The Accelerating Biophysical Contradictions of Industrial Capitalist Agriculture
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The productivity of industrial capitalist agriculture is central to dominant development narratives. It is also highly unstable, with intractable biophysical problems created in the substitution of labour, skill and knowledge with technology, and overridden with unsustainable ‘technological fixes’ and masked by a host of externalized costs. Relatively cheap oil is central to this, effectively subsidizing the low‐priced industrial grains and oilseeds on which global food security has come to hinge. However, the chronic biophysical contradictions of industrial capitalist agriculture are accelerating, at the same time as the surge in biofuels has augmented the still‐rising demand of livestock feed to embolden industrial producers. A period of acute and ominously regressive food price volatility looms in the short term, with more ruinous outcomes ahead. But this might also widen openings for rebuilding biodiverse food systems and remaking and valorizing agricultural work, which will involve rethinking agriculture's place in conceptions of development and modernity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".