Is violence inherent in life on planet earth?The story of the enlightenment of the Buddha includes the moment when he sees all of the suffering around him, including the bugs getting crushed under the farmer's plow. Truly, even the act of taking your next breath, or your next step, probably kills some microbes.
But it is not pointless to try to avoid needless harm. Vandana Shiva is leading the Nonviolent Farming movement with an organization called 'Navdanya':
http://sustainableman.org/#Clients
"The first element of Navdanya's philosophy is to establish an agriculture at peace with nature - that leaves farmers in peace... and doesn't push them into self-directed violence that we have seen since (the so called green revolution) in the form of farmer suicides.
Second is the celebration of diversity. Biodiverse systems produce more nutrition per acre than the most intensive industrial systems and also have a higher land-equivalent ratio. That means you can grow much more on the same piece of land because you are creating symbiotic relationships between the plants.
Third is the importance of keeping in the commons that which belongs to the commons, like biodiversity and knowledge. The dominant market philosophy today is based on competition, but to my mind, the only things that sustain themselves in the long term are solidarity economies - economies based on mutual trust, on give and take.
Our work has grown out of this three-tiered philosophy. We are working to build non-violent, biodiverse agriculture -namely, organic farming. We have trained nearly half a million farmers across the country either through large camps or through attendance at our schools, and have also set up freely accessible community seed banks...
Through organic farming, agroforestry, and forest regeneration, we would not only turn our soil and our vegetation into a major carbon sink [which absorbs and stores carbon from the atmosphere in a stable form], we would directly address the poverty problem too. When you seriously address climate change, you do the very things that reduce poverty and hunger." (Their website)
“Good food cannot be reduced to single ingredients. It requires a web of relationships to support it.”
― Dan Barber
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