Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[Dan Conine <dconine@bertramwireless.com>]

> Date: Mon, 08 Dec 2014 21:02:44 +0000
> From: John D'hondt<dhondt@eircom.net>
> To: Healthy soil and sustainable growing
>         <livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org>
> Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] Thanks to meat, farming emissions set
>         for 80% rise
> Message-ID:<548611F4.2010002@eircom.net>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252; format=flowed

> I think the real reason farmers were forced to go this way was to get
> rid of the small ones and to aim for more industrial farming. After all,
> a cow bedded down on fresh straw in a stable can be kept clean with a 4
> pronged fork and a wheelbarrow.
Here in the U.S. Midwest, the "problem" farmers have been the middle-sized 
ones that grew to a profitable size by simply expanding the methods of their fathers 
with machinery.
The small farmers (a wheelbarrow and a cow or 5) were already gone or ignored by the 
government, and the industrial farms are "government-friendly" because they 
are easy to monitor and inspect.
Legislation was often instituted by environmentally concerned people because of what they call 
"non-point" pollution sources. These are the farms that are big enough to spread manure 
every day with a small or medium tractor, and not big enough to be concerned with their own 
pollution run-off on frozen ground or in wet seasons. These are what typically are now called 
"family farms", but most have become small corporations unto themselves.
They get under the radar of the LAU count (large animal units), but don't 
individually scare people, and command the sympathies of their neighbors who 
are just one generation off those same farms themselves.

In these cases, there are a lot of issues that contend for attention: should 
farmers make enough money to send their kids to college (and usually leave 
town anyway, causing brain drain)? Should such small farmers be subsidized to 
install million-dollar slurry tanks? Should they be allowed to sell raw milk?

The bottom line seems to be the problem that food is too cheap for the really 
small farms to make a living, but not cheap enough yet to eliminate the 
mid-sized farms.

The current state of the Boomer population means that a large number of these farmers 
will be selling out soon, with little chance of passing the farm down to a farming 
member of the family, and many will once again consolidate into factory-size farms, as 
they did during the family farm crisis of the 70s and 80s that gave rise to Farm-Aid, 
which is trying very hard to perpetuate the falsehood that these mid to large farms are 
"family" farms and should be protected somehow, even to the detriment of 
those small organic farmers who are struggling to establish niche markets (some 
struggle less than others, but in general, they aren't living at any level of income 
near what a non-farm middle-income earner does).

I suspect that much of the environmental regulatory practice transfers back and forth 
between Europe and the U.S., as scientists and politicians and economists fight over 
who gets to control their country's facade of "doing something".

Dan C.
Belgium, Wisconsin