Turning Back the Clock on Farming

Hi Friends,

We wanted to share with you a great article about young farmers featured in the New York Times. According to the Times, young people disenchanted with sitting in a desk all day, are picking up a pitchfork and choosing the farming profession instead.

And surprisingly, many of these young farmers have decided against industrialized farming. Like us, they are working to embrace many of the same small-scale farming methods used by their grandparents and great-grand parents before them. 

Can you believe that it has actually been less than a century since conventional farming methods merged with modern industry?  

As a means to combat rising food prices during the Cold War, Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz began a large agricultural subsidy program. This subsidy program pushed farmers to maximize their crop yield by planting their crops “fence row to fence row.”  The U.S. Department of Agriculture then compensated these farmers by buying whatever they couldn’t sell on the open market.

While the subsidy program had the desired effect of bringing down food prices across the United States, as the individual calorie became cheaper and cheaper to supply, farmers had to plant more and more to make up for their falling crop prices.

Inadvertently, quantity of the yield became the modern farmer’s new focus of attention, and in order to stay competitive in this new market farmers were forced to divert more money, time, and finite resources on techniques and equipment that would maximize the volume of crops their land could produce. 

Many farms today rely on specialized equipment; indomitable GMO seeds that come with non-negotiable patent protection clauses, and lots chemical fertilizer - anything to bolster volume and gain an edge in a highly competitive, industrial market.  

Quality is often sacrificed in order to meet the demands of an industrial fostered market.  The practices that once helped farmers make names for themselves as having the plumpest tomatoes, the biggest watermelons, or the sweetest, crispest, onions now lag behind on the list of priorities. 

We really hope that more farmers and consumers alike can work together to change this practice. It would be wonderful to once again see farmers storing heirloom seeds from their best plants, or experimenting with soil and compost to grow the better tasting crops.

In the meantime, at the Pastures of Rose Creek, a new truck can wait and we are very thankful our old farm tractor is working just as hard as it did twenty years ago.  So, this week we are giving many thanks for the fortunate condition of our farm and the wonderful community we live in.

Well, back its back to work, those fences certainly are not going to build themselves(Moo.)