permaculture

[Lawrence London <lfljvenaura@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Dec 30, 2016 at 12:07 AM, Lawrence London <lfljvenaura@gmail.com>
wrote:

> New news or old news, all good. Keep posting. Someone has to,
> especially now that the anti environment barbarians are at the doorstep
> and that local farming has become so expensive, institutionalized and
> regulated,
> few do it anymore unlike previous decades with victory gardens, urban
> farmers and fertile crescent
> market producers out in the county providing faithfully for the folks in
> town..............I'm sure you remember that era.
>

http://civileats.com/2016/10/27/want-to-understand-trumps-rise-head-to-the-farm/
snippets:

"But what has too long been overlooked is how much of that economic
dysfunction—and the anger it has caused—goes back to the dissolution of the
family farm."

"Yes, the farm. Rural America produces food as well as anger. From the
1940s to the 1970s, the farmers who produced that food, even on small
parcels of land, could make a reasonably good living, with prices
reflecting their costs of production. It was hard work, but they could
support their families, and the money they spent at feed stores and coffee
shops built thriving local communities. That ended in the 1980s, when
hundreds of thousands of farms went out of business and rural communities
withered across the country—while the federal government did nothing.

Much of rural America has struggled to recover
<http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/eib-economic-information-bulletin/eib-145.aspx>
from the 2008 recession—but how could it, when it never recovered from the
1980s farm crisis? The 1980s was when rural America came apart at the
seams, but plans were developed decades earlier to move farmers off the
land, in the name of economic efficiency. U.S. farm policy has been slowly
crippling the heartland for more than half a century—so it’s no wonder the
people who still live there are mad.

Starting in the mid-1950s, a number of free market-oriented business groups
proposed policies to address what they saw as the inefficiencies of farming
in an age of increasing technological advances. One of these groups, the
Committee for Economic Development (CED), described
<http://www.normeconomics.org/AN%20ADAPTIVE%20PROGRAM%20FOR%20AG.pdf> the
chief “farm problem” as a “persistent excess of resources, particularly
labor”—that is, too many farmers. The CED plan detailed how to move those
“resources” off the land and into cities, where their labor was more needed.

Its goal was to eliminate a third of farm families, replacing a network of
millions of self-sustaining medium-sized family farms with fewer, much
larger farms producing the same amount of food—most of it commodity grains
bound for animal feed and processed food—more “efficiently.” But efficiency
didn’t account for the massive upheaval the new system wrought on the
structure, community, and economics of rural life.

Agriculture policy since then has followed these recommendations, slowly
dismantling support programs that had made midsize family farms viable,
including effective supply
<http://www.nffc.net/Issues/Domestic%20Policy/page-domestic.htm> management
<http://www.iatp.org/files/Supply_Management.htm> through price floors, a
crop reserve, and conservation incentives. Instead, Richard Nixon’s
Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz
<http://grist.org/article/the-butz-stops-here/> famously directed farmers
to plant “fencerow to fencerow,” flooding the market with grain and driving
down prices. If farmers couldn’t survive the price drops, Butz encouraged
them to “get big or get out.” And so they did: the number of farms
<http://usda.mannlib.cornell.edu/MannUsda/viewDocumentInfo.do?documentID=1864>
dropped from nearly 4.8 million in 1954 to 2.1 million by 1990."

"Over a quarter of a million farms were lost in the 1980s
<http://usda.mannlib.cornell.edu/usda/nass/Agstat//1990s/1990/Agstat-04-23-1990.pdf>,
the land was sold to larger operations, families were forced to move, and
lifelong farmers were pushed into new jobs (or lack thereof). At least a
million people were displaced from their homes and livelihoods in just
10 years—in many cases from land their families had farmed for generations.
As the farmers left, so did the Main Streets and manufacturing businesses
that had relied on them. Whole towns died off in the course of a decade.

Throughout the crisis, rural America felt abandoned. Communities were going
through catastrophic loss and the rest of the country didn’t seem to care.
Many foreclosures were purposefully accelerated
<http://www.flaginc.org/about/> by the government lending agency that held
their loans, and some were done illegally and without normal due process
procedures—at the behest of U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)
officials."

"The foreclosures slowed in the late ’80s, but it turns out there are
consequences to removing an entire way of life. In his 1997 book, *Harvest
of Rage*
<https://www.amazon.com/Harvest-Rage-Oklahoma-City-Beginning/dp/0813332931>,
journalist Joel Dyer draws a line from the planned devastation of the farm
crisis to the rise of the 1990s antigovernment movement, including the
1995 bombing
of an Oklahoma City federal building
<http://www.history.com/topics/oklahoma-city-bombing> that killed 168
people.

Drawing on data from farm hotline operators, rural psychologists, and other
mental health professionals, Dyer argues that farm loss was so emotionally
and financially significant that it traumatized not only individual
families, but also entire rural communities, leaving swathes of the country
with chronic long-term stress, depression, and other mental health issues.
Suicides, spousal abuse, and other violence spiked in the rural population.

The foreclosure rates have slowed in the last two decades, but today
midsize family farms continue to go out of business at an alarming rate.
None of this should surprise us, given that the supply management programs
that had allowed midsize family farms to be the economic drivers of their
communities have all been removed.

The change in rural America engineered by the CED and other business
interests is still going according to plan. As of 2012, just four percent
of farms produced two-thirds of agricultural value—that’s a lot of wealth
concentrated in just a few hands. Today, a small number of farmers are
“efficiently” producing more grain than ever (though it’s not very
efficiently
<http://civileats.com/2016/10/05/does-big-ag-really-feed-the-world/>
“feeding the world”), while metropolitan and suburban populations have
ballooned."


-- 
Lawrence F. London, Jr.
lfljvenaura@gmail.com
https://sites.google.com/site/avantgeared