Excerpts:
The latest evidence against any consensus around Big Ag as world savior: In a paper [PDF] just published in Science, a team of researchers led by the eminent Washington State University soil scientist John P. Reganold urges a fundamental rethinking of the U.S. ag-research system, which is “narrowly focused on productivity and efficiency” at the expense of public health and ecological resilience; and of the Farm Bill, which uses subsidies not to support a broad range of farmers but rather to “mask market, social, and environmental factors associated with conventional production systems.”
The Reganold team’s Science article distills their much longer report published last year by the prestigious National Research Council. While conventional wisdom holds that scientists who study agriculture think only lots of GMOs and agrichemicals can feed us going forward, Reganold’s team has quite a different set of recommendations in mind: “organic farming, alternative livestock production (e.g., grass-fed), mixed crop and livestock systems, and perennial grains.”
Read the full article here: http://www.grist.org/sustainable-farming/2011-05-11-factory-farms-only-way-to-feed-the-world-no-says-science-paper