In an era of exponentially bad news and progressively bad timing in implementing needed reforms, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, or USDA, recently announced some amazingly good news. Small farms are on the rise.
Why is this good news? Because the alternative, large-scale farming - also known as factory farming - is a major polluter of the air, water and earth we share. In fact, it's such a significant part of the overall pollution of the planet that scientists have gone so far as to try to legislate against cow farts. This enterprise, both hopeless and silly, merely underlines how desperate the experts are to find solutions.
Many of today's "factory" farms are in reality industrial complexes. These operations, while able to produce high volumes of food, do not produce wholesome food, as witness the increasing number of food recalls like the 2008 botulism contamination of tomatoes, the August, 2008 Salmonella St. Pauli outbreak, and the recent peanut foods recall.
These farms also have little regard for the environment or the animals they tend. By accumulating large herds of animals, they create unwieldy amounts of waste which they dump into waterways or discard in piles whose runoff further affects surface and ground water. On family farms, cow, hog and chicken manures are used to enrich fields or sold to others as soil amendments. To get an idea how pervasive this water pollution from factory farming is, consider the case of the huge dairies in San Bernardino and Riverside counties, which have caused such massive water problems the aquifer itself is higher in nitrates and pollutants than water coming out of local sewage treatment plants.
All these affects - water and air pollution, food recalls, foods with fewer and fewer vitamins and minerals - are the result of treating profit, and not adequate food supply, as the goal. Factory farms do make money, but at the expense of human beings and the ecology we depend on to live. They also use increasingly large quantities of pesticides and herbicides on crops, and grow genetically modified food, to further maximize that profit, jeopardizing not only their customers' health but the environment as a whole.
Perhaps most poignant is the fact that concentrating land in a few profit-driven hands has destroyed the American ideal of the family farm, a small operation where the cows have names, the chickens free-range to scour bugs from the garden plot, and corn, wheat and soy are green crops, not greenbacks.
According to the USDA survey, these family farms, generally considered plots of less than 50 acres, have risen by four percent in the last six years. Even the number of smaller farms - specialty farms and organic farms of one to ten acres - has grown, up to 700,000 from 580,000 in 2002.
These small farms not only reduce water and air pollution by employing modern developments in animal husbandry, crop rotation and waste management, but they also provide more nutritious food at a local level, reducing the amount of fuel needed to transport food from growing areas to consumers. 
As a Cornell University study notes, transporting strawberries from California to New York by air uses 100 kilocalories of energy (from fuel) for every kilocalorie of strawberry transported. Translated, it means one-half cup of strawberries (the average serving) at 24 calories requires 2,400 calories of energy from fuel to make the trip. As you can see, the energy equation is severely negative, even for a strawberry lover.
If food miles equal carbon emissions, then the food miles for even the lowly carrot, at 1,838, represent a waste of resources that could be used to shore up a failing economy and generate jobs. These food miles, which represent from 8 to 92 times the mileage as compared to locally grown food, also require producers to spray frequently to retard spoilage, pick before the produce has ripened, and ship long distances, often in trailers or freight cars that incorporate a cooling system for even more energy waste.
Small farms are between 200 and 1,000 percent more productive than factory farms, and small farms of 27 acres or less generate ten times the dollar value, according to a study by Food First/Institute for Food and Development Policy. According to agronomist Peter Rosset, a former Food First director, this is because small farms tend to specialize, devote more attention to the day-to-day details of farming, and use a variety of agronomical techniques like drip irrigation, crop rotation and dual-cropping, or growing soybeans and lespedeza (or clover) on the same plot.
Unfortunately, along with the rise of small farms, factory farms are also gobbling more acreage and producing more foodstuffs. In 2007, farms with more than $1 million in revenues produced almost 60 percent of the nation's food - up from less than 50 percent in 2002. The biggest component of this rise is industrial beef production, a truly non-sustainable enterprise from almost every perspective, even if you are a dedicated carnivore.
This consolidation of food is bad for us, bad for the soil, water and air we breathe, and bad for our health. We can only hope that President Barack Obama is firm in his commitment to support and encourage small farmers in finding "profitability in the marketplace and success in the global economy" - a move he hopes to accomplish by reducing farm subsidies to factory farms.
Failing that, expect the next food recall to be even more severe, and the next tomato you buy from California to have all the nutrition value of an old pair of shoes - sans rubber soles, of course.
Related Reading:
The Wicked Cool World of Organics, Edition 1
China's New Organic Industry
