For the majority of modern human’s existence, human beings have lived by what is referred to as hunting and gathering. Hunter-gatherers procured food by hunting, trapping, fishing and/or gathering edible wild animals and plants for food and other useful materials. These bands were typically egalitarian, shared resources and hunted and gathered cooperatively. During this period people's connection to the land was of total dependence, for it was fundamental to their survival. Because hunting and gathering depended entirely on the natural environment, these peoples tended to live a sustainable lifestyle by limiting their impact on nature.
By 12,000 years ago at the latest, human populations had spread into most of the livable regions of the globe, including Australia and North and South America. About 10,000 years ago, some of these rapidly evolving bands moved away from their hunting and gathering practices and began to settle down and grow their own food; these settlements were our first agriculturalists. With agriculture human society was forever changed. Villages, towns, cities began to flourish, and so did knowledge, artistic expression, organized religion, and technology. During this era, people learned how to plant seeds, and how to take care of edible plants. Then they learned how to domesticate and breed the animals. Herding animals made life a lot easier because then people wouldn't have to move in order to hunt animals to eat. The men that were earlier hunter-gatherers now became farmers (Wikipedia, 2007).
Agriculture and Modern Food Chain
Over the course of the past 10,000 years, agriculture gradually spread throughout the earth, and eventually became the dominant mode of life in nearly all of the areas of the world inhabited by humans, forming the basis for a new way of life, which we call civilization. Human specialization became important as people were ensuring continued existence by learning new ways to produce and preserve food. Agriculture as a way of life has been enhanced by new discoveries and inventions from all around the planet. Settled agricultural villages represented a radically new way of life for human beings, unlike anything that had existed before. Farming meant living permanently in one place. Peoples have fulfilled their nutritional needs by consuming foods produced by domesticated plants and animals. However, living in one spot permanently meant utilizing a relatively small amount of land very intensively over a long period of time, instead of using a large amount of land extensively, as hunter-gatherers did, for brief periods of time (Wikipedia, 2007).
After 10,000 years of this way of life, the human population is still expanding exponentially. In order to fully understand the extent to which this radical change impacted the planet’s food chain it is necessary to consider carefully both advantages and disadvantages of people gained by living off small plots of land and the effects of such a way of life on the environment. Today, there are billions of peoples on the planet, almost all of them supported by agriculture. Any significant change in the size of any one part in the food chain and the rest of the chain is affected. This interdependence within a food chain helps to maintain balance between plants, animal and human populations.
All the way through the 20th century, human communities no matter how sophisticated they had become, they could not ignore the importance of agriculture; to be far from dependable sources of food meant to risk malnutrition, starvation and death. Barbara Kingsolver discusses two important aspects of farming as a way of life: first there was loss of mobility, for “you can’t run away on harvest day”. And second, large families of many children meant more hands to help in the fields. Thus, a tendency toward larger families is built into the new way of life.
Additionally, with the invention of the steam engine and the introduction of the mechanical plow, the industrialization period of modern agriculture began. Inanimate objects, such as mechanical engines replaced human laborers, and burning materials, such as wood, coal, and crude oil, provided the energy to run the fuel injected machines. This marked a decisive turning point of human history (McKibben).
Fast-Forward to 20th Century: from Family Farm to Agribusiness
In 1890 census indicated that 40 percent of U.S. populations lived on farms and food production claimed 50 percent of the nation’s resources. A hundred years later less than 2 percent of the total U.S. population lives on a farm and food cost is less than 12 percent of average consumers’ income. Urban growth and infrastructure development has reduced the amount of prime agricultural land. In two generation North Americans transformed themselves from a rural to an urban nation.
The origins of today’s farm economic model can be traced back to the Great Depression period when farm legislations essentially changed the underlying premise of the role of agriculture in American society. In the 1930s a new course of action ensued, its aim to push agriculture to shift from farm tenancy to ownership. A stream of legislation pushed farming along the same path during the 1960s with a move away from family farming and towards commercialization of the farm. Then came the 1970s’ massive growth of American agricultural participation in the world’s economy, but this growth was not without costs, the 1975 recession, caused by the first world oil crisis, resulted in a wave of bank foreclosures shut down a myriad of small farm operations.
In the 1980s many family-owned farms were in serious financial difficulties, high interests, huge debts, lower crop prices, a shrinking world market, as well as another severe drought ensured a quick removal of crop control from the hands of small farmer. Subsequently, an even more centralized management system based on international trade emerged; this is what many call the industrial food system. Today the food chain is in the hands of a small number of large-scale agricultural industries, the agribusinesses. There are only six companies “Monsanto, DuPont, Mitsui, Aventis, and Dow, which now control 98 percent of the world’s seed sales” (Kingsolver).
