Our Food Systems How Did We Get Here?
The industrial agriculture model is collapsing under its own weight. It’s time to rebuild from the ground up — with living systems, living seeds, living soils and living communities.
Sowing Sanity: Reclaiming Seeds, Soil, and the Future of Food
The industrial agriculture model is collapsing under its own weight.
Here we reflect via some learned voices and insights as to what paths we need to tread to put things right.
“The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life.”
— Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America
A Broken Foundation
Today, it is not merely the soil that is eroding beneath our feet — it is the very systems that once promised nourishment, community, and resilience. Our food system, and the financial structures underpinning it, have evolved into monuments of self-destruction: efficient at extraction, disastrous at regeneration. This is a classic example of a Multipolar Trap, more information on Multipolar Traps, here.
As we have mentioned several times in these articles, many of the monocultures we have evolved are completely ruining our soils.
The story of how we arrived at this moment is not a simple one. It is woven from decades — even centuries — of misaligned incentives, short-sighted policies, and the steady corrosion of local autonomy. As we confront the collapsing certainties of industrial agriculture and global finance, it is essential to see clearly where we are, and how the seeds of the future must be planted differently.
From Hard Tomatoes to Princes of the Yen
In the 1970s, Jim Hightower sounded an alarm that few heeded.
In Hard Tomatoes, Hard Times, he detailed how the U.S. land-grant universities — institutions created to democratize agricultural knowledge — had been co-opted. Instead of serving small farmers and local food security, they became engines for corporate agribusiness, funneling public research into the pockets of chemical companies, machinery manufacturers, and monoculture giants.
The result: a food system optimized not for nourishment or ecological stewardship, but for centralized profit extraction. It was the era where "hard tomatoes" — bred to survive cross-country shipping rather than delight the palate — became the icon of a system that valued shelf life over life itself.
Meanwhile, in the financial world, another transformation was underway — one that would ultimately shape the global food economy as much as farming policies.
Richard Werner, in Princes of the Yen, exposed the hidden architecture of postwar Japan’s economic miracle: the manipulation of credit creation by central banks, and the consolidation of financial power in ways invisible to most citizens. His work reveals a critical truth: who controls the flow of money controls the structure of society itself.
And the structure they built was profoundly unstable — favoring large, centralized actors while starving decentralized, local alternatives of the oxygen they needed to thrive.
This is a great podcast featuring G. Edward Griffin (the author of the great book “The Creature From Jeckyll Island”. Describing the evolution of Central Banks and in particular The Federal Reserve.
The industrial agriculture model, propped up by subsidies and debt, mirrored the financial system it was embedded in: efficient at scale, brittle under pressure, and utterly blind to its ecological and human costs.
“Subsidizing collapse is not a strategy. It’s a warning.”
Subsidizing Collapse
Today, governments shovel subsidies into a food system that is eroding soil, depleting water tables, destroying rural communities, and poisoning the very ground we stand on. We focus on California’s Central Valley in this article we wrote, previously.
And they finance it all with debt — debt that mortgages not only the economy but the planet’s living systems.
The insanity is structural:
Farmers are trapped in a cycle of dependency, often unable to escape even if they wish to.
True costs — ecological, social, and health-related — are externalized onto the public or deferred onto future generations.
Those who steward the land with care, who regenerate soil, biodiversity, and local resilience, receive the least support — or worse, are actively marginalized.
The "rational" actors in this system are, in fact, participants in a form of collective suicide.
“The soil is not a resource; it is a relationship.”
Seeds: The Forgotten Foundation
In the rush to industrialize agriculture, we also industrialized the seed.
Today, the majority of global seed supply is controlled by a handful of corporations.
The varieties that dominate are genetically narrow, optimized for chemical dependence, mechanical harvesting, and long-distance shipping — not for flavor, nutrition, resilience, or local adaptation.
But seeds are not widgets.
Seeds are living memory, living potential.
And unlike commodities, seeds cannot be manufactured instantly. They require seasons, soil, stewardship, and time.
We learned this brutally in 2020 when COVID-19 disrupted supply chains across the world.
As fear and uncertainty drove millions to seek security through gardening and home-growing food, seed companies — large and small — were overwhelmed.
Stocks ran out within weeks.
Backorders stretched into months.
For a moment, it became clear just how thin and brittle our seed infrastructure really is.
It was not just a logistical failure. It was a structural one.
A system designed for predictable, linear consumption could not flex or swell to meet sudden living demand.
“When seeds are treated like commodities, we forget they are also living memory.”
This is the hidden fragility of our food future.
You can 3D-print face shields.
You can ramp up production of canned beans.
But you cannot print seeds.
The genetics, the viability, the adaptation — all of it depends on living time.
It depends on the slow, reciprocal dance between humans and land across seasons and generations.
As we look to the future, the seed system itself must be reimagined.
We cannot simply replace industrial fields with regenerative farms and hope the seeds will adapt overnight.
We must steward seeds as living, evolving relationships — shaped by the hands and hopes of many, not patented and imprisoned by a few.
Our path forward must honor the principle that diverse, decentralized, open-pollinated, locally adapted seeds are not optional.
They are the basis of all resilience yet to come.
“Resilient food systems begin underground — in the roots, in the seeds, in the hidden life we can no longer afford to ignore.”
Next Steps: Sowing Sanity
If seeds are living memory and living potential, then rebuilding our food system must begin not with technology or subsidies, but with life itself.
The next evolution of Secret Life of Seeds will explore how we:
Rebuild regional seed sovereignty — restoring the ancient, everyday relationship between seed, soil, and people.
Support the rebirth of landraces — dynamic, adapting seed populations co-evolving with their landscapes and communities.
Realign credit and financial flows toward genuine regenerative value — not fossilized extraction.
Recover the knowledge, dignity, and joy of growing — food that feeds bodies, communities, ecosystems, and culture alike.
There is no shortcut.
No last-minute technological rescue.
No scalable replacement for the slow, beautiful work of regeneration.
Our work ahead is clear:
To grow living seeds, we must grow living systems.
To grow living systems, we must nurture living communities.
The soil is waiting.
The seeds are waiting.
The choice is ours.
“A sane food system is not a return to the past. It is a return to the logic of life itself.”
Thank you for reading this latest article of ours.