I’m the midst of reading What’s the Matter with Kansas? : How Conservatives Won the Heart of America
My experience and knowledge of farming is very limited.
My great-grandfather was a farmer for a short period of time until his serious partying undid him. According to family lore, he would stay up all night drinking and dancing. In the morning he would fall asleep behind the plow. The horse would drag him and the plow around the field creating spagetti-twirled furrows. Later, he moved to the city where he was a train engineer with the same drinking/sleeping issues. He would fall asleep while driving the train and roar through the stations without stopping. But other than great-grandfather’s ill-fated time in the Iowa fields, most of my ancestors were crowded into ethnic urban ghettoes.
I went to the local farm yesterday to pick up some lettuce and bananas. Yes, I bought bananas with the Dole stickers peeled off at a farm in New Jersey. There are a few designer farms around here, where the executives from the Mercedes corporate offices and the trophy wives go for the salad bars at lunch time. I stopped in for donuts for the kids and slightly better produce than at the Shop Rite.
I’m not sure what to do about the real farmers out in the Heartland. Protecting them from extinction does seem important. Not only for the environmental reasons, but because farming is good honest work that has a long tradition in this country.
On the other hand, a lot of careers and lifestyles are endangered. Pretty much ever career that I have been involved in. Academia. Journalism. Publishing. Just as would try to convince my kids not pursue careers in academia (For the love of God, kid, don’t go to graduate school!), perhaps we should just accept that the world has changed. No governmental policy can prevent another foreclosure on the family farm.
The only farms that have any future are in blue states where they can charge double for organic rhubarb and get $10 for a plate of greens.
Apt. 11d 
I don’t know. My father-in-law seems to make an acceptable living farming his 400+ acres in Illinois with corn and soy beans. His brother-in-law makes an even better living (admittedly, he farms a lot more acres).
It’s not income that is the real danger to the family farm (at least, not on the well-run family farm). It’s that most kids don’t want to work that hard so they get nice office jobs in the city now. The greatest danger to the family farm is the lack of desire the next generation has to go into that sort of work.
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My uncle in Ireland was nearly wiped out by the scare over mad cow disease, and the only thing keeping him afloat is the EEC subsidy. It keeps the countryside pretty, the small family farm, so it seems more like a tourism subsidy than a farming one, at this point.
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Perhaps another future for farms is that of exotic novelty…like an amusement park almost.
When I grew up, everyone had a garden. A big one with preservable quantities. That’s just what we did in the summer. (ok. I grew up in Iowa.) Now I have a few peppers and tomatoes outside my apt in teh city and strangers walk by and say “what’s that!?” And I’m like *duh it’s a tomato*. It occurred to me that most people in my greater urban area perhaps haven’t connected that vegetables come from plants. Now if the farms could market it just right, seeing teh Origin of a Vegetable could be a wildly fun experience. 🙂
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Yah, I tell my kids that their pork chops grow on trees in the great Pork Chop orchards of the Shenandoah Valley, and you know when to pick them when the shrink wrap goes clear. They are coming to understand that every single thing Daddy says might not be strictly accurate…
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Level Plains begins 2005
first Republican judges take office and Enterprise leaders make a decision to develop a Comprehensive Plan for the citys future. The tumultuous year for Level Plains began in January when Councilman Willie Reynolds reported that some town employees fea…
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