The film’s most fascinating parts contextualize industrial farming methods within the larger story of North America’s colonization by Europeans, who displaced Native Americans whose philosophy stressed harmony with nature, and imported other human beings—African slaves—as unpaid supervisors of rice, cotton, and sugar plantations that owners lacked the skills to run on their own. This section of the movie illustrates the idea of nature being transformed into something unnatural with imagery that shows irregular but lovingly-tended cropland being replaced by machine-perfect rows laid out in the same hard-edged layouts simultaneously applied to every other aspect of life.
