In his book Innovation: The Five Disciplines for Creating What Customers

Want, Curt Carlson, president and CEO of SRI, a Silicon Valley research firm

(and clearly not a farmer), remarks in passing:

“The only thing we have an industrial policy in place for in this country is

agriculture-a nineteenth century industry.”

Which might show us how far, in the minds of some high-tech players, the

thinking and practice of farming have gone astray. To view it as a “19th

century industry” controlled by a government-led “industrial policy” is to

get two things wrong at once. No one who speaks of the science of medicine

is so arrogant as to think that science encompasses the whole of medicine’s

art and craft. There is too much else in play, too much else at stake.

Likewise with farming, which is often controlled and led by policy-makers

content to think of it as an extractive industry, with inputs and

externalities that could be passed on to the consumer as part of the costs

of the product. But it is not an open-air factory, and the processes

involved are in no way analogous to heating and bending steel, stamping out

parts, or assembling components. The plants and animals do not live on a

conveyor belt that takes them to be processed. There is a miracle at the

center of the work, a springing to life that invokes a modesty in the farmer

in the practice of his art and craft. Though this is starting to change, in

some ways our consumer vision is still so limited and sanitized that many

Americans fondly and mistakenly pray for the emergence of such an enormous

factory, with foods neatly precooked and packaged, without even the sounds

and smells of life at either end.  -  Paul Hunter