In his recent declaration of war on my farm and thousands like it, and yes, those were his words, The New York Times' recipe-trader-in-chief and food columnist Mark Bittman contrasted the kind of "industrial" agriculture practiced in the U.S. with peasant agriculture in the rest of the world, and found the kind of farming we do wanting.Mr. Bittman was speaking at The New York Times Food for Tomorrow event, and, according to him, farming done by peasants is much to be preferred to the kind of farming I do. He says that peasants produce 70 percent of the world's food while only using 30percent of the resources used by farmers worldwide. I would presume he's talking about off-farm inputs here, since the only resource that matters in Bittman's world is oil, failing to take into account the land use and the labor of those noble peasants.
展开▼
