Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

livingontheland - [Livingontheland] Relearning how to live as voluntary peasants

livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Healthy soil and sustainable growing

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: "TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Relearning how to live as voluntary peasants
  • Date: Wed, 14 Feb 2007 17:52:35 -0700


Reactions to this part of it?

By the same token, however, there is no farming being done in the United
States of America -- not on a local, sustainable scale, that is, not to
any degree worthy of official attention. In fact, the U.S. Bureau of the
Census stopped counting farming as an occupation in 1986 -- the number of
actual, self-employed, traditional farmers had become statistically
insignificant. To be sure, there are some non-corporatized farmers still
around, but they exist only because they have either a reliable source of
non-farm income (as I had), or because they are willing to live in real
poverty (the Farmies of the 1970s lived on the equivalent of a dollar
fifty per day per person).

But the bottom line is that our corporatized, industrialized,
government-subsidized mega-scale methods of petro-food production have
made small-scale farming virtually impossible. And that is the
heartbreaking story of American agriculture in the twentieth century,
whether you're talking about grandma and grandpa's forgotten old farm or
whether you're talking about The Farm.
----------------------

paul tradingpost@lobo.net







Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page