Translations:Manfred Klett: Von der Agrartechnologie zur Landbaukunst/92/en

To begin with, it holds that agriculture, in comparison with industrial enterprise, necessarily produces at higher cost, because the cost-reducing principle of division of labour contradicts its conditions of production — the manifoldness within the wholeness. One seeks to escape this by moving over to the industrial mode of production. The wholeness of the farm organism is for this purpose taken apart, broken into pieces. Each piece becomes for itself, with considerable capital expenditure, an industrial-agricultural single enterprise that, under apparently calculable framework conditions, produces masses of highly specialized output and dominates the market at unrivalled low prices. But this reduction in cost is a deception, because the consequential costs arising from environmental destruction and from the impairment of the nutritive value of products, as well as the costs of subsidies — of subsidized unreason — are passed beyond the market onto the general public. Were these hidden costs added to the producer price of the industrial

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