A Quote by Matthew Scully

'Cost-saver' in industrial livestock agriculture may usually be taken to mean 'moral shortcut.' — © Matthew Scully
'Cost-saver' in industrial livestock agriculture may usually be taken to mean 'moral shortcut.'
The Nuffield report suggests that there is a moral imperative for investment into GM crop research in developing countries. But the moral imperative is in fact the opposite. The policy of drawing of funds away from low-cost sustainable agriculture research, towards hi-tech, exclusive, expensive and unsafe technology is itself ethically questionable. There is a strong moral argument that the funding of GM technology in agriculture is harming the long-term sustainability of agriculture in the developing world.
Yet if you go to the supermarket and look at food that's produced through industrial agriculture, look at what's happened to the prices. Have they been going down? They've been going up and they will continue to go up. So the choice is either, do we hitch onto a system of agriculture that's doomed and will doom the planet with it, and go along the route of industrial agriculture, or do we want to shift to a kind of system that we know is going to be, in the long run, cheaper, because we'll have a planet left at the end of it? We need to factor that cost in.
The reductionist measure of yield is to agriculture systems, what GDP is to economic systems. It is time to move from measuring yield of commodities, to health and well-being of ecosystems and communities. Industrial agriculture has its roots in war. Ecological agriculture allows us to make peace with the earth, soil and the society.
Traditional agriculture was labour intensive, industrial agriculture is energy intensive, and permaculture-designed systems are information and design intensive.
I’ve been thinking about that question about what city people can do. The main thing is to realize that country people can’t invent a better agriculture by ourselves. Industrial agriculture wasn’t invented by us, and we can’t uninvent it. We’ll need some help with that.
It is now 14 years since I first suggested that organic farming might have some benefits and ought to be taken seriously. I shall never forget the vehemence of the reaction.. much of it coming from the sort of people who regard agriculture as an industrial process, with production as the sole yardstick of success.
Once you're a saver, you're always a saver. At the end of the day, it's more money in your pocket.
The history of agriculture is the history of humans breeding seeds and animals to produce traits we want in our crops and livestock.
I work so hard for what I do. To achieve what I have has taken me half of my life to be able to achieve what I have achieved. And for people to think I have taken a shortcut, it's not right, and it's not fair.
I'll never pay above the odds for something if there's a more cost-effective alternative, so I guess that's where the saver in me shines through.
The industrial-technological system may survive or it may break down. If it survives, it MAY eventually achieve a low level of physical and psychological suffering, but only after passing through a long and very painful period of adjustment and only at the cost of permanently reducing human beings and many other living organisms to engineered products and mere cogs in the social machine.
I wish for recycling to become a major industrial agriculture.
If an action must be taken that will benefit the majority at the cost of the minority, is it morally indefensible? If an action taken for the benefit of a majority occurs at the expense of a minority, is it moral action?
Leadership is a choice to protect the person to the left of us, and protect the person to the right of us, and sometimes that may come at a cost. It may cost us our benefits, it may cost us our comfort, it may sometimes cost us our perks, whatever it is, credit.
Industrial agriculture now accounts for over half of America's water pollution.
If you're going to define a shortcut, then make it the base [sic] darn shortcut you can.
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