AGRICULTURE TODAY

  This article, a copy of a conversation with an excellent Canadian scientist is worth reading…

—DR. PINNA

As Small Farms Disappear, the Food System is Crumbling

FROM DR. MERCOLA.COM

Most “farming” today is nothing like the small farming of our ancestors. Food production on a massive, corporate level has taken over the natural farming practices that thrived for hundreds of years. As Dr. Chopra said:

“Look at our food supply in Canada and the United States since they were established 200-300 years ago until they started to turn into this intensive industrial farming.

Until then, they were the happiest lands anywhere on earth because food was pristine, pure and it was doing well — and there was a lot of land and water. Everything was good.

And then came the mechanization — the chemicalization — and now it’s come to the elimination of the family farm. How has it happened? This last thing that I’m talking about: we now no longer have family farms left, very few and very far in between.”

Those of you who are new to the natural health scene may find it surprising that the modern food system is in danger of collapsing. The food system began its dramatic decline the second the world turned away from the farming practices of our ancestors, and began to attempt to outdo nature with technology.

Now, producing food on a massive scale at the lowest price possible has taken precedence over obeying the laws of nature. The system is pushing natural systems and organisms to their limit, forcing living creatures to function as machines.

Of course, “whatever we may gain in industrial efficiency, we sacrifice in biological resilience,” Michael Pollan pointed out in Our Decrepit Food Factories.

Animals Pumped Full of Hormones and Fed Unnatural Diets

As you might suspect, food that is raised using unnatural processes often leads to unnatural responses in those who eat it. Now we are facing the reality of meat and dairy products laced with cancer-causing hormones, super-bug-creating antibiotics and new manifestations like mad cow disease.

Dr. Chopra expands:

“It first started with chemical fertilizers, and then pesticides, and then they moved on. From the pesticides, they said, “We can feed animals back to animals because only half the animal is meat and then the rest of the animal has to be wasted.”

So they picked up slaughterhouse waste and they ground it up. They picked up dogs and cats — road kill as well — and ground it all up. They start to feed animals back to animals that we people eat. All the animals that people ate were herbivores. We didn’t eat carnivore animals. We didn’t eat birds that prey on other birds.

So they’ve been grinding all these up and they were feeding it back to the animals until it turned into a big business. It started in Germany and spread to the UK, and then there’s mad cow disease.

Next came hormones. Hormones are also used for industrial farming for all animals to be impregnated on the same day. Then came along the bovine growth hormone (BGH) to increase milk production. That, unfortunately or fortunately, landed on my desk in 1988, and I started to ask questions. I said, “What’s this? Why are you doing that?   Have you done any studies?” Monsanto, of course, had not done any studies.

Meanwhile, they passed other hormones for beef production. These hormones are sex hormones — like a large birth control pill — that are implanted behind the ears of cattle and left there for life. People eat that beef. Some of those hormones are synthetic and have been proven to be complete carcinogens.”

Further, raising animals in this way — away from their natural environments and diets — actually increases their risk of passing on a dangerous bug to you. For instance, most cows are fed grains, when their natural diet is grass. Grain diets create a much higher level of acidity in the animal’s stomach, which E. coli bacteria need to survive.

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