On the death of my family's dairy farm
This is not just an environmental and animal welfare concern, although it certainly is those things. But it&#x27;s also a national security issue of the first order.<p>One of the ways big factory farms work so efficiently is by utilizing mono-cropping. They&#x27;ll plant acre after acre after acre of exactly the same strain of a crop. That gets their efficiency, and hence their profit margin, as high as possible. You don&#x27;t have to do anything differently in order to support two strains of corn or soybeans. You con&#x27;t have to worry about one breed of milk cow being more susceptible to disease or giving milk with a different fat content. All your equipment is the same, all of your chemical inputs are the same, all of your processes are the same.<p>That works fine when it works. But when it doesn&#x27;t work it can go completely to hell. One pathogen could conceivably wipe out a large portion of America&#x27;s entire corn or soybean crop. Significant enough climate change could as well. A single new strain of disease, if it were robust enough to spread through the air or via wildlife, could kill huge fractions of our cattle or pigs. It&#x27;s not inconceivable that we could go from large surpluses of cheap food one year to widespread hunger the next, with just the wrong set of circumstances.<p>We&#x27;ve not just improved farming efficient. We&#x27;ve gutted the natural robustness of what used to be a distributed agricultural system.