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livingontheland - Re: [Livingontheland] the ways that best sustain the farmer/ Efficiency

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  • From: Liz <liz@allslash.org>
  • To: Healthy soil and sustainable growing <livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] the ways that best sustain the farmer/ Efficiency
  • Date: Thu, 27 Dec 2007 10:08:33 -0500

At 11:36 PM 12/26/2007, you wrote:

Ah yes. The history of industrial farming shows you can take 1000 acres,
and minimize human labor and bankrupt yourself at the same time. And
bankrupt your local community in the process. Exactly how millions of
family farmers have been driven into the cesspools of cities - without
"employable skills".

This whole idea of minimizing human labor is a bill of goods that we've been sold now for over a century. There are places where mechanical assistance is clearly important, where the job is too physically strenuous for people (or people assisted by animals), and where it's too dangerous. And I'd be the last person to say there was anything wrong with tools!

But we've been brainwashed to think that work is a four letter word. This has nothing to do with people on public assistance. Many of them would be overjoyed to work if they could get any. It has to do with the notion that there is something demeaning about physical labor, that it's what you're stuck with doing if you're not smart enough or enterprising enough to get a college education, or not rich enough to simply pay someone else do it for you. "Work" is what you have to do to make enough money to "live," as though life were some external activity that takes place when you aren't working. But of course, if we can be made to think that life (i.e. spare time) is the only desirable state, we can be persuaded to buy things that appear to give us more of it.

Let me say that as a woman, I am emphatically aware of how difficult women's lives were when they worked from dawn to dusk every single day just to provide the family's minimum needs. There is a happy medium between barely managing to survive, and living the inflated and artificial idea of life that most Westerners have.

It's encouraging to see the numbers of younger people who do want to work with their hands, to be craftspeople, to make what they need instead of running out to the nearest discounter to buy a cheap low-quality version of the real thing. I just hope this trend persists, and that it isn't too little too late.

Liz in SW VA
http://life-as-a-spectator-sport.com





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