If animals are regarded as machines, they are confined in pens remote from the source of their food, where their excrement becomes, instead of a fertilizer, first a “waste” and then a pollutant. Furthermore, because confinement feeding depends so largely on grains, grass is removed from the rotation of crops and more land is exposed to erosion.

If plants are regarded as machines, we wind up with huge monocultures, productive of elaborate ecological mischiefs, which are in turn productive of agricultural mischief: monocultures are much more susceptible to pests and diseases than mixed cultures and are therefore more dependent on chemicals.

If the soil is regarded as a machine, then its life, its involvement in living systems and cycles, must perforce be ignored. It must be treated as a dead, inert chemical mass. If its life is ignored, then so must be the natural sources of its fertility — and not only ignored, but scorned. Alfalfa and the clovers, according to some of the most up-to-date practitioners, are “weeds”; the only legitimate source of nitrogen is the fertilizer manufacturer...

#WendellBerry #TheUnsettling #AnimalsAsMachines #PlantsAsMachines #SoilAsMachine
#DirtAsMachine #EarthAsMachine

Amitav Ghosh's books _Nutmeg's Curse_ and _The Great Derangement_ come to mind...