The World’s First Floating Farm Making Waves in Rotterdam
20th August 2018
Agricultural policy for the last fifty years might be characterized as ‘trying to turn the farm into a factory and not succeeding very well’. Review the performance of any of ConAgra’s or ADM’s factory-farms and this is pretty obvious.
The whole ‘urban indoor farm’ is just another such attempt to change the field into a factory floor. The problem is that organic processes (such as those that create food) aren’t really susceptible to the simplistic order of the assembly line. Any attempt to do so can only work by simplifying inherently complex natural biological systems so that they can be ‘managed’ for artifacture, which works about as well as a ‘managed’ economy — the latter gives you Soviet ‘goods’; the former gives you the equivalent of Soviet food. Nutrition gurus like Michael Pollan complain about the result, with good reason, and often about the artifactural production, but never get to the root of the problem.