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livingontheland - Re: [Livingontheland] Big Ag's Big Lie About Organic Food

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Subject: Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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  • From: "Liz" <liz@allslash.org>
  • To: "Healthy soil and sustainable growing" <livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] Big Ag's Big Lie About Organic Food
  • Date: Wed, 1 Jul 2009 20:51:53 -0400


My impression is that the Obama administration is indeed opening up to
new possibilities for how we do agriculture, and I welcome that. But
what nobody at the official levels--from the President to the key Ag
members in Congress to USDA and certainly Big Ag--is even thinking about
is the possibility of more human-powered (and animal-powered)
agriculture. They all assume that "efficiency" means one farmer in a
giant tractor, doing the work of a hundred (people, horses, oxen). At
the same time the President moans about the need to create six million
jobs. Duh.

This is exactly the argument I keep having with my Cornell School of
Agriculture-educated uncle, who of course knows much more than I do about
raising food. "But everyone would have to be growing food," he moans, "to
feed us all without chemicals." The irony seems to have completely escaped
him.

His kind of reasoning also encapsulates the idea that having to use your own
labor to feed yourself is somehow demeaning. The farmer on the huge John
Deere is a businessman, after all. Not just a "dirt farmer," but a man of
status. Put that man back behind a team of horses, or on the business end of
a pitchfork, and somehow he's reduced to a laborer again.

Like the person who objected to your evaluation of the poultry industry by
repeatedly denigrating all those "backyard chicken" people. They (and their
methods) signify nothing if the methods can't be scaled up to fit a
corporate business model. The family who raises 20,000 chickens at a time
for Tyson is running a business. The family whose eggs and meat come from
their backyard chickens is "just growing some of their own food." In spite
of the increased numbers of people with backyard gardens and chickens (and
rabbits and goats and . . . ), there is still some unspoken assumption that
no one would do this if they didn't have to. THAT is the mindset we're fighting, as much as anything else.

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





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