Easy movement
March 03, 2016
"Mennonites ... believe that if you look at the history of tractors with rubber tires, you see failure within a generation. Rubber tires enable easy movement, and easy movement means that, inevitably, the farm will grow, which means more profit. More profit, in turn, leads to the acquisition of even more land, which usually means less crop diversity, more large machinery, and so on. Pretty soon the farmer becomes less intimate with his farm. It's that lack of intimacy that leads to ignorance, and eventually to loss."
-- The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food by Dan Barber (The Penguin Press, 2014)