Intensive Farming

Intensive farming, factory farming, or any mass production of animals and crops share a commonality in that they are as far removed from nature and natural systems as you can get.

They are the opposite of sustainable and thus provide a worthwhile example and comparison.

Intensive farming focuses on the singular, not on the whole. The goal of intensive systems is to produce as much of a product as they can and do it as quickly as is possible. Emphasis is placed on production. When such emphasis is placed on only one area the other areas will invariably suffer.

Raising livestock in this manner, often referred to as factory farming, is not the only example of such practices going on in the world today. It is hard to argue that the monolithic grain farms now showing up across the grain belt don't belong in the intensive farming category.

Today it feels as though raising livestock and growing crops in this manner is the more modern way to operate. The giant farms are upheld by some notion of accomplishment and grandeur. To that end one has to wonder what modern agriculture amounts to.

Factory farms and massive grain farms are intense, require great energy and very attentive care and the resources are often very strained.

A terrific amount of human and natural energy is expended to maintain a particular condition that it separate from the natural surrounding environment of the product being produced.

The land and the animals in these systems are strained to the utmost. The giant grain farms cannot make a dollar by avoiding the use of fertilizer and herbicides. They cannot convert to a more natural means of growing crops. They are rooted in their own cycle. They take advantage of the latest and greatest equipment and genetic technology because that is where hope for survival lies.

In factory farms animals raised in confinement are strained due to the unnatural environment, unnatural feeds, and unnatural crowding. These factory farms are too large to allow any amount of natural to enter the system. Everything must be controlled and nature is usually very un-controlling.

The attention to detail is necessary because factory farms will take a hard hit when one of the production line components fail (a disease outbreak or building ventilation malfunction or failed crop emergence).

Every factor is monitored and controlled to cut costs and gain a dollar. These types of operations must be intensively managed in order to prevent a catastrophe from happening. Any slip up can be disastrous.

With the energy and attentive care required to run intensive systems they must be of a grand scale in order to realize a revenue that can balance the cost of that total input energy. When humans operate on a grand scale, numerous things get lost in the shuffle. Hence the complete lack of sustainability in intensive farming.

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