ABSTRACT
Industrial activity has always resulted in pollution. But agriculture, for most of its history, has been environmentally benign. Even when industrial technology began to have an impact in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, agriculture continued to rely on natural ecological processes. Crop residues were incorporated into the soil or fed to livestock, and the manure returned to the land in amounts that could be absorbed and utilized. The traditional mixed farm was a closed, stable and sustainable ecological system, generating few external impacts.
