Six Fallacies of Modern Agriculture
By Donella Meadows
–July 2, 1987–
Farm subsidies are over $20 billion a year, farmers go broke anyway, pesticides contaminate water and food, and topsoil washes down the river. Why is that year after year, under Republicans and Democrats, our agriculture system has persistent troubles?
Wendell Berry, a Kentucky farmer and a writer, says it’s because we operate from assumptions about agriculture that [...]
Dear Folks: November 23, 1986
Dear Folks,
It’s late on a Sunday night and I’m too tired to be writing this. I just got back from a trip to Washington, interesting but draining. I came home to find only Dennis here, with a nice pot of lentil soup and a cabbage salad ready for me and the woodstoves all fired up and the chores all done. [...]
Can the World be Fed Without Pesticides
By Donella Meadows
–October 17, 1986–
“We must feed ourselves. To do that, we must have agricultural chemicals. Without them, the world population will starve,” says Norman Borlaug, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for breeding high-yielding grains.
But thousands of modern, high-yielding farms use no agricultural chemicals at all.
The four Lundberg brothers of Chico, California, have a 2000-acre organic rice farm. Some [...]
Everything in Nature Wants to Eat Apples
By Donella Meadows
–October 9, 1986–
“Apples are wonderful food. Everything in nature wants to eat them. That’s why I have to use pesticides.”
It was late August, and Steve Wood was showing me his crop at Poverty Lane Orchards in Lebanon, N.H. The nearly-ripe apples were covered with a gray residue from the last spray of the season — Guthion against apple [...]
Regulating Pesticides – An Impossible Job
By Donella Meadows
–October 2, 1986–
It’s an old joke that one should never look too closely at how sausage is made or how legislation is passed. That’s also true for how pesticides are regulated.
I began to look too closely when three of my colleagues were working on a pesticide data base. I watched them, asked questions, and learned how the Environmental [...]
