My time with Big Ag…
It takes a lot of energy.
One thing ends and another begins. I just completed an internship in a large agricultural company, and am allowing space for reflection on what I learned. I sought out this particular company because they were recognized by my local Soil and Water Conservation District for their sustainable practices. They are just under the common low-end acreage for what is considered “big ag”.
My background is in biology, environmental conservation, small organic farming, and holistic nutrition and wellness. I have been against big ag, but saw this as an opportunity to learn the best management practices (BMPs) in a given agricultural industry. One of my griefs with the human world is the huge corporations we have created. They function in what could be viewed as living “entities” that desire to make money and propagate themselves into the future through the promotion of their interests. Humans working together on common goals are powerful. This is how we have created our governments, industries, religions, institutions…
By using the knowledge of those who came before us, we have manifested everything around us that we take for granted; our clean running water, the Internet, ships and planes used in trade. Think about those of us who drink tea or coffee or eat fruit in the winter.
Our intention and creative power imbues what we make with a type of life of its own, and it has the potential to live on long after we are gone.
Through studying this small big agricultural company, we can use it as a proxy to understand other corporations. The one I worked for is the acme of what a company of that scale can be, they have taken steps toward sustainability, and are open to new ideas that are better for the environment especially if they save the company money. Now this is not the case everywhere. I live in the United States in Oregon, an incredibly special place and a fertile setting for this type of thought.
Not every place is conducive to this. According to the director and producer of River Blue, a documentary on the fashion industry, companies in China and Indonesia severely pollute local waterways without penalties. There are people lending their collective power to corporations with a common goal of making money, a lot of money. Their focus is this myopic vista (narrow view), which blinds them to the reverberations of their actions. As it is so often, it is the poorest who suffer most, and those living around the textile factories have no option, but to use the polluted water.
Energy inputs, outputs, and transfers are important to become aware of. This is called emergy, or embodied energy, and everything has it. For example energy comes from the sun to earth, plants use it to make food, and we eat the plants or the animals that eat them. You are embodied energy. Ancient plants, in the form of fossil fuels have the emergy we use to power our vehicles and devices, and heat and light our homes. Each time energy is transferred some is lost as heat. This is happening on a micro-scale inside our bodies, in large scales in corporations and in cosmic scales in the universe. I think it is best we learn to reflect on the enormous amount of energy used and transferred in our daily lives in the developed world. Through this we can appreciate what we have and become aware of how we can live “greener” lives by conserving the resources available to us.
