Perhaps they can also encourage people to read "The Omnivore's Delusion: Against the Agri-intellectuals" by Missouri farmer Blake Hurst. He puts the smackdown on Pollan and, by extension, Food, Inc.
It begins with some frustration after overhearing a fellow passenger on a plane hold court rather loudly about Hurst's profession.
He was a businessman, and I’m sure spends his days with spreadsheets, projections, and marketing studies. He hasn’t used a slide rule in his career and wouldn’t make projections with tea leaves or soothsayers. He does not blame witchcraft for a bad quarter, or expect the factory that makes his product to use steam power instead of electricity, or horses and wagons to deliver his products instead of trucks and trains. But he expects me to farm like my grandfather, and not incidentally, I suppose, to live like him as well. He thinks farmers are too stupid to farm sustainably, too cruel to treat their animals well, and too careless to worry about their communities, their health, and their families. I would not presume to criticize his car, or the size of his house, or the way he runs his business. But he is an expert about me, on the strength of one book (Omnivore's Dilemma), and is sharing that expertise with captive audiences every time he gets the chance. Enough, enough, enough.
It's a fairly lengthy essay which covers a lot of ground from topsoil & pollution and nitrogen to the more red in tooth and claw aspects of farming such as sows eating their newborns. Do read it. However, I am going to provide some choice quotes here.
…some of the largest farms in the country are organic—and are giant organizations dependent upon lots of hired stoop labor doing the most backbreaking of tasks in order to save the sensitive conscience of my fellow passenger the merest whiff of pesticide contamination. They do not spend much time talking about that at the Whole Foods store.
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The combination of herbicides and genetically modified seed has made my farm more sustainable, not less, and actually reduces the pollution I send down the river.
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Only “industrial farming” can possibly meet the demands of an increasing population and increased demand for food as a result of growing incomes.
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It is an article of faith amongst the agri-intellectuals that we no longer use manure as fertilizer…In my inbox is an email from our farm's neighbor, who raises thousands of hogs in close proximity to our farm, and several of my family member's houses as well. The email outlines the amount and chemical analysis of the manure that will be spread on our fields this fall, manure that will replace dozens of tons of commercial fertilizer.
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The nitrogen problem is this: without nitrogen, we do not have life. Until we learned to produce nitrogen from natural gas early in the last century, the only way to get nitrogen was through nitrogen produced by plants called legumes, or from small amounts of nitrogen that are produced by lightning strikes…Pollan damns agriculture's dependence on fossil fuels, and urges the president to encourage agriculture to move away from expensive and declining supplies of natural gas toward the unlimited sunshine that supported life, and agriculture, as recently as the 1940s. Now, why didn't I think of that? Well, I did. I've raised clover and alfalfa for the nitrogen they produce, and half the time my land is planted to soybeans, another nitrogen producing legume.
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Farmers know that organic farming was the default position of agriculture for thousands of years, years when hunger was just around the corner for even advanced societies.
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The distance between the farmer and what he grows has certainly increased, but, believe me, if we weren't closely connected, we wouldn't still be farming. It's important to our critics that they emphasize this alienation, because they have to ignore the "industrial" farmer's experience and knowledge to say the things they do about farming.
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