Excerpt from– Farmed Out: Wes Jackson on the Need to Reinvent Agriculture, The Sun, October 2010. Read full article
We’ve been told that our food system is broken, and the fix is to grow food organically and procure it locally. The organic farmer eschews pesticides, spreads compost instead of nitrogen-based fertilizer, and sells her Hakurei turnips at the Saturday-morning market. All big improvements, says Jackson, but ones that stop short of a solution. They are answers to problems in agriculture, when we have yet to address the problem of agriculture, a ten-thousand-year-old bad habit that Jackson believes is humanity’s original sin.
