An article that supports my own views on sustainability in Agriculture and what's wrong with 
migratory beekeeping.


http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/16/magazine/16wwln-lede-t.html? 
ei=5124&en=6fe50addedc76f38&ex=1355461200&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink&page 
wanted=all

New York Times
December 16, 2007 
THE WAY WE LIVE NOW 
Our Decrepit Food Factories

By MICHAEL POLLAN 

excerpts

"We’re asking a lot of our bees. We’re asking a lot of our pigs too. That seems to be a hallmark of 
industrial agriculture: to maximize production and keep food as cheap as possible, it pushes 
natural systems and organisms to their limit, asking them to function as efficiently as machines. 
When the inevitable problems crop up — when bees or pigs remind us they are not machines — 
the system can be ingenious in finding “solutions,” whether in the form of antibiotics to keep pigs 
healthy or foreign bees to help pollinate the almonds. But this year’s solutions have a way of 
becoming next year’s problems. That is to say, they aren’t “sustainable.”"

"Whenever we try to rearrange natural systems along the lines of a machine or a factory, whether 
by raising too many pigs in one place or too many almond trees, whatever we may gain in 
industrial efficiency, we sacrifice in biological resilience. The question is not whether systems this 
brittle will break down, but when and how, and whether when they do, we’ll be prepared to treat 
the whole idea of sustainability as something more than a nice word."

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