In defence of factory farming

Jason Smith makes a very good argument in defence of factory farming in response to the Compassion in World Farming (CIWF) campaign against a proposed super dairy at Nocton in Lincolnshire, England. Jason takes on several of the misguided arguments that drive antagonism towards large-scale farming. His article is a good accompaniment to my article against the misplaced faith in urban farming Grow Your Own: Urban Farming: The future of food or Arcadia on the cheap?

I liked in particular Jason's debunking of 'natural' farming:

"People who argue that super dairies are unnatural should realise that there is nothing natural about farming at all. There is nothing natural about the landscape of the British countryside and there is nothing natural about humans drinking milk. Human beings had been around some 140,000 years before they gradually stopped being hunter-gatherers and took up cultivating crops and animals. The British countryside that we see today was largely created between 1760 and 1820 as part of the agricultural revolution that saw the end of the open-field system and the subsistence farming that accompanied it."

When will people learn that the romantic views of nature and of the past are not the way to solve our problems today?