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critical.
    A factory farm locks the farmer in at the bottom of a corporate hierarchy. In return for the assumption of great economic and other risks, the farmer is permitted to participate minimally in the industry’s earnings. In return, moreover, for the security of a contract with the corporation, the farmer gives up the farm’s diversity and versatility, reducing it to a specialist operation with one use.
    According to one company’s projections, a farmer would buy into the broiler business at a cost of $624,275. That would be for four houses that would produce 506,000 birds per year. Under the company’s terms, this investment would produce a yearly net income of $23,762. That would be an annual return on investment of 3.8 percent.
    I don’t know what percentage of annual return this company’s share-holders expect to realize from their investment. I do know that if it is not substantially better than the farmer’s percentage, they would be well advised to sell out and invest elsewhere.

    The factory farm, rather than serving the farm family and the local community, is an economic siphon, sucking value out of the local landscape and the local community into distant bank accounts.
    To entice them to buy Kentuckians’ work and products so cheaply, our state government has given the animal confinement corporations some $200 million in state and federal tax “incentives.” In gratitude for these gifts, these corporations now wish to be relieved of any mandated public liability or responsibility for their activities here.
    I don’t know that the arrogance and impudence of this have been equaled by any other industry. For not only have these people demonstrated, by their contempt for laws and regulations here and elsewhere, their intention to be bad neighbors; they come repeatedly before our elected representatives to ask for special exemptions. But in that very request they acknowledge the great risks and dangers that are involved in their way of doing business. Why should the innocent, why should people with a good conscience, want to be exempt from liability?
    It is clear that the advocates of factory farming are not advocates of farming. They do not speak for farmers.
    What they support is state-sponsored colonialism—government of, by, and for the corporations.

III. SUSTAINABILITY
    T HE WORD “SUSTAINABLE” is well on its way to becoming a label, like the word “organic.” And so I want to propose a definition of “sustainable agriculture.” This phrase, I suggest, refers to a way of farming that can be continued indefinitely because it conforms to the terms imposed upon it by the nature of places and the nature of people.
    Our present agriculture, in general, is not ecologically sustainable now, and it is a long way from becoming so. It is too toxic. It is too dependent on fossil fuels. It is too wasteful of soil, of soil fertility, and of water. It is destructive of the health of the natural systems that surround
and support our economic life. And it is destructive of genetic diversity, both domestic and wild.
    So far, these problems have not received enough attention from the news media or politicians, but the day is coming when they will. A great many people who know about agriculture are worrying about these problems already. It seems likely that the public, increasingly conscious of the issues of personal and ecological health, will sooner or later force the political leadership to pay attention. And a lot of farmers and grassroots farm organizations are now taking seriously the problem of ecological sustainability.
    But there is a related issue that is even more neglected, one that has been largely obscured, even for people aware of the requirement of ecological sustainability, by the vogue of the so-called free market and the global economy. I am talking about the issue of the economic sustainability of farms and farmers, farm families and farm communities.
    It ought to be obvious that in order