A book about farmers and farming might seem like a strange segue after having just read a book about artificial intelligence, but then consider this quote from Darwin Among the Machines:

Garrett found it ominous that only half the world’s population was still concerned with producing food: “The new, non-agricultural half is the industrial part; it is the part that serves machines.”

Garet Garrett (one of the few men who can trump Chris Christie for most redundant name) published his cautionary book Ouroboros; or, the Mechanical Extension of Mankind back in 1926, back when half of the world’s population was still involved in farming. Today one farmer in America puts food on the table for 130 Americans. Of course, given how globalized the food industry has become, that statistic loses its significance, but still, you get the point: many eaters, few farmers.

The irony is that the industrialization of food has given those of us who don’t plough fields enough free time to spend it reading books about how to go back to 19th century farming. (Americans, I learned, spend less of their disposable income on food than any other country in the world.) In fact, it seems to me that the expanding industry of writing about food has eclipsed the industry of actually making it.

Deeply Rooted: Unconvential Farmers in the Age of Agribusiness is, like so many books that sit on the same shelf in indie bookstores across the country, a work of nostalgia. Lisa M. Hamilton (author of “Farming to Create Heaven on Earth“) mourns the good ol’ days when farmers in overalls woke up at 5 a.m. to feed the roosters and pick the tomatoes.

It is the kind of book that would make Blake Hurst’s blood boil. Hurst, a corn and soybean farmer and Vice President of the Missouri Farm Bureau wrote a much-cited essay in The American a few months back titled “The Omnivore’s Delusion: Against the Agri-intellectuals.” It stirred so much controversy in part because New York Times readers around the world had been waiting for an authentic farmer from Middle America to respond to all the foodie intellectuals (like Michael Pollan and Lisa M. Hamilton) based in Berkeley and Brooklyn. Hurst’s essay makes many good points, such as the fact that genetically modified crops reduce the amount of synthetic fertilizers used by farmers, and in doing so he scored some sympathy from even those he derisively calls “agri-intellectuals”. But, as Chris Bedford points out on Civil Eats, Hurst’s diatribe misses the most important part of the debate: industrial agriculture, as we’ve known it so far, is not sustainable because it is too dependent on cheap oil. If informed consumers aren’t able to change the agricultural industry then it is only a matter of time until the rising price of oil does.

We saw this last year during the global food crisis when rising oil costs immediately led to a rise in the price of basic commodities. The price of food is tied to the price of oil in two ways. Michael Pollan has estimated that 80 calories of energy in a single, one-pound box of lettuce requires the burning of 4,600 calories of fossil fuels to produce and ship. Also, when oil prices rise our energy-dependent economy starts looking toward other sources. Because corn farming is subsidized in the United States, you can buy a gallon of corn oil at WalMart today for less than $5. In fact, during last year’s food crisis, restaurant grease became so valuable that it was stolen by grease bandits barrel at a time.

Hamilton uses a palette of pastoral adjectives to paint romanticized portraits of four farmers who are using sustainable farming to try and compete in a market economy that rewards bigger, cheaper, and faster. Her Hollywoodesque style of writing drove me crazy. In every barn a ray of sun cuts diagonally to shine light on some cheesy metaphor, and a farmer’s calloused hands are just like the dry earth he inherited from his ancestors. Please. They are the sort of descriptions that come to a city girl as she sips on her cappuccino in Sausalito.

What kept me turning the pages, though, is that Hamilton has been writing on the agriculture beat for over ten years now and during that time she’s picked up a lot of wisdom and expertise about some of the lesser-known aspects of American agricultural policy over the years. The United States attempt – and ultimate failure – to integrate the Mexican ejido system (still one of Mexico’s biggest policy debates today) of shared land usage after the Mexican-American War is a fascinating story. So too is the migration of the dairy industry from Southern California to Arizona, New Mexico, and now northern Texas. And the Farm Breeder Club, a collective of independent seed growers with a Creative Commons ethos who share their homegrown genetic variations with one another via an annual catalog, is the sort of thing I could easily spend a few years writing a graduate thesis on.

In fact, I wish that Hamilton spent less time describing the pearly white teeth of Latino children at 4H meetings in New Mexico and more time investigating the impact of seed patents on small scale independent farmers. A basic fact often left out of the current discussions around food and food policy is that all agricultural crops are genetically modified organisms. Ever since agriculture began, humans have changed the DNA of plants to suit their needs by keeping the seeds of plants that proved most beneficial (in terms of both nutrition and resilience), and throwing out those that didn’t quite cut it. (Seedless grapes: what a wonderful invention!) But today agricultural innovation is being restricted to just a few major corporations who have the resources and legal departments to file patents on seeds that are more drought resistant, or that can grow at a higher altitude. The Farm Breeder Club, founded at North Dakota State University, aims to build a public domain collective of agricultural innovation. Already they have come up with KW960175, a resilient breed of wheat that is being planted by independent organic farmers throughout Oregon.

Listening to one of the North Dakotan farmers who bred the wheat seed describe his motivation for joining the club … well, he might as well be talking about open source software:

Everything we do is built on something somebody else did in the past. Borrowing material, building on others’ work – that’s the only way you can start making progress. After all I had learned from farming in North Dakota over the years, I figured it would be good to give something back.

Deeply Rooted isn’t a book I would recommend. In the end I think I would have learned more had I spent the same amount of time reading all of the (many) posts published at Civil Eats. But the truth is, I don’t think I’ll be reading much more about food and agriculture at all from now on. At a certain point you have to stop spending all your time reading about a problem and start doing something to fix it. At this point I know where I stand in the agriculture debate and I know how I can get involved.

I happen to be writing this on a farm in rural Slovenia. Well, it was once a farm. It has been seven years since the owners last made cheese from their flock of 50 sheep. These days the sheep merely roam the nearby pastures while a few hens and a small garden make up what is advertised as a farm on their tourism website. Stanka, the owner of the guesthouse who still bakes homemade bread each morning, says that making cheese just got to be too much work once they had kids. Now her husband works at the tourist information center down the road and each of the cabins here are equipped with satellite television. Tourism has replaced agriculture as the main industry for this valley and its 500 residents. Who knowns when, and if, that worldwide trend reverses.