Toward New Models for the Scale and Practice of Agriculture (at the Agricultural Law blog)

Some readers may be interested in this post at the Agricultural Law blog: Toward New Models for the Scale and Practice of Agriculture. What follows is the introduction without the embedded links:

Over the course of a month or two (perhaps longer), I’m going to occasionally post snippets from a handful of Rob Wallace’s rhetorically pungent, intellectually incisive, and politically powerful collection of essays in his book Big Farms Make Big Flu: Dispatchers on Infectious Disease, Agribusiness, and the Nature of Science (Monthly Review Press, 2016). Early last year I posted notice of an article in New Left Review, 102 (Nov/Dec 2016): “Ebola’s Ecologies: Agro-Economics and Epidemiology in West Africa,” co-authored by Rob Wallace and Rodrick Wallace, appending a list of suggested reading that included Big Farms. I will post bits and pieces from the book sans the notes and with slight editing (e.g., in the interest of length, I’ve left out some of the many examples that illuminate the arguments), although I may provide some embedded links (some of which are found in the book’s notes). As this work—with notes—is well over 400 pages, the material I’m sharing is best viewed as providing but the slightest taste of its contents, although I hope it is sufficiently representative and enticing enough to stimulate your desire to read it in toto.