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  • From: Lawrence London <lfljvenaura@gmail.com>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [permaculture] NYT morons at work: Don’t Let Your Children Grow Up to Be Farmers - NYTimes.com
  • Date: Mon, 11 Aug 2014 02:26:17 -0400

attn: Steve Hart & John d'Hondt
unbelievable..........would probably say the same about permaculturists
- just so you'll know what "they" are up to, i.e. propagandizing, lying
whores helping secure a bright financial future for monsanto and their
odious companions in the corporate agribusiness world.
- this is an absolutely disgusting disinformation campaign
I will never again buy a copy of the NYT or read their garbage again.
As the Who said "We won't be fooled again".
We all know who is behind propaganda like this and who is responsible for
any difficulties local small farmers might experience in their honorable
quest to make a living off the land.
This should be well covered at the NAPC with outreach to those in the
permaculture movement who farm or garden for a living.
It is one thing to have a NAPC with all the bells and whistles and it is
another to use the convergence to provide support for the tens of thousands
in the trenches keeping the Permaculture movement alive year after year
into the future. Call it a festival and celebrate local farming and
permaculture.

<>

NYT morons at work:
They are like the nazis of ww2:

The Many Lives of Degenerate Art
http://hyperallergic.com/142518/the-many-lives-of-degenerate-art/?wt=2
The fascists at work eradicating fine art. I think those hitlerian nazis
were much much much much worse than most people realize.
see image here:
http://hyperallergic.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Hitler-touring-DegenerateArt.jpg
caption:
Adolf Hitler and other Nazi officials (Hoffmann, Willrich, Hansen, and
Ziegler) standing by the Dada wall at the ‘Entartete Kunst’ (Degenerate
Art) exhibition, July 16, 1937. Paintings by Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee,
and Kurt Schwitters have been deliberately hung askew and are accompanied
by a slogan penned by George Grosz. This photo was published in the
Nationalist Observer, South German (Süddeutsche) issue, No. 199, July 18,
1937. (Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz,
Berlin, Germany; bpk, Berlin, Art Resource, NY)

Don’t Let Your Children Grow Up to Be Farmers - NYTimes.com
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/10/opinion/sunday/dont-let-your-children-grow-up-to-be-farmers.html?_r=1

Don’t Let Your Children Grow Up to Be Farmers

NEW HAVEN — AT a farm-to-table dinner recently, I sat huddled in a corner
with some other farmers, out of earshot of the foodies happily eating kale
and freshly shucked oysters. We were comparing business models and profit
margins, and it quickly became clear that all of us were working in the red.

The dirty secret of the food movement is that the much-celebrated
small-scale farmer isn’t making a living. After the tools are put away, we
head out to second and third jobs to keep our farms afloat. Ninety-one
percent <http://bit.ly/1oxxUsJ> of all farm households rely on multiple
sources of income. Health care, paying for our kids’ college, preparing for
retirement? Not happening. With the overwhelming majority of American
farmers operating at a loss — the median farm income was negative $1,453 in
2012 <http://1.usa.gov/1oxCabT> — farmers can barely keep the chickens fed
and the lights on.

Others of us rely almost entirely on Department of Agriculture or
foundation grants, not retail sales, to generate farm income. And young
farmers, unable to afford land, are increasingly forced into neo-feudal
relationships, working the fields of wealthy landowners. Little wonder
the median
age for farmers and ranchers <http://bit.ly/UYZu6D> is now 56.

My experience proves the trend. To make ends meet as a farmer over the last
decade, I’ve hustled wooden crafts to tourists on the streets of New York,
driven lumber trucks, and worked part time for any nonprofit that could
stomach the stink of mud on my boots. Laden with college debt and only
intermittently able to afford health care, my partner and I have acquired a
favorite pastime in our house: dreaming about having kids. It’s cheaper
than the real thing.

But what about the thousands of high-priced community-supported agriculture
programs and farmers’ markets that have sprouted up around the country?
Nope. These new venues were promising when they proliferated over a decade
ago, but now, with so many programs to choose from, there is increasing
pressure for farmers to reduce prices in cities like my hometown, New
Haven. And while weekend farmers’ markets remain precious community spaces,
sales volumes are often too low to translate into living wages for your
much-loved small-scale farmer.

Especially in urban areas, supporting your local farmer may actually mean
buying produce from former hedge fund managers or tax lawyers who have quit
the rat race to get some dirt under their fingernails. We call it hobby
farming, where recreational “farms” are allowed to sell their products at
the same farmers’ markets as commercial farms. It’s all about property
taxes, not food production. As Forbes magazine suggested to its readers
<http://onforb.es/WZl391> in its 2012 Investment Guide, now is the time to
“farm like a billionaire,” because even a small amount of retail sales — as
low as $500 a year in New Jersey — allows landowners to harvest more tax
breaks than tomatoes.

On top of that, we’re now competing with nonprofit farms. Released from the
yoke of profit, farms like Growing Power in Milwaukee and Stone Barns in
Pocantico Hills, N.Y., are doing some of the most innovative work in the
farming sector, but neither is subject to the iron heel of the free
market. Growing
Power <http://bit.ly/1oxwoHh%5D> alone received over $6.8 million in grants
over the last five years, and its produce is now available in Walgreens
stores. Stone Barns was started with a $30 million grant
<http://bit.ly/1sbXNhv> from David Rockefeller. How’s a young farmer to
compete with that?
<http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/10/opinion/sunday/dont-let-your-children-grow-up-to-be-farmers.html?_r=1#story-continues-4>

As one grower told me, “When these nonprofit farms want a new tractor, they
ask the board of directors, but we have to go begging to the bank.”

And then there are the chefs. Restaurants bait their menus with homages to
local food, attracting flocks of customers willing to pay 30 bucks a plate.
But running a restaurant is a low-margin, cutthroat business, and chefs
have to pay the bills, too. To do so, chefs often use a rule of thumb: Keep
food costs to 30 percent of the price of the meal. But organic farming is
an even higher-risk, higher-cost venture, so capping the farmer’s take to a
small sliver of the plate ensures that working the land remains a beggar’s
game.

The food movement — led by celebrity chefs, advocacy journalists, students
and NGOs — is missing, ironically, the perspective of the people doing the
actual work of growing food. Their platform has been largely based on how
to provide good, healthy food, while it has ignored the core economic
inequities and contradictions embedded in our food system.

Unlike our current small-bore campaigns, previous food movements of the
1880s, 1930s and 1970s were led by highly organized farmers’ organizations
— like the American Agricultural Movement, National Farmers Union and
Colored Farmers’ National Alliance — trailblazing new paths for the economy.

They went toe to toe with Big Ag: crashing shareholder meetings; building
co-ops and political parties; and lobbying for price stabilization. In the
late 1970s, for example, small-scale family farmers organized a series of
protests under the slogan “Parity Not Charity,” demanding a moratorium on
foreclosures, as well as the stabilization of crop prices to ensure that
farmers could make a living wage. They mobilized thousands of fellow
farmers to direct action <http://bit.ly/XBGPj7>, including the 1979
Tractorcade, where 900 tractors — some driven thousands of miles —
descended on Washington to shut down the nation’s capital.

It’s not the food movement’s fault that we’ve been left behind. It has
turned food into one of the defining issues of our generation. But now it’s
time for farmers to shape our own agenda. We need to fight for loan
forgiveness for college grads who pursue agriculture; programs to turn
farmers from tenants into landowners; guaranteed affordable health care;
and shifting subsidies from factory farms to family farms. We need to take
the lead in shaping a new food economy by building our own production hubs
and distribution systems. And we need to support workers up and down the
supply chain who are fighting for better wages so that their families can
afford to buy the food we grow.

But none of these demands will be met until we start our own organizations
— as in generations past — and shape a vision of a new food economy that
ensures that growing good food also means making a good living.




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