Today’s agriculture is not sustainable

Editor:

Cam Dahl, president of Cereals Canada, says Canadian farmers have a sustainability story to tell, but they currently don’t have the tools to tell their story in a coherent way. Maybe the story can’t be told in a coherent way because there is nothing sustainable about modern agriculture. Relying on oil to produce, ship, process, and package our food is not sustainable and contributes large amounts of air pollution helping make us sick.

Draining wetlands, the kidneys of the Earth, which are essential for cleaning our most valuable resource, water, is not a sustainable practice. Spraying toxic chemicals on our food, wiping out our bee population and polluting our water is not sustainable. Artificially propping up the soil with fertilizer to deal with exhausted soil due to poor practices, which also leaches into our waterways creating algae blooms and toxic blooms is not sustainability.

Destroying biodiversity, natural ecosystems and wildlife habitat is not sustainable. Modern agriculture has done nothing but destroy the land, air, and water making us all sick.

There are sustainable ways of living and producing food but they are ignored because they don’t pad the wallets of billionaires. Information about restoration agriculture, permaculture, and food foresting should be part of every conversation that deals with agriculture.

We have all the knowledge we need to succeed in building a vibrant, sustainable world, but we need to implement it.

The first step is to quit grasping at straws and admitting there is a serious problem and no amount of technology or wishful thinking is going to change that fact. The change from living as communities in harmony with nature to living as individuals trying to control nature has been a disaster for everyone. Let’s start a real story of sustainability, health, and happiness, what are we waiting for?

Maria Rose Lewans Swift Current