 Let's talk about this thing that we call industrial agriculture or industrial farming is another way of saying it. And let's actually look at what that really means. Culture, there we go. This is the most prevalent kind of farming that we see today in developed countries like the United States of America. So most of our food comes from this kind of farming. It's basically a way of producing lots of food cheaply. So most of the meat, milk, eggs, and even most of the fruits and vegetables that we would buy in a typical supermarket, well most of them would have been produced in this way. Industrial agriculture is kind of like we can see it as the child of three parents or maybe we could think of it as the product of innovations in three separate fields. The first is science and technology. And innovations in this field include things like improved farming methods, let's say, or better agricultural technology and those sorts of things. Also in this circle I would put things like genetic modification. So I'll just write here gene modification. And we'll look at what the upside and the downside of each of these innovations has been with regard to this kind of farming. The second parent or contributing field is the field of economics. And this includes, for example, techniques for achieving something called economies of scale. And that basically means if you produce a lot of something you can usually sell it more cheaply. So I might put in here in brackets mass production so that you remember what that means. Mass production. Also in this field is the creation of new markets. So that's identifying new consumers for your products and then actively selling or advertising to them to get them to buy the products. The third parent or responsible party for industrial agriculture is the field of politics. The government regulates or has the duty to regulate things like global trade, food labeling, and especially food safety regulations. These are regulated by the FDA. Now while the government is supposed to make regulatory decisions to benefit the people of our nation or any other country which has a government regulatory body, in reality it's not quite as simple as that. The decisions made by the government are actually influenced quite significantly by food lobbyists. And the food lobbyists represent the companies that are mass producing all of these goods for consumption by the general population. And because these companies are wealthy, very wealthy, they can actually influence many of the decisions that the government makes via these food lobbyists. So I'll just draw on our red tape here. That's the red tape of the lobbyists. Things like you can't say limit red meat consumption because the beef lobbyists would fight against that. And so you would have to say limit your intake of saturated fat in a health warning issued by the government. Those sorts of things are controlled by food lobbyists. So let's go back now and define some of these innovations. In the 1800s, elements like nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium were identified as stimulating growth in plants. And so these elements were then the beginning of what we know as fertilizer. Secondly, in the 1900s, vitamins were discovered or isolated and they were then found to be responsible for growth and maintenance of health in animals. At the same time, in the mid 1900s, antibiotics were being discovered and this led to the ability to take animals from the outdoors where they're used to living and bring them in to the indoors or to what they call CAFOs or confined animal feeding operations. These animals, like for example cows, chickens, even fish are raised in farms because they can be raised more efficiently in that way in very overcrowded and dark settings in order to maximize the production of meat. So where a cow might actually in nature be grass fed and roaming around in a pasture in a CAFO, the grass is replaced with something that we have a lot of. You guessed it, corn. And the cows are then kept in very close quarters actually quite still so that they can't graze and walk around. And instead, they're sort of fed at these feeding troughs and it makes them get fatter quicker and that of course means more money for the companies that are selling this product. Because cows aren't meant to be fed on diets of corn, they are kept healthy with vitamin supplements and also with the use of antibiotics because the conditions in which they're being kept are often unsanitary. They're often standing in their own waste while they are kind of almost force fed these large amounts of corn in order for them to get fat and ready for slaughter at an earlier age or at a younger age. Genetic modification involves taking the genome or the genetic material of a plant like for example corn and then changing it so that the plant is no longer susceptible to a pathogen or a bug that once used to attack that plant and that increases the yield. Other kinds of genetic modification are things like altering the genes so that the quality or the quantity of the product improves. I'm sure you've seen those massive strawberries in supermarkets and many of those have been actually genetically modified to yield bigger, bigger fruits on the plants. Cows even can be genetically modified to produce more protein in their milk to make cheese and even things like potatoes. I'll just draw these in purple because I don't have more colors than that. But there's something called an amaflora potato that is genetically modified because the starch that comes out of that potato is more useful for industrial uses for processed foods. Now the downside of this kind of genetic technology is that it decreases something called biodiversity and biodiversity is the natural variation that exists among species. And biodiversity is actually a measure of the health of an ecosystem and you can see why that would be reduced if the genes are modified to make a plant more uniform and more uniformly resistant. The other thing that genetic technology does is that it harms beneficial organisms. So for example, organisms that are responsible for things like pollination or pest control can also be harmed by genetic modification. The downside to these farming improvements or innovations is that pesticides and fertilizers can actually filter into the ground and pollute the ground water. And then that polluted ground water actually can damage fisheries downstream. So I'm just going to write here fisheries. The other downside is the fact that the methane byproducts from these CAFOs or confined animal feeding operations actually can damage the ozone as well. So that's another potential side effect of this kind of industrial agriculture. If we look at the economics, we see here that yes, it has been successful to produce large amounts of food. We have achieved more available goods and if you measure quality of life in terms of available goods, then yes, our quality of life has improved in that regard. But then if we also look at the aggressive marketing that's going on to consumers and the kind of increase in portion sizes that we've seen, one of the biggest consequences is the obesity epidemic that is plaguing not just the United States although we are probably world leaders in the obesity epidemic. But around the world in developed countries where industrial agriculture is being employed, obesity is one of the side effects that follows quickly. So while this has generated a lot of income for someone, probably someone living in these buildings or working in these buildings over there, the problem is that this obesity epidemic is going to cost society a lot in terms of medical care and that is going to in some ways undo what we've seen here in terms of the profits if we look on a societal level. So I guess the take home message is that while industrial agriculture has been successful in producing more food for a growing number of people, at the same time the side effects of this kind of mass amount of cheap food has been environmental effects, societal effects, health effects such as obesity, and all of these problems are problems that we actually are going to be paying for later on and this is why we need to start thinking now about potential solutions to these kinds of issues.