Exploration 4

Fresh, a documentary that discusses the impact of poor agriculture production in todays society and how it has harmed the safety of individuals. Fresh examines the thoughts and ideas of farmers and business men today, who are trying to get agriculture production back on the right track. They seek to remove agriculture production away from industrialized production. The rapid shift to industrialized agriculture production has caused your everyday foods to have an increased chance of having chemicals, that potentially could be devastating to the health of people. Normally, people don't worry about this, because they assume nothing is wrong with their food. We learn from the video, that local farm production of food is a lot safer than industrialized production, but a higher price comes a long with better quality food. The problem here is people don't have the funds to buy more expensive food so they are left with industrialized food. As said in the documentary "you get what you pay for".

"Monoculture" is introduced at the beginning of the film. This is when a large piece of land is designated to one crop to mass produce. Often, farmers aren't necessarily concerned about the chemicals they are putting in the crops but rather "too obsessed with productivity". The chemicals they put on their crops is synthetic. Synthetic fertilizer can come with devastating effects. Once cattle consumes these crops, diseases carry from the crop to the cattle and eventually from the meat of the cattle to our mouths.

The farmers whom discussed the issue on poor food production, stressed the needing to go back to old agriculture production. Going back to when, cattle weren't raised in a "monoculture" environment and unnaturally fed in order to make them grow faster. The farmers see best fit when cattle grow naturally, in order to protect the safety and health of the people whom consume the food. This has gotten so out of hand that once a cow dies, they will actually feed the dead cow to other cows. But being your traditional farmer, it is hard to compete with the industrialized farmers due to their exponential amount of food they are able to produce with little cost to the consumers. Local farmers are "finding it hard to enter into super markets" because they cost so much more than a industrialized farmer.

Throughout the documentary, there were many incidences of comparing and contrasting between the ideas of industrialized production and natural production. The local farmers really focused on not having any chemicals in food production to help enhance the amount. Also, they discussed how agriculture should be processed.

We can imply theses ideas to our culture, because we need to realize that bigger and faster processing food can have severe impacts. We need to step back and look at the big picture rather than only focusing on the money and rather the safety of our people.