Wendell Berry’s writings further, I am running a Guided Reading Group for some of his essays here:
As Wendell Berry highlights the simplicity of the production masks deeper inefficiencies. The system relies on tonnes of grain coming from monocultures that may be situated halfway around the world. Examined from a total system perspective, the factory farm is incredibly energy inefficient. Wendell Berry, ‘Stupidity in Concentration’.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/mar/09/american-food-giants-swallow-the-family-farms-iowa
Wendell Berry, Stupidity in Concentration.
Wendell Berry, Stupidity in Concentration.
This rule was formulated by Wendell Berry.
Wendell Berry, Stupidity in Concentration.
James C Scott defines mētis as practical and locally attuned and adapted knowledge and skill. James C. Scott, ‘Seeing Like A State’.
As if that was a real concern for them.
This is such a sad and disturbing read. But we need to hear the monstrous to be prompted to take a different road.
Switzerland seems to be one of the few remaining places where many farmers choose the traditional over the profitable. In Adelboden, farmers have a yearly "Alpaufstieg", where they walk their cow herds up an incredibly narrow, zigzag path to an alp (demanding even for a moderately fit hiker), where the cows spend the summer eating grass and alpine flowers, while the grass in the valley is allowed to grow and mowed and dried for the winter. Switzerland is the only country where animal dignity is protected at the constitutional level (I actually remember voting for this) and 1.1 million Swiss even voted for granting subsidies for livestock with horns (although that vote did not pass). All that to say, that a more traditional route is possible, but only when both the government and the population support the value of upholding a less profitable but more sustainable and humane path.
Sadly, your moral tale echoes what we see happening to people in cities as well: "keep the animals confined, concentrate as many together as possible, and separate them from the unpredictable environment in return for the predictable and manageable environment of the factory (farm)" - farm people into condos, separate them from their environment, and hook them up on a digital drip of entertainment and control.
Thank you for your thoughtful, incisive writing!