Translations:Manfred Klett: Von der Agrartechnologie zur Landbaukunst/242/en

Already during the preceding decades the centre — the Church — had more and more forfeited its spiritual-moral and social leadership role, in favour of the awakening to individual self-determination. Concurrent with the increasing industrialisation of agriculture from the 1960s of the twentieth century onward, it was this fact that triggered the last great wave of migration from the land. Where around 1800 still 62% of the working population were active in agriculture, around 1875 49%, around 1950 25%, today only 2% remain. In the place of the peasant stepped the agrotechnician, whose point of orientation no longer lies at the centre of the village but peripherally — in the educational centres of the city, in agrotechnological innovations, and in the supraregional markets. In the globally networked agrarian industrialism, a powerful wall builds itself up around agriculture — an apparatus of intelligence composed of a detailed knowledge fragmented into specialist fields. The farmer becomes the «executive organ» of an intelligence that determines him from without. In the course of this creeping spiritual disenfranchisement, horticulture was the first to detach itself gradually from the village and individual farm precincts and to specialise in monocultures under glass — a first step in the fragmentation of the organismic wholeness. In arable farming too — very early in the USA — grain growing became autonomous, followed by soil loss through wind and water erosion. Today a monotonous pattern of monocultures dominates the landscape image worldwide and without exception. In Central Europe this second step in the fragmentation of wholeness was accomplished, after some inertia, only towards the end of the twentieth century. Finally, in a third step of fragmentation, fruit growing too lost its organ-function within the agricultural organism. In the 1970s, premiums were paid for the grubbing-up of standard-tree orchards; today their ecological value is again appreciated. Production, however, concentrates in intensive installations in monoculture in climatically favoured regions. Last of all, in a fourth step of fragmentation, the keeping of domestic animals — bound to the farm's own fodder base — was also given up, with the consequence on the one hand of the emergence of livestock-free operations and on the other of the concentration on factory farming. The concept of «Haustier» (domestic animal) was replaced by the concept of «Nutztier» (production animal). It began with poultry in year-round indoor or cage housing, followed by pig-keeping concentrated in large-scale fattening units, and finally — who

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