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Farmington, Maine | Agriculture in the U.S. has become industrialized over the last 50 years, be it feed lots with so many animals there is no place to spread all the manure, growing crops where the only thing available to put on the land in chemical fertilizer or treating chickens and other farm animals like they are part of some big machine. All in the name of cheaper prices for the consumer so that more people could work in other parts of industry.
Where the average food bill used to be about 25% of the weekly income for the average American family it got down to about 12%. Farms got larger and their neighbors that could not or would not produce food for the ever dropping farm prices got out and left rural America for jobs in the cities.
So here we are right where we wanted to be, making cheap cheap food in the industrial way, living in rural communities that are a shell of what they used to be. With most of the population living in cities buying processed food produced buy giant industries and farmers selling to, buying from and being slaves to prices controlled by giant industry instead of selling to consumer’s as they once did. Farmers are underpaid, consumers are unhealthy from eating food that is over processed, with too much sugar, and salt and giant industry is making more money than they ever did.
A wise man once said;
A farmer in a nurturer as aposed to an exploiter.
An exploiters goal is money and profit while the standard of a nuturer is care, his lands care, his animals care, his families care.
The exploiter cares how little he has to invest & how much profit he can make and how fast he can make it. The nurturer while he must make a living also cares about the health of his animals, how much his land can produce and also be sustainable in the future.
There seams to be a fair amount of exploiters out there that call themselves farmers in my book.
It also seams to me that it’s high time farmers start processing and or selling to consumer’s like we used to. Does it really matter if you milk 200 cows and sell your milk wholesale or milk 50 cows sell retail or make something with the milk and make the same amount of money. You will have more control over the prices you get for your goods.
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The unsugared reality of agriculture today
