Why the U.S. is growing less food

from local farmers, creating enough market demand to encourage a move back to family farming? This is the dominant way food gets to market in many developing countries, and it’s now making a comeback in the developed world, driven by the desire for fresh food, picked when it’s ripe and bought from the people who grew it. Even in the United States,

In the United States today, one farmer can feed around seventy families, so that employment in agriculture accounts for just 1.4 percent of the workforce.

There are still significant numbers of children, adolescents, and adults who experience food shortages, particularly in the countries of sub-Saharan Africa, but during the past three generations their total has declined from the world’s majority to less than 1 in 10 of the world’s inhabitants. The United Nations’ Food and Agricultural Organization

Agriculture is responsible for about twice as much of total U.S. water withdrawals as all buildings, industry, and mining combined. It accounted for 81 percent of all 1995 consumptive use.

our current food production and distribution system does deliver edible calories to the people at an affordable “price.” But its toll on both the environment and its consumers is astonishing.

With pests often consuming up to 40 percent of the crops grown in the United States,