Tag: farmers

A NATION OF TRUCK DRIVERS

Oh how the country has changed in the last 36 years. We were a nation of farmers, secretaries, and machine operators in 1978. The family farmer was still the backbone in the Northern Plains and Midwest. The internet didn’t exist, so letters needed to be typed, copies made, mail distributed, dictation taken, and coffee brewed. So every business was loaded with secretaries. The country still manufactured goods here in 1978. We sold  them domestically and internationally. Globalization and NAFTA hadn’t become the buzz words of Ivy League educated MBA’s yet.

A look at the most common jobs today reveals how the country has changed.

Continue reading “A NATION OF TRUCK DRIVERS”

QUOTES OF THE DAY – FARMER EDITION

“There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.”
― Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

“Why do farmers farm, given their economic adversities on top of the many frustrations and difficulties normal to farming? And always the answer is: “Love. They must do it for love.” Farmers farm for the love of farming. They love to watch and nurture the growth of plants. They love to live in the presence of animals. They love to work outdoors. They love the weather, maybe even when it is making them miserable. They love to live where they work and to work where they live. If the scale of their farming is small enough, they like to work in the company of their children and with the help of their children. They love the measure of independence that farm life can still provide. I have an idea that a lot of farmers have gone to a lot of trouble merely to be self-employed to live at least a part of their lives without a boss.”
― Wendell Berry, Bringing it to the Table: Writings on Farming and Food

“The first supermarket supposedly appeared on the American landscape in 1946. That is not very long ago. Until then, where was all the food? Dear folks, the food was in homes, gardens, local fields, and forests. It was near kitchens, near tables, near bedsides. It was in the pantry, the cellar, the backyard.”
― Joel Salatin, Folks, This Ain’t Normal: A Farmer’s Advice for Happier Hens, Healthier People, and a Better World

“When it is understood that one loses joy and happiness in the attempt to possess them, the essence of natural farming will be realized. The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings.”
― Masanobu Fukuoka, The One-Straw Revolution

“The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.”
― Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture

“Good farmers, who take seriously their duties as stewards of Creation and of their land’s inheritors, contribute to the welfare of society in more ways than society usually acknowledges, or even knows. These farmers produce valuable goods, of course; but they also conserve soil, they conserve water, they conserve wildlife, they conserve open space, they conserve scenery.”
― Wendell Berry, Bringing it to the Table: Writings on Farming and Food

“Teaching kids how to feed themselves and how to live in a community responsibly is the center of an education.”
― Alice Waters

“To husband is to use with care, to keep, to save, to make last, to conserve. Old usage tells us that there is a husbandry also of the land, of the soil, of the domestic plants and animals – obviously because of the importance of these things to the household. And there have been times, one of which is now, when some people have tried to practice a proper human husbandry of the nondomestic creatures in recognition of the dependence of our households and domestic life upon the wild world. Husbandry is the name of all practices that sustain life by connecting us conservingly to our places and our world; it is the art of keeping tied all the strands in the living network that sustains us.

And so it appears that most and perhaps all of industrial agriculture’s manifest failures are the result of an attempt to make the land produce without husbandry.”
― Wendell Berry, Bringing it to the Table: Writings on Farming and Food

 

FARMER FSA WADDLES UP TO THE TROUGH

Corporate Green Acres is the place to be. It seems the free shit army isn’t just occupying West Philly. They are crawling all over the Midwest farmbelt. It’s not your small family farm. It’s the giant corporate farms that have big time lobbyists and congressmen in their pockets. These bloated bills are nothing but handouts to corporations. Why should corporate farms be guaranteed a profit even if they don’t produce a crop? Why should I pay so that corporate fat cat farmers have no risk if their crops fail? Why should milk prices be controlled? Why should government be spending almost $100 billion per year of our tax dollars to promote and subsidize farmers in any way? Since the SNAP food stamp program falls under this bloated bill, maybe the West Philly FSA can join forces with the Iowa FSA to lobby for this bill.

 

Farm Bill Redux

Tuesday, June 12,2012

THE U.S. SENATE is poised this week to take up the crucial 2012 Farm Bill. This inordinately complex legislation is projected to cost $969 billion over the next 10 years, about $24 billion less than the cost of extending the soon-to-expire existing farm bill.

Big agriculture and its deep-pocketed lobbyists support the new bill, having accepted deep cuts in direct crop subsidies in exchange for legislators “protecting and strengthening” crop insurance programs. Industry considers the latter its safety net against adverse weather and unpredictable fluctuations of global commodities prices.

It’s less of a safety net than a security blanket that shifts risks to taxpayers and guarantees farmers substantial profits. That must change; otherwise, the cost of the new insurance programs could greatly exceed Congressional Budget Office estimates, leaving the federal government on the hook for billions of added dollars each year.

In a particularly cruel twist, the bill pays for these new programs in part by taking food out of the mouths of poor children.

Farm bills are the long-time home of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — food stamps. The proposal strips $4.5 billion from the SNAP program over 10 years, even as the struggling economy has record numbers of Americans seeking food stamps to help feed their families. The reductions would eliminate about $90 worth of groceries a month from the kitchens of low-income families. According to Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., who is introducing an amendment to restore the SNAP funds, half of those who benefit from the program are children.

The Obama White House is supporting the bill, S. 3240, sponsored by Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., who chairs the Senate Agriculture Committee. The administration opposes the SNAP reductions, however, and wants the cost of crop insurance reduced.

MEANWHILE, AN odd amalgamation has emerged to oppose the bill. The liberal Environmental Working Group used U.S. Department of Agriculture data to reaffirm that corporate and very large individual agriculture operations — not small and mid-sized family farms — enjoy the vast majority of the insurance benefits. Last year in Missouri, for example, 74 percent of the $267 million in benefits went to 20 percent of recipients. In Illinois, the top 20 percent received 72 percent of $518.5 million.

From the right comes the American Enterprise Institute with its “Field of Schemes” report. It’s part of a broader AEI project called “American Boondoggle: Fixing the 2012 Farm Bill.” In “Schemes,” AEI experts focused on the bill’s proposed ‘shallow losses” insurance. Such insurance would cost far more than the direct crop subsidy programs being dropped and “create incentives for the wasteful use of economic resources,” the report says.

EXISTING CROP insurance programs already are out of whack. If crop yields fall short of projections, farmers collect from the government. If harvest prices fall short of projections, farmers collect. To make sure that farmers can afford the insurance premiums, the government pays an average of 60 percent of the cost. To make sure private companies offer the insurance, the government pays their commissions and administrative costs.

Expanded shallow-loss coverage would distort the system even further. As one Minnesota farmer told “The New York Times” last week, “I can farm on low-quality land that I know is not going to produce and still turn a profit.”

The farm bill needs a lot of work before it merits the support of the American people.

— The St. Louis Post-Dispatch