In the ongoing debate about whether sustainable agriculture can
“feed the world,” it’s important not to lose sight of what industrial
agriculture is doing to ecosystems—both in specific areas and on a
grand scale.

Producing and distributing lots and lots of calories, leveraged by
fossil fuel and synthetic fertilizers and poisons, may solve certain
short-term problems; but the practice also creates long-term ones that
won’t be easily solved.

In June, a study emerged showing that so-called inert ingredients in
Roundup, Monsanto’s widely used flagship herbicide, can kill human
cells even at low levels—“particularly embryonic, placental and
umbilical cord cells,” reports
Scientific American.
This is an herbicide that’s used on virtually all of our nation’s corn
and soy fields, covering tens of millions of acres of cropland. (It’s
also widely used by landscapers and on home lawns.)

Then there was the recent atrazine imbroglio. For years, the EPA has
been assuring the public that the highly toxic herbicide, still widely
used in the Corn Belt, wasn’t showing up in drinking water in worrisome
levels. Turns out that was a lie, as some excellent muckraking by the Huffington Post Investigative Fund revealed. Atrazine exposure has been strongly associated with reproductive health maladies, including a rise in hermaphroditism among frog populations.

Note that corn and soy production, as practiced today, is completely reliant on these two broad-spectrum herbicides.

Now comes news about the hazards of another input critical to the
project of industrial agricultire: synthetic nitrogen fertilizer. When
farmers apply nitrogen to farm fields, a certain amount enters the
atmosphere as nitrous oxide. And according to a study conducted by
researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
(NOAA) and published in
Science, human-generated nitrous oxide is now the No. 1 contributor to ozone-layer depletion.