First, modern industrial farmers convert fossil fuels into food calories, and the assumption that modern industrial agriculture will continue in its present form is retrograde.
Most of the transgenic crops on the market today, however, have been designed to meet the needs of industrial farmers and their customers in the West.
Similarly, when the bureaucracy finally gets around to using its existing statutory authority to regulate industrial farmers who foul rivers with animal waste, it will be because some chief executive has ordered it to.
Priestner says the vast numbers of game birds bred in the countryside for shooting, primarily pheasant and partridge, are more of a worry to industrial farmers than are a few urban hens, in terms of disease.
At a time when animals are abused by industrial farmers, manipulated, mismanaged, malnourished, and generally disrespected, this sort of thing is akin to a hunter's putting a cigarette in the mouth of the just-shot trophy buck and taking a picture.
* Guardian: Over-20s in rush for scarce university places The Daily Mail takes out much of its page three today with a battle cry to "Save our Orchards" following information from campaigners that two-thirds of them have vanished since the 1950s due to changing land space, industrial farmers or development.
Soon this mom-and-pop operation will be competing in the same marketplace as better subsidized industrial farmers like Ulrich Pöggel, who manages 7,000 acres of what used to be a state-run cooperative in East Germany spread across flat, damp lands at Altenhof, about 90 miles north of Berlin.
Bees worldwide contribute an estimated $215 billion worth of work to agriculture, with industrial farmers often bringing in swarms of bees to pollinate many hectares of an individual crop.
A state legislator turned in an application to the State Agriculture Department to become the nation's first licensed industrial hemp farmer.
