Eat Here: Reclaiming Homegrown Pleasures in a Global Supermarket Brian Halweil.

The world's agricultural biodiversity--the ultimate insurance policy against climate variations, pest outbreaks and other unforeseen threats to food security--depends largely on the millions of small farmers who use this diversity in their local growing environments. But the marginalization of farmers who have developed or inherited complex farming systems over generations means more than just the loss of specific crop varieties and the knowledge of how they best grow. "We forever lose the best available knowledge and experience of place, including what to do with marginal lands not suited for industrial production', says Steve Gleissman, an agroecologist at the University of California at Santa Cruz. (1) The 12 million hogs produced by Smithfield Foods Inc., the largest hog producer and processor in the world and a pioneer in vertical integration, are nearly identical genetically and raised under identical conditions, whether they are in a Smithfield feedlot in Virginia or Mexico or Poland. (2)

As farmers become increasingly integrated into the agribusiness food chain, they have fewer and fewer controls over the totality of the production process--shifting more and more to the role of "technology applicators", as opposed to managers making informed and independent decisions. Recent USDA [United States Department of Agriculture] surveys of contract poultry farmers in the United States found that, in seeking outside advice on their operations, these farmers now turn first to bankers and then to the corporations that hold their contracts. (3) If the contracting corporation is also the same company that is selling the farm its seed and fertilizer, as is often the case, there's a strong likelihood that that company's procedures will be followed. That corporation, as a global enterprise with no compelling local ties, is also less likely to be concerned about the pollution and resource degradation created by those procedures, at least compared with a farmer who is rooted in that community. Grower contracts generally disavow any environmental liability.

And then there is the ecological fallout unique to large-scale industrial agriculture. Colossal confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs) constitute perhaps the most egregious example of agriculture that has, like a garbage barge in a goldfish pond, overwhelmed the ability of an ecosystem to cope. CAFOs are increasingly the norm in livestock production because, like crop monocultures, they allow...