Health Hotline Magazine | September 2019

The Hidden Costs of Conventional Agriculture

By Suzanne Boothby

When the Green Revolution began to take off in the middle of the 20th century, it was a promise of abundant food; selective breeding resulted in high-yielding crops and irrigation allowed food to be grown in places where it couldn’t before. There was a major shift in the way food was grown—industrial-scale agriculture surpassed small to mid-sized family farms as a means to feed millions of Americans. It has become the dominant food production system, but it is a system that is defined by monoculture cropping that relies heavily on synthetic chemical fertilizers and pesticides (a broad term which include insecticides, herbicides, and fungicides). There is an emphasis on growing commodity crops like corn and soy that

end up as animal feed and in processed junk food. Industrial animal production has grown alongside industrial agriculture, in which a single species of animal is raised in concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) to satisfy our desire for cheap meat. The cheap and abundant food that has proliferated in the U.S. relies on a system of agriculture that is costing us all. Costs that are passed on to taxpayers, farm workers, rural communities, our

collective public health, and the environment. Let’s take a look at some of the hidden costs of conventional agriculture.

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