For related articles and more information, please visit OCA’s All About Organics page and our Farm Issues page.

      All around the world, the push to globalize the food supply by consolidating food production into large-scale, corporatized agricultural systems controlled by a select few is causing massive environmental destruction and immense poverty. And the only way to truly turn things around is to return to small-scale, independent, organic farming models in which people, not corporations, control the food supply, and grow quality food for their families and communities without government interference.

It may sound overly simplistic or even unrealistic in modern world terms, but small-scale farming methods that include growing a variety of crops on smaller plots, also known as biodiversity; rotating crops to maintain soil quality; and avoiding the overuse of harmful chemicals are still among the best ways to conserve land and ensure an abundant, nutrient-dense food supply. Apart from these methods, agriculture as we know it is doomed, as mankind will eventually greed itself into extinction.

“Report after report — the kind governments and big organizations choose to override — tells us that the best way to ensure that everyone is well fed, sustainably and securely, is through farms that are mixed, complex and low-input (quasi-organic),” writes Colin Tudge in a recent editorial in the U.K.’s Guardian. “These must be labor-intensive (or there can be no complexity), so there is no advantage in them being large scale.”

Tudge warns about the dangers of greed-based agricultural consolidation and the elimination of people-driven agricultural models, noting how the ongoing separation of people from the land all around the world is destroying cultures, societies, and the planet at large. In the not too distant future, if current trends continue, the whole of humanity will have essentially been ultimately banished from its agricultural heritage into pauperism and starvation.