Big Ag and the Dead Zones

I once had a group of students in my rhetoric class at the University of Iowa who wrote and presented about the problems with hog lot farming.

Now you may think, "This has nothing to do with me! I'm a vegetarian!" or "Hunh, I live in a city, yokels in Iowa mean less than nothing," or something like that.

Oh, my friend, my friend, farming — the ways of big agriculture — they affect us all. From the desire of farmers in the Klamath Basin to irrigate their crops — thus destroying the fishing industry and salmon runs up and down the West Coast — to the nitrogen-based fertilizers that farmers, at the whims of a greedy corporation, put on their crops (crops that are grown for hogs, for cows and for biofuel, not to mention for tofu, for tempeh, for soy isolates easily stuck into almost anything from tennis shoes to "protein bars," which means this does affect and involve you), those ways are the ways that ruin our planet.

But. Though I'm not a fan of more hybrids or more modified food, here is some good news about one possible development that may save the Mississippi River, the Gulf of Mexico and the wheat farmers.

Huzzah, I say. (I like the direct-sow idea, but I know that large-scale farmers will want something less labor-intensive.) Huzzah, and let's please figure out something to help corn not be so evil as well.