Michael Pollan explains the way"old-fashioned farms" functioned as more effecient systems of energy exchange than their often much larger, more industrialized counterparts. Farmers acheived this balance through rotational crops and a large diversity of plant and animal life. Pasturing animals was one way that the system was kept in balance, animals would graze and consume plant waset from gardens and then deposit their manure in fields or in stalls ensuring that it would be incorporated back into the system as fertilizer.
This widening of plant and animal avenues allowed certain animals the chance to eat specific crops or plants and not others. Farmers understood that pasturing different species of grazing animals together could ensure that there was not an imbalance between the grazer and what was being consumed. Putting horses and cattle in one pasture together is one way to ensure a balanced and beneficial use of the land, as cattle eat the plants that the pickier horse is loathe to consume. In terms of composting the smaller scale farm was also an efficient system of consumtion and renewal. Farmers could take old plants from their gardens and mix them with manure from the animals. Over time the nitrogen and bacteria in the manure would cause the pile of compost to heat up thus speeding the breakdown of the tough grasses and plant waste and providing a balanced, not overly rich nitrogen fertilizer for the garden and other crops.
Pollan details the simplicity and logic of this system when he paraphrases Wendell Berry by saying we "take this elegant solution and neatly divide it into two new problems,a fertility problem on the farm (now remedied with petrochemical fertilizers) and a pollution problem on the feedlot (which is often not remedied at all)"(Pollan 67-68 Omnivores Dilemma).
Pollan shows the other "new"side of this equation by describing the waseful illogical system that is characteristic of monoculture industrial farms and large scale factory farms. In these arenas effeciency is the key and takes precedence over all else. On crop farms vast areas are planted with one or two plants, in the US most commonly corn or soybeans. The seeds of these plants are generally treated with fungicides while in storage and some are also GMO's. Once planted the areas under cultivation are intensely fertilized with high amounts of nitrogen and other substances, most of which are sourced from petroleum. The crops are harvested, and generally not used directly as food, but rather sent to factories to be broken down into, as Pollan describes them, more "value added" products. This description of the dangers of monoculture is abbreviated and some information has undoubtdly been left out.The main point however, is that in no way are these giant one crop farms beneficial to the farmer, the environment or the consumer. They only benefit the seed companies and corporations who process the products into a multitude of parts to be reassembled into "food".
On the factory farm side of things animals, only one species, are raised in intensely close quarters, and fed food they have not evolved to eat which usually contains animal parts and by-products. The waste from these animals is too contaminated with growth hormones and antibiotics- administered to boost their size and to treat illnesses which result from close confines and lowered immune systems-to use on crops or in any beneficial way. Because the manure must be gotten rid if it is stored in the most logical of places, open pit vast lagoons which are not lined, and often overflow and leak, contaminating rivers and watersheds. Throughout the Omnivores Dilemma these oppositions, and many others, stand out starkly, and demand to be recognized, if for no other reason than it being the right of people to know and understand where their food comes from. beautiful or not, people need to know.
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