Smelling something fishy, I checked out the "sustainable agriculture" article on Wikipedia, whereupon I was greeted by a five bullet summary:
- Satisfy human food and fiber needs
- Enhance environmental quality and the natural resource base upon which the agricultural economy depends
- Make the most efficient use of non-renewable resources and on-farm resources and integrate, where appropriate, natural biological cycles and controls
- Sustain the economic viability of farm operations
- Enhance the quality of life for farmers and society as a whole
"Ok", I thought as I skimmed that list, "now I'm really picking up some rotten fish scent." Let's cut through the BS, one bullet at a time:
- The entire point of a farm is to "satisfy human food needs". This bullet is meaningless.
- This could mean just about anything. The article talks about hypothetical "that jack ass is using too much water!" scenarios. If the government would get out of water pricing, this problem takes care of itself-- I don't need to "support" it, or not.
- Ditto. Absent government, "non-renewable" resources are priced; as they become scarce, the price rises, and farmers seek alternatives.
- Uh, farmers do this on their own. Why would someone want to run an unviable "farm operation"?
- Here it is: the inevitable collectivistic nonsense! "Quality of life" is a totally subjective measure, per each individual-- and "farmers" and "society" can't have a "quality of life", as they are figurative abstractions.
If you truly want to support "sustainable agriculture", go do your part to enact anarchy. Let's pick on California, just for the sake of an example:
I was reading the other day that a third of California's drinking water just runs into the ocean, because the government's "environmental" regulations prohibit the damming up of that water. Oh, and a handful of bureaucrats manually set the price of water (at gun point) in the State, which is why they have massive shortages. Nothing like a pathetic vote-pandering, heart string-pulling price ceiling, which makes sure that no one-- poor people included-- has water.
Example given, this partial aside: the government-induced shortage of course leads to more regulation, Ayn Rand-style, in the form of "water gestapo" thugs that arrest you for running the sprinkler or for taking too long of a shower ("I don't care that your balls still have soap on them!"). Good thing the State's actors care so much about "society's quality of life".