Small farming is the future

[Dover]

Small farming is the future

Jim Goodman — 7/28/2008 5:45 am

SNIP

I decided years ago that I didn't want my farming operation to get bigger. I liked milking 45 cows, raising their feed and doing a little direct marketing. I liked being small.

"Hopelessly behind the times," I was told. Local cheese makers were giving up, local meat processing was a thing of the past. Small farming was dead. The developing world couldn't feed itself and needed industrial farming systems.

Who could argue with the Green Revolution? Until the current food crisis. It's not so much a shortage of food, but a shortage of cheap food. The poor can't afford to eat and the middle class feels the pinch. Why wasn't industrial agriculture, farming fence row to fence row, feeding the world?

SNIP

Farmers, using cheap fuel, fertilizer and plenty of chemicals, could plant more acres, produce enough volume and generally make a profit. This, of course, benefited the seed and chemical companies, which long ago figured out that small farmers saving their own seed and tending small acreages didn't spend much money.

SNIP

Western countries need to take a step back. We cannot continue to feed grass-eating animals a diet of grain, nor can we continue to fill our fuel tanks with grain. We cannot continue to encourage and subsidize industrial agriculture at the expense of small local producers.

http://www.madison.com/tct/opinion/column/298100

[jwirr]

1. We also need to change the way we "help" developing nations. We

have outsourced our polluting factories and turned their agriculture into huge farms to grow one item to export while the people move to the cities and starve. Many aid organizations are just now realizing that they could support themselves if they were back on the land and were given help with eco-friendly farming ideas. I was raised on a small farm like you are talking about but my father went belly up during the Eisenhower years.

[nosmokes]

2. Thanks for the post! Smaller farms,sustainable methods

are definitely the future of agriculture for the third world and industrialised countries as well. We need to face the fact that seasonal, local and organic is what's best for us because it's what's best for the planet.

[cliss]

3. Yes indeed, Dover.

The more I look around at what's happening, the more clear it becomes. FOOD is going to be the # 1 issue of the coming next few years.

How to get your hands on it. How to grow it, and how to survive.
This is a dangerous trend which is going in 1 direction, and Americans need to be vigilant of what's happening.

Trend # 1:
Oil prices are expected to stay high, if not continue to go up. This will affect:

Trend # 2:
Food prices. They are expected to go up astronomically in the coming year.

Trend # 2:
Small-scale farming will take on new importance, because of #1 & #2.

[bvar22]

4. Small Farming is definitely in our future.

We are currently in an experimental stage.

[hippywife]

5. We're working our way

that direction, too. A good read on just about every aspect of why it's important, the best book is Diet for a Dead Planet by Christopher Cook. Not a big book, and not hard to read, but he sure does cover everything well.

[hornblast]

6. Agreed about small farms; discussion about neoliberalism and food

Say, I remember Jim Goodman. Good man. I was acquainted with him in Madison, Wisconsin when I lived there. (I've since moved on to Milwaukee.) To this day, I find myself more in agreement with his anti-neoliberal stance than in my ostensibly more passionate activist days in Madison.

Perhaps that is because I'm now in Milwaukee, a place that's been deeply affected by neoliberalism (i.e. free trade across the world that ships jobs overseas and makes everything a commodity; Russ Feingold is not a fan of it). We've lost jobs by the thousands, and have huge poverty across the city's core. In the poorest neighborhoods, the food is very low quality. By direct implication, so is the nutrition. Obesity is rampant, which may seem contradictory. How can a poor person eat enough to be obese? It's easy if they're easily able to get cheap snack foods that have no real value. In my estimation, bad food habits are a direct effect of contemporary American poverty, and the accompanying lack of education.

Still, one of our local right-wing cranks (McIlhern) got his undies in a twist when a community garden group had the audacity to object to yet another fast food chicken restaurant being opened along a busy thoroughfare on Milwaukee's poor north side rather than making it into a source for healthy and affordable food. He claims that "Property tax revenue would come from having a fast food joint there, and so would jobs!" Yes, but, corporations like to get out of paying property taxes, and the jobs would suffer high turnover and low pay. And the area's nutrition and health would suffer along with it. Darn those "gardening activists" for trying to get in the way of it.

One vacant property being used again does not mean prosperity for the city. By itself, bringing our poorest residents healthy food would not do this either. But we do need to begin somewhere. If the poorest people suffer poor health from decades of bad food, having yet another fast food restaurant will not help them strengthen themselves or their community.

[hippywife]

7. Myabe you can check into

guerrilla gardening using vegetables with good edible greens and roots, mulch 'em in real good to keep from having to go back and weed. Wouldn't take too much to have a group of folks taking turns throwing water on them as they stroll by. LOL There could even be a group already established there, who knows.

http://www.guerrillagardening.org/