Translations:Benutzer:Arian/Klett-Mini-Test/353/en

Already in the preceding decades the centre — the Church — had forfeited more and more its spiritual-moral as well as its social leading role, in favour of the awakening to individual self-determination. Concurrent with the advancing industrialisation of agriculture since the 1960s of the twentieth century, it was this fact that unleashed the last great wave of departure from the land. Whereas around 1800 still 62% of the working population were active in agriculture, around 1875 49%, around 1950 25%, today it is only 2%. In the place of the peasant stepped the agrotechnician, whose point of orientation lies no longer at the centre of the village but peripherally — in the educational centres of the city, in agrotechnological innovations, and in the supra-regional markets. In the globally networked agrarian industrialism a mighty wall builds itself up around agriculture, an intelligence apparatus of detail knowledge fragmented into specialist domains. The farmer becomes the "executive organ" of an intelligence that determines him from outside. In the course of this creeping intellectual dispossession, horticulture was the first to detach itself gradually from the village and individual-farm precincts and specialise in monocultures under glass — a first step in the dismemberment of the organismic wholeness. In arable farming too, very early in the USA, cereal growing became autonomous, followed by soil loss through wind and water erosion. Today a monotonous pattern of monocultures dominates the landscape image across the entire globe. In Central Europe this second step in the dismemberment of the wholeness was accomplished — after some persistence — only towards the end of the twentieth century. Then, in a third step of dismemberment, fruit growing too lost its organ-function within the agricultural organism. In the 1970s premiums were paid for grubbing up standard-tree orchards; today their ecological value is once more appreciated. Production, however, concentrates itself on intensive installations in monoculture in climatically favoured regions. Finally, in a fourth step of dismemberment, the keeping of domestic animals — bound to the operational fodder-base — was also abandoned, with the consequence on the one hand of the emergence of stock-free farms and on the other of the concentration into factory farming. In the place of the concept "domestic animal" stepped the concept "useful animal." It began with poultry in year-round stall or cage keeping, followed by pig-keeping concentrated in large-scale fattening units, and finally — who