Robert L. Zimdahl
Academic Press, Boston,
2006; 235 pp.
ISBN-10: 0-12-370511-8
Price: $43.95 (soft)

Roughly 6.5 billion people inhabit the earth, but over 1 billion people regularly go hungry.  This food shortfall poses an ethical dilemma for agriculture.  On one hand, agriculture may be obligated ethically to increase production so that an additional billion people have adequate food.  However, achieving such an increase with current agricultural practices has real potential to ravage the resource bases of soil, water, and clean air, and thereby jeopardize agriculture’s ability to maintain even current production levels.

Agriculture’s Ethical Horizon grapples with this dilemma.  It argues that agricultural productivity has been the quintessential value of agriculture that has trumped other concerns such as sustainability, environmental preservation, and social justice (e.g., fair commodity prices, welfare of migrant farm laborers).  Increasing world population demands greater productivity, but Agriculture’s Ethical Horizon argues that the prevailing production ethic is insufficient to address the myriad issues that 21st-century agriculture faces.  Modern practices bent on ever-greater production per acre have created externalities such as soil erosion, pesticide resistance, and groundwater depletion, with woefully inadequate attention about their long-term consequences.  Social policies and economies of scale favor ever-larger farms, resulting in loss of family farms and dwindling of rural communities.  A new, more encompassing ethic is needed to guide agriculture that places other values on par with production.

Agriculture’s Ethical Horizon was written primarily for the agricultural science community, and it calls for agricultural scientists to actively question and re-shape values underlying modern production agriculture.  Agriculture’s Ethical Horizon is not primarily a philosophical text, but Zimdahl outfits readers for the discussion with an exploration of scientific and experiential truths, considerations of “is vs. ought” arguments behind agricultural research, and an introduction to ethical theories for non-philosophers (chapters 1, 2 and 4, respectively).

Having laid the philosophical groundwork, Zimdahl then tackles various issues in modern agriculture, such as approaches to weed control (parts of chapters 3, 6 and 7), sustainability (chapter 7, parts of chapter 9 and others), and biotechnology (chapter 8).  It is especially difficult to stay current in the debate over a topic like biotechnology, but Zimdahl does a good job of framing the issues surrounding it up to 2006.  Agriculture’s Ethical Horizon intentionally omits issues relevant to agriculture such as animal ethics and livestock welfare, urbanization and loss of agricultural land, and farming for biofuels.  Chapter 9’s title of “How to Proceed” is misleading in that it largely continues to point out deficiencies in current production systems, rather than proposing concrete ways to advance the ethics of modern production agriculture.

One of the strengths of Agriculture’s Ethical Horizon is that it encourages agricultural scientists not to focus solely on how they do science, but to think more about why.  Zimdahl argues that most agricultural scientists genuinely try to avoid subjectivity and strive to find objective truth by confining their endeavors strictly to hypothesis testing.  As agricultural ethicist Paul Thompson notes in the foreword, this is largely an outcome of the strong influences of positivism and philosopher Karl Popper’s notion that science advances by falsification of hypotheses.  Zimdahl argues cogently that scientists have consequently not adequately reflected upon values that drive decisions about what hypotheses in agricultural science are deemed worthy of testing and often do not give ample consideration to the implications of their science.  Agriculture’s Ethical Horizon urges agricultural scientists to look beyond strict hypothesis testing, recognize the role and importance of subjectivity in determining which hypotheses are tested, and engage in ethical debates about agriculture today.  This discussion is facilitated by numerous citations of prominent scientists and ethicists in the current production debate.

Agriculture’s Ethical Horizon often couples criticism of the prevailing production ethic in agriculture with criticism of the utilitarian philosophy that supposedly underlies it, but linkage between the two is not made clear and criticism of utilitarianism may be misplaced.  In short, utilitarianism posits that the best outcome is the one that produces the greatest good for the greatest number of people.  So, one could argue that an agricultural ethic that values productivity above other values fails to maximize good among people and resources and is actually a poor reflection of utilitarianism.  The challenge to agriculture still lies in promoting an ethic that maximizes good, but utilitarianism might actually be a candidate to use as a guiding philosophy. Alternative ethical theories to utilitarianism could have received greater consideration in the book.  But beyond an overview of some ethical theories in chapter 4, and an occasional reference to ecocentric ethics, the potential utility of alternative theories in building an improved agricultural ethic received hardly any discussion, and it would have been appropriate if Agriculture’s Ethical Horizon had presented their pros and cons. 

Another weakness of Agriculture’s Ethical Horizon is its oversimplification in seemingly laying all the blame on production agriculture.  In contrast, many argue that agriculture already produces enough food to feed the world, but food is not distributed equitably.  Thus, irrespective of agricultural production considerations, there are economic and political dimensions to the larger issue of feeding the world that are not adequately acknowledged in the book.  Moreover, while agricultural scientists debate ethical and practical issues about how to best supply the world’s food, there is also need to address the demand side of the food equation and perhaps the thorny problem of human population management.  Although issues such as materialism, consumerism, and population growth may have been beyond the scope of Agriculture’s Ethical Horizon, the book should have at least acknowledged their driving influence in the demand for greater agricultural production.

The book generally reads well, but editorial deficiencies and some redundancies are apparent.  The text suffers from many punctuation errors (especially a lack of commas), and there are inconsistencies in the format of excerpted works.  Sentences are often verbose and in passive voice, and the font is challengingly small. Some of these sentences repeat earlier statements in the paragraph, or in previous sections of the book.

Agriculture’s Ethical Horizon is timely in kindling the debate about ethics, or perhaps its lack of consideration, in modern agricultural production.  Readers will be stimulated to pick up the discussion where Agriculture’s Ethical Horizon has left off, but they will need to fill in what it has left out of the debate.

Louis S. Hesler
North Central Agriculture Research Laboratory
USDA, Agricultural Research Service
Brookings, South Dakota
E-mail: Louis.Hesler@ars.usda.gov
American Entomologist
Vol. 55, No. 3, Summer 2009