What Industrial Agriculture Has Done to Our Bodies — And What Our Ancestors Already Knew

"The land does not forget what we put into it. Neither do our bodies. Neither do our children."

---

The Pesticide Burden Is Not Distributed Equally

Since 1945, global pesticide use has increased by more than 50-fold. Most of that increase happened in the Global South and in communities of color in the United States — the same communities that had the least political power to resist it. Farmworkers, the majority of whom are Latino, Indigenous, and people of color, face daily pesticide exposure at levels no one would accept for themselves. Children living near agricultural fields in California’s Central Valley have been found to carry organophosphate residues in their urine at rates that correlate with measurable neurological effects. In urban environments, residents of low-income Black and Brown neighborhoods are more likely to live near industrial facilities, highways, and food distribution centers that release airborne toxins — with no corresponding access to the clean, whole foods that might mitigate the damage.

East Harlem sits at the intersection of multiple environmental stressors: highway pollution from the FDR Drive and the Triborough Bridge corridor, food deserts with few fresh vegetable options within walking distance, and a legacy of disinvestment that means the parks are smaller, the trees are fewer, and the air quality data is worse. Environmental racism is not a metaphor. It is a measurable, documented pattern of who gets clean air and who does not — and it follows the color line with predictable precision.

This is the context that individual consumer advice — “buy organic,” “wash your produce,” “wear gloves” — cannot address. You cannot shop your way out of an environmental justice crisis. The solution requires collective power, policy change, and the restoration of community sovereignty over land and food.

---

What Pesticides Do to Human Bodies

The health science on pesticide exposure is extensive and, in its cumulative weight, alarming. Organophosphates — the most widely used class of insecticides in the world — were originally developed as nerve agents during World War II. Their agricultural application operates on the same basic mechanism: they disrupt acetylcholinesterase, the enzyme that regulates nerve signaling.

Chronic low-level exposure has been linked to neurological damage, cognitive impairment in children, Parkinson’s disease, and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. The case for banning organophosphates has been building in the scientific and legal community for decades.

Beyond organophosphates, the pesticide family includes pyrethroids and carbamates — both of which act as neurotoxins and endocrine disruptors. Endocrine disruption is particularly significant because the hormonal system governs reproduction, metabolism, immune function, and development.

When synthetic chemicals interfere with this system — mimicking hormones, blocking receptors, or altering enzyme activity — the effects can be subtle, cumulative, and cross-generational. Research has linked pesticide-associated endocrine disruption to early puberty, reproductive difficulties, thyroid disorders, and metabolic disease.

Pesticide exposure pathways are multiple: food consumption, inhalation of airborne residues, absorption through the skin, and contaminated water. For agricultural workers who handle these chemicals directly, exposure is orders of magnitude higher than for consumers. And for communities that are both food insecure and environmentally burdened — who eat what is available rather than what is clean — the cumulative chemical load can be severe.

---

What African Farming Always Knew

Before synthetic pesticides existed, African and Indigenous farming systems maintained soil health and crop diversity through techniques that Western agriculture is only beginning to understand and measure. Intercropping — growing multiple crops together in the same field — naturally suppresses pests by disrupting monoculture conditions that allow pest populations to explode. Companion planting pairs crops whose chemical profiles deter each other’s pests. Crop rotation restores nitrogen, breaks pest cycles, and builds soil organic matter. These were not accidents of tradition. They were refined over millennia of observation, experiment, and accumulated knowledge.

As Ubuntu Village explored in our work on African food sovereignty, the smallholder women farmers who grow over 80% of Africa’s food have been doing so without synthetic inputs — using knowledge systems that are older, and in many ways more sophisticated, than the industrial monoculture model that now dominates global agriculture. The problem was never a lack of agricultural knowledge in African communities. The problem was the systematic erasure of that knowledge through colonial dispossession of land and the imposition of export-oriented industrial farming.

The living soil — its fungi, bacteria, earthworms, and microbial communities — is the foundation of all food production. As Ubuntu Village explored in our guide to soil organisms, the organisms that replenish, decontaminate, and aerate the soil are the same ones that synthetic pesticides and chemical fertilizers kill. Industrial agriculture is not just a health hazard. It is an act of ecological violence against the very systems that make food production possible.

---

When Toxins Become Inherited — The Epigenetic Record

The most disturbing dimension of pesticide exposure is not what it does to the person who is exposed. It is what it does to their children — and their children’s children. Epigenetics — the study of how environmental factors alter gene expression without changing the underlying DNA sequence — has established that toxic exposures can be inherited across multiple generations. A grandmother’s exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals can alter the hormonal development of grandchildren who were never directly exposed. The body remembers what the mind cannot.

As Ubuntu Village explored in our work on epigenetics and ancestral memory, this science affirms what African and Indigenous communities have always held: that what is done to a people echoes through their descendants. Slavery, forced displacement, chronic poverty, and environmental contamination are not historical events that ended. They are ongoing biological inheritances — carried in the stress hormones, the immune systems, the metabolic profiles, and the gene expression patterns of living people. Environmental justice is therefore also intergenerational justice. To clean up the land is to begin the work of healing the lineage.

---

Environmental Justice Is a Spiritual Issue

In African and Indigenous cosmologies, the land is not property. It is a living being — an ancestor, a relative, a source of medicine and memory. To poison the land is not merely an economic or regulatory failure. It is a spiritual violation, an act of disrespect toward the web of life that sustains all human existence. The Yoruba concept of Ashe — the divine energy present in all living things — cannot be separated from the soil that feeds the community. The Nguni understanding of ubuntu — I am because we are — extends to the ecosystems that hold the community.

When we frame environmental health through this lens, individual behavior change is revealed as an insufficient response. The question is not how you manage your personal pesticide exposure. It is what obligations we hold collectively — to the land, to each other, and to the generations who will inherit what we leave behind. A community that poisons its soil for short-term yield has broken a covenant. A community that fights to restore its land is performing an act of spiritual repair.

---

What Community Power Looks Like on the Land

Community gardens, urban farms, CSA cooperatives, and food sovereignty organizing are not supplemental wellness activities. They are acts of political reclamation — the assertion that a community has the right to know what is in its food, to grow its own medicine, and to refuse the terms of a food system that treats them as a market rather than as a people with knowledge and rights.

In East Harlem, in Detroit, in rural Mississippi, in Nairobi’s informal settlements and Lagos’s urban margins, communities are doing this work. They are building food forests, seed libraries, and composting collectives. They are fighting pesticide drift near schools. They are demanding environmental impact assessments before industrial facilities are sited in their neighborhoods. They are teaching children that soil is not dirt — it is a living system, and it remembers how it has been treated.

This is not nostalgia for a pre-industrial past. It is a clear-eyed recognition that the ancestral farming wisdom our grandmothers carried — the knowledge of what to plant, when, and alongside what — is more sophisticated, more sustainable, and more health-protective than the chemical model that displaced it. Reclaiming that knowledge is an act of justice. That same extractive logic does not stop at the water’s edge — industrial fishing fleets are hollowing out the ocean floor and the coastal communities who depend on it in much the same way industrial agriculture hollowed out the land. Protecting the land is an act of love for everyone who comes after us.

---

Not receiving our emails? Re-subscribe here.

---

References

• ‣ Earthjustice. Ban Organophosphates: Protecting Children from Toxic Pesticides. Earthjustice.
• ‣ Rauh, V. A., et al. (2011). Brain anomalies in children exposed prenatally to a common organophosphate pesticide. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(20).
• ‣ Skinner, M. K., et al. (2013). Ancestral dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) exposure promotes epigenetic transgenerational inheritance of obesity. PLoS ONE, 8(5).
• ‣ Bullard, R. D. (1990). Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality. Westview Press.
• ‣ Altieri, M. A. (1995). Agroecology: The Science of Sustainable Agriculture. Westview Press.
• ‣ Landrigan, P. J., et al. (2018). The Lancet Commission on pollution and health. The Lancet, 391(10119).

---

Related Reading

• ‣ How Glyphosate Exposure Could Harm Your Brain
• ‣ Epigenetics and Ancestral Memory: What Your Body Remembers
• ‣ Can Farmers Really Grow Enough Food to Feed the World?
• ‣ 5 Organisms That Will Replenish, Decontaminate and Aerate Your Soil

---