The case against farm subsidies

Graham Harvey has a good article on the Guardian website:

While consumers may clamour for healthy, local foods, the British countryside is singularly ill-prepared to provide them. Mainstream agriculture is principally engaged in growing bulk commodity cereal crops on a large scale, an enterprise entirely dependent on nitrate fertiliser whose manufacture wastes profligate amounts of fossil energy.

Half of these industrial grains are then fed to animals kept in sheds. Animals managed this way are often unhealthy. So is the commodity milk and meat they produce. Things will have to be organised differently if we're serious about healthy, local food.

For more detailed arguments see his book The Killing of the Countryside.