Family Farms?: Sept. 24, 2005
This may seem a strange first blog, especially since it is a part of my magickal website. Someone once told me I should put a sign over my door that read, "Not what you expected."
Farm Aid for 2005 just happened again in Illinois. I have great respect and admiration for all the artists and people who have put forth so much effort in trying to help family farms survive. I could not help myself, though, from shaking my head and thinking..."Don't they know that family farms are already gone?"
Perhaps this is an overstatement. But if so, it is not by much. I moved to my farm in 1972 as an 18 yr. old young man. I fumbled my way around for 30+ years trying one way after another to make a meager living. There were times when we almost succeeded. We have tried raising beef and dairying and spent a helluva lot of time learning the many things a person needs to know to farm. Kids who grew up on family farms learned these things as children but I had to learn a lot the "hard way."
We have farmed our land organically since it's inception. Before the interest in organic agriculture became mainstreamed, we did these things out of principle and respect for the land. I think for most the years we farmed "organically", our products were never marketed as "organic" but went into the regular commercial agricultural pot.
I remember milking our Jersey cows as one of the most wonderful times in my life. You were independent and whole. There is something truly remarkable about what small dairy farms in Wisconsin really were about. Family and land and a bond and trust and connection that created a kind of wholeness that I have never experienced since. A sense of integral connection to land, seasons and cycles. Being part of Life and Death. Knowing you were involved in something as ancient as civilization itself. These things were and are important parts of the heritage of humanity.
Well, bad things happen to good people. But what happened to family farms was not an act of nature. It was the culmination of policies that began with (in my lifetime) Ronald Reagan. The rhetoric at that time was "lets have small government and let free market forces determine." Problem is, these free market forces are not fair market forces, not in this world. "Free Market" has become the alias for Corporate America (TM),or as I like to call it, "the machine."
The trend continued through the 90's and somewhere in the early 90's we quit dairying. Not only did we quit dairying but also nearly everyone else in what was an agricultural community quit dairying.
I live on a small rural back road. When I moved here in 1972 almost everyone who lived on our road was milking cows. The exception was an elderly woman who lived in a little town near us and drove each day to her farm to feed her beef cows. Now they are all gone! No kidding, there is not one person milking cows on this road. And it doesn't stop there. It is true up and down the whole rural countryside. In it's place is a new wave of houses going up...I guess people who have money already and just want somewhere beautiful to live.
The few remaining farmers have chosen to get bigger in a huge way. I don't fault the few surviving dairymen and women who chose this way to stay in business. But I see deeply the change it has wrought to the land, the community and the small towns that agriculture used to support. There are problems that occur when animal and human population densities go beyond a certain point in a certain amount of space. Huge farms have bigger problems with manure. The old farmers who knew every single one of their cows by name and cared for them knowing that their well being was dependent on the animals' they kept well being are superceded by systems where that intimacy with land and animal and human cannot be maintained.
Back in the Clinton days, his NAFTA had a dialogue that went something like this: "We will allow our nations farmers to compete with the third world. In exchange, we will become (somehow magically) the 'high tech' people. Our policies will help the third world raise themselves up to our 'middle class' way of life."
It ain't happening, folks. Rather, the reverse is true. My local community is entering the third world, and the third world is still the third world.
My schools can't function without money, the small businesses suffer. Young people can't find work. Not here. It's a general cluster-f*ck.
These changes, happening within a generation, have consequences to our culture, our way of life and to our security as a people. There are fewer and fewer "uncle joes" out on the farm for city people to go and visit. There is a loss that is, perhaps, only tangible if you have been apart of a rural community in the past 30 yrs.
Where do kids learn about life? About the interconnection of nature and humanity? Living it is something that needs to be remembered...ways of life where people and the land were wed. Where it was not hard to realize where food *really* comes from and that efforts put forth would bear fruit in season. Where there was a sense of continuity in the world.
These things I grieve...and it does not bode well for the future that family farms are destroyed.