The golden Harvest, which is being produced by David Kennard and Premilla Dixit in a five part series, will investigate a system of agriculture that holds back the deserts and plants down the fly-away soil.  An agriculture which from the fields and valleys of California fuels the state economy at millions of dollars ad supplies baby food manufacturers with farm-chemical free, naturally grown, grains, fruits, nuts and vegetables; which from the heart of the Brazilian Amazon fills with nature’s herbs and salves the delicate jars of Britain’s multimillion dollar cosmetics firm The Body Shop; from the rain forests of Malaysia supplies the bulk of the world’s natural rubber; and with about 15,000 organic farmers in Japan earns billions of dollars in organic food sales while meeting local needs. 

Can these sustainable agriculture systems, free of farm chemicals, meet world food and fiber needs? Can they arrest and correct the environmental, economic, health and cultural crises in modern agriculture?  The Goden Harvest proposes to find out.  It will encompass the pragmatic, poetic and philosophical concerns of sustainable systems. 

In almost one hundred and twenty centuries of agriculture history, scientific agriculture – removed from farm and community,, taught and researched in the halls and laboratories of agriculture science academies, increasingly fragmented into discrete disciplines and separated from the concerns of nutrition – that is, modern agriculture, spans a mere half a century in its most intensive development and stretches less than one and a quarter centuries to its beginnings.  Historical record shows that scientific agricultures’ global spread has a least as much to do with the shifts in political and economic power in the West, Western colonial history in the third world and a massive global public relations campaign, as it has to do with the short term spectacular increases in crop yields triggered by its science. 

Today, the modern agriculture crisis lies at the very heart of our global ecological crisis, at once its most widespread perpetrator and its most dangerously vulnerable victim. 

Each aspect of modern farming, symbiotically with the whole, has the curious character of a boomerang.  Chemicals hailed as ‘soil substitutes’ meant to fertilize soils and enrich plant growth are rendering soils and water toxic, catalyzing soil erosion; imbalancing plant and soil nutrients, leaving both pest-prone; contributing toxins which deplete ozone and add to the greenhouse effect, threatening climatic changes devastating to agriculture. 

Large irrigation schemes meant to provide abundant water for rich harvests are depleting the earth’s total 0.1 per cent unfrozen fresh waters for all uses to critical lows; waterlogging and salinating as much farmland as is being newly irrigated weakening plant roots. 

Gene-spliced hybrids, meant to provide improved varieties of seed for abundant yields, last an average of 3 to 5 years while decimating stocks of millenia-old, hardy, land races upon which they depend for the germ plasm that underwrites their farmworthiness.

Deforestation and grassland reclamation, meant to increase agricultural lands for economic gain, is escalating desertification to 6 million hectares and soil erosion to 25 billion tonnes annually, globally; destabilized watersheds have triggered unprecedently frequent and sever cycles of droughts and floods devastating agriculture, whole communities and economies.

Intensive livestock farming meant to arrest malnutrition by providing protein diets has siphoned protein-rich grains, beans and fish-meals from the third world’s poorest to feed first world livestock; the bottom 20 percent-60 percent of the third world eat less and less nutritions food than did their grandparents; hunger has killed more people in the early 1980s than did all the wars, revolutions and murders of the past 150 years; 50 percent of third world children die before the age of 15, nearly 30 percent before they reach the age of 5.

This scientific agriculture package meant to enhance the farmers’ income and to catalyze economic growth in the third world, has created billions of dollars in farm debts and ruined thousand of small farmers and banks. 

Exceptions aside, agriculture policy globally continues to extend and entrench the infrastructure of chemical agriculture – one so capital-intensive that it is its won “raison d’etre”, disregarding performance.

It is this milieu which presents the critical forum for the proposed series. q

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