On a summer visit back to the farm here where I grew up, I think I
figured out the central problem with modern industrial agriculture.
It’s not just that it produces unhealthy food, mishandles waste and
overuses antibiotics in ways that harm us all.

More fundamentally, it has no soul.

The
family farm traditionally was the most soulful place imaginable, and
that was the case with our own farm on the edge of the Willamette
Valley. I can’t say we were efficient: for a time we thought about
calling ourselves “Wandering Livestock Ranch,” after our Angus cattle
escaped in one direction and our Duroc hogs in another.

When
coyotes threatened our sheep operation, we spent $300 on a Kuvasz, a
breed of guard dog that is said to excel in protecting sheep. Alas, our
fancy-pants new sheep dog began her duties by dining on lamb.

It’s
always said that if a dog kills one lamb, it will never stop, and so
the local rule was that if your dog killed one sheep you had to shoot
it. Instead we engaged in a successful cover-up. It worked, for the dog
never touched a lamb again and for the rest of her long life fended off
coyotes heroically.

That kind of diverse, chaotic family farm is now disappearing, replaced by insipid food assembly lines.

The
result is food that also lacks soul — but may contain pathogens. In the
last two months, there have been two major recalls of ground beef
because of possible contamination with drug-resistant salmonella. When
factory farms routinely fill animals with antibiotics, the result is superbugs that resist antibiotics.

Michael
Pollan, the food writer, notes that monocultures in the field result in
monocultures in our diets. Two-thirds of our calories, he says, now
come from just four crops: rice, soy, wheat and corn. Fast-food culture
and obesity are linked, he argues, to the transformation from family
farms to industrial farming.

In fairness, industrial farming is
extraordinarily efficient, and smaller diverse family farms would mean
more expensive food. So is this all inevitable? Is my nostalgia like
the blacksmith’s grief over Henry Ford’s assembly lines superseding a
more primitive technology? Perhaps, but I’m reassured by one of my old
high school buddies here in Yamhill, Bob Bansen. He runs a family dairy
of 225 Jersey cows so efficiently that it can still compete with giant
factory dairies of 20,000 cows.

Bob names all his cows, and can
tell them apart in an instant. He can tell you each cow’s quirks and
parentage. They are family friends as well as economic assets.

“With
these big dairies, a cow means nothing to them,” Bob said. “When I lose
a cow, it bothers me. I kick myself.” That might seem like
sentimentality, but it’s also good business and preserves his assets.

American
agriculture policy and subsidies have favored industrialization and
consolidation, but there are signs that the Obama administration
Agriculture Department under Secretary Tom Vilsack is becoming more
friendly to small producers. I hope that’s right.

One of my
childhood memories is of placing a chicken egg in a goose nest when I
was about 10 (my young scientist phase). That mother goose was thrilled
when her eggs hatched, and maternal love is such that she never seemed
to notice that one of her babies was a neckless midget.

As for
the chick, she never doubted her goosiness. At night, our chickens
would roost high up in the barn, while the geese would sleep on the
floor, with their heads tucked under their wings. This chick slept with
the goslings, and she tried mightily to stretch her neck under her
wing. No doubt she had a permanent crick in her neck.

Then the
fateful day came when the mother goose took her brood to the water for
the first time. She jumped in, and the goslings leaped in after her.
The chick stood on the bank, aghast.

For the next few days,
mother and daughter tried to reason it out, each deeply upset by the
other’s intransigence. After several days of barnyard trauma, the chick
underwent an identity crisis, nature triumphed over nurture, and she
redefined herself as a hen.

She moved across the barn to hang
out with the chickens. At first she still slept goose-like, and visited
her “mother” and fellow goslings each day, but within two months she no
longer even acknowledged her stepmother and stepsiblings and behaved
just like other chickens.

Recollections like that make me wistful
for a healthy rural America composed of diverse family farms, which
also offer decent and varied lives for the animals themselves (at least
when farm boys aren’t conducting “scientific” experiments). In
contrast, a modern industrialized operation is a different world: more
than 100,000 hens in cages, their beaks removed, without a rooster,
without geese or other animals, spewing out pollution and ending up as
so-called food — a calorie factory, without any soul.