Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization

Natural History, June, 2004 by Laurence A. Marschall

Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization by Richard Manning North Point Press, 2004; $24.00

Don't get him wrong. Richard Manning, who lives on seventy acres of unspoiled land in western Montana, is not suggesting that mid-western farmers, not to mention the residents of New York City and Tokyo, abandon their homes and take to the woods, as he has. After all, his own grandfather was a successful farmer in northern Michigan.

What he wants to make clear, however, in this amiably grouchy and carefully crafted polemic, is just how much we have sacrificed with our reliance on agriculture. The abundance of food that accompanied the domestication of plants and animals thousands of years ago also led to a concentration of power unthinkable in nomadic societies. Slavery, poverty, and political oppression took root wherever there was fertile farmland; social inequity came, as it were, with the territory. Pharaohs and Aztec high priests feasted, while commoners, who suffered the ravages of war and despotism, were tied to the furrow and the farmyard or labored to build public monuments.

Social ills, however, were not the only price to be paid for human settlement. As Manning sees it, the transformation also represented a general lowering of the overall standard of living. Periodic famines punctuated times of plenty, and farmers could not pack up their tents in search of better harvests. Even when harvests were plentiful, domesticated grains, higher in energy than their wild counterparts and easier to consume when ground into soft gruel, made it possible to wean children earlier, and so populations grew explosively. Communicable diseases spread more quickly under crowded conditions, and, because farmers' diets depended too much on monoculture, deficiency diseases ran rampant. Pressed by population pressure, settlements spread to marginal lands, where conditions left people even more susceptible to illness. Virtually every malady, from malaria to tooth decay, could thrive in the new agricultural societies.

Manning makes a fundamental distinction between farming--growing food in small plots for local consumption--and large-scale agriculture, whose ultimate goal (whether in ancient Mesopotamia or in the modern global economy) is the accumulation of wealth. "I have come to think of agriculture not as farming, but as a dangerous and consuming beast of a social system," he writes. In its most recent incarnation--as a mechanized, chemical-driven system of industrial-scale commodity growing--it has taken on a particularly demonic form, for it requires an energy-intensive and heavily subsidized infrastructure to sustain it.

Having run out of arable land, farming in effect began to claim oil fields, steel mines, phosphate mines, and the network of gravel, steel, and asphalt needed to connect them. Once farming ran out of arable land to devour, it started in on the rest.

Insatiable and immensely powerful global agribusinesses such as Cargill, Inc., and Archer Daniels Midland Company now exercise enormous leverage on what we eat (processed grains), what we drink (high-fructose corn syrup), and what we use to fuel our cars (farm states are heavily promoting the use of gasohol).

Although he's a forceful advocate of small, organically run farms, Manning is no romantic utopian, and he doesn't see a practical cure-all for the predicament he defines so incisively. Take time off to hunt, he suggests--whether that means using a rifle to fill your freezer with deer meat or searching local farmers' markets for the best-tasting fresh tomatoes and free-range chickens. Agriculture, after ten millennia, is here to stay, but maybe we can find a way to live the good life in spite of it.

LAURENCE A. MARSCHALL, author of The Supernova Story, is the W.K.T. Sahm professor of physics at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania, and director of Project CLEA, which produces widely used simulation software education in astronomy.