Tumbledown Farm .9 Acres (give or take an acre or two)

UNSER TÄGLICH BROT

Our Daily Bread, agricultural documentary web site.

Our daily bread, the movie trailer.

I am again amazed at how late I discover some things. This documentary, released in 2005 by Geyrhalter films (NR, available on Netflix), is disturbingly, hauntingly beautiful at times in its straightforward depiction of the massive machinery and human drudgery of 21st century food production. It puts into a succession of pictures lasting an hour and a half the thousands of words uttered by Wendell Berry, Michael Pollan, and many others about the dehumanization of our culture of industrial food production. The film's impact is not lessened--if anything, it is exponentially increased--by the utter lack of either narrative or dialogue. The only sounds are those of the incessantly droning, whirring, swishing, hissing, beeping machines--punctuated occasionally by the squealing of pigs, the din of thousands of chickens, the moos of hundreds of cows. One of the most defining moments is

The problem is one of scale. According to the synopsis, "the film looks without commenting into the places where food is produced in Europe: monumental spaces, surreal landscapes and bizarre sounds - a cool, industrial environment which leaves little space for individualism. People, animals, crops and machines play a supporting role in the logistics of this system which provides our society’s standard of living." The film could have asked, but didn't about the transportation costs, the fossil fuel consumption, and the entry cost in terms of credit and cash to get into "farming" today. How long will our society be able to foot such an incredible bill for its food? When will those who oppose meaningful change to the system in the U.S. realize that guzzling our children's portion of non-renewable fossil fuels and heating up their atmosphere is the equivalent of engaging in mass abortion?

Anyone who eats in today's world should see the film. I think it should be required viewing in schools, where students should be asked--both before and after viewing--to write an essay on where their food comes from.

Perhaps the most poignantly funny moment is when a worker drops one of the baby chicks as they are being banded and counted for shipping. The machines spitting chicks out rapid-fire into plastic containers made my youngest laugh. The same sort of fascination is present when the machine with rubber "fingers" on revolving cylinders attached to a long metal rectangular chute "vacuums" the full grown broilers on their way to slaughter.

The film, shot in the EU, makes it clear that industrial ag is not just a U.S. phenomenon. And it isn't any longer "the solution" to food production only in the developed world--increasingly, it is the formula, recipe and prescription handed out by the developed world to developing countries. As any number of Ag reporting examples will show, industrial production is the assumption the world over. For example, the NY Times article on sugar prices in India gives the following analysis of the problem and its solution, never once asking whether fewer farms in richer and more exploitative hands is (or should be) always the answer: "Brazilian factories and farmers grow sugar cane on plantations of hundreds or thousands of acres, while Indian farmers have an average of two acres. The small scale makes it prohibitively expensive for most Indian farmers to invest in efficient irrigation systems or mechanized harvesters." What about investing in people with personally meaningful jobs, and a sense of self-direction and ownership? Don't tell me that we have it all figured out, when even today, in the U.S., where we supposedly lead the world in worker safety and welfare, we allow industrial scale ag to operate by the rules of 19th century family farms. (See Herbert's opinion piece about New York farm worker safety and welfare laws.) The only difference is that then the workers were also owners--or had a shot at ownership. Today they are cogs in an industrialist's wheel.

The film brought me back to reality about the current brouhaha in France over the EU demand that the "fruit and vegetable producers" return 500 million euros in subsidies they had been "illegally" paid by the French government. (See the Le Monde editorial of August 5, "Fruits amers.") I began to lament the poor producers, imagining the small European family farms and small-scale farmers of a century of so ago. But, of course, the subsidies were received by associations of large-scale producers and have everything to do with import and export of "excess production" and the regulation of consumer prices, not with the "poor farmers" of my imagination. And so it goes.

Perhaps the most disturbing scene in the film is the one immediately following the moment captured in the photo above. The cow pictured here "revolts," rattling and shaking the massive killing machine as the worker walks forward to touch him on the forehead with the electric prod.