Why Industrial Agriculture Is The Nº1 Problem For People and Earth

From the 1800s, the industrial centers became growing cities and populations expanded geometrically. Farming became an industry, too, a business set upon vast tracts of deforested land. Production was removed from the places where people lived and people who lived where production went were removed. Today, increasingly, multinational corporations mass-produce foods in ways that farm the Earth to the absolute limits of its capacity. These faceless entities maximize profits at people's expense, by design and by any means necessary. Intentionally or not, money is more important in this equation than people.

What happens is that when a dollar can’t be turned naturally in the Earth, industrial agriculture does it in other ways. Machines are put to work to plow the dirt, pulverizing top-sol into dust. Whatever work can’t be mechanized is given to low-paid workers, who risk their lives by exposure to sun and poisons, making sure food gets from the fields to our tables. Chemicals, usually petrochemicals, are needed because the land is farmed to near exhaustion. Mismanaged, the unhealthy land attracts pests and disease. To counter these problems, industrial agriculture uses synthetic chemical fertilizers and toxic pesticides, often in conjunction with genetically modified organisms designed to survive the poisons applied to ward off pests and disease. It's as vicious a circle as ever was devised by businesses that measure the deaths they cause on a scale of manageable liabilities. Statistics prove they can get away with it.

Most people don’t know that the food they buy at markets is trucked from hundreds or thousands of miles away, that its enzymes and life-energy are no longer living, that color and preservatives have been applied, gassed, and infused to make them look freshly picked. They also don’t know that industrial agriculture consumes 70% of all freshwater reserves and that it wastes 90% of what it withdraws. People don't know that industrial agriculture floods fields with chemical and poison-laced waters and that this brew floods our streams and rivers, lakes and wetlands, ultimately flowing into the seas, where super-fertilization creates algae that never existed before. This algae is so strong that it sucks the oxygen out of the water, suffocates other plants and fish that swim into its hypoxia zone. Meanwhile, freshwater reserves are running out and the population continues to expand... Earth's resources are being stretched beyond the breaking point.

There is no part of the planet that industrial agriculture does not harm. 

It deforests, killing the root networks that once recycled water into underground reserves.
Water sheets on land devoid of forest, runs to streams and rivers.
Turbidity it causes in the streams and rivers blocks light, kills the underwater life, both plant and animal.
Petrochemicals wreak havoc to what little life remains.
In the oceans, it kills off entire species and disrupts the migration patterns with dead zones that have to be avoided.
The transport infrastructure, refrigeration stations, are all heavy carbon sources.
Industrial agriculture is the largest consumer of energy in the southwest, water pumped hundreds of miles through aqueduct
Massive facilities too large to be monitored, are breeding grounds for bacteria, outbreaks of disease.