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Politics and the Family Farm

June 8, 2008: As I, and many others have stated over the years, finding good candidates to run for president is a difficult task, since most of those able folk don't want to subject themselves to the hostility connected with a run for high office. So, what do we now have? A Democrat who is the pied piper of the naive, a Republican who mumbles, and apparently (as of this date) is afraid to really go after his adversary, and educate the public as to what the Democrat really is, and a Libertarian who is too much like a Republican, and who was nominated by the party probably because there wasn't anyone else around who could do the job. What a waste of time! I'm not a Hillary Clinton fan, but she seems to be the only one out there who would have the guts to tell it like it is, and do what has to be done. But due to some of her own errors (the delegate count, for instance) she's currently out of the race.

The other topic is the family farm. I remember when the problems with the family farm began to grow, way back at the end of the 40s and the early 50s. My experience was in the poultry industry, when major canning companies began buying out the small farmer on the East Coast. Competition became too strong, so those business owners had to sell out, or really lose their shirts. Look, we used to be called the "bread basket of the world". I'm not against big business, but when it affects our citizen' lives - the price and availability of food, then we should all realize that something has to be done.

There are a number of problems which affected the small farmer for the past fifty or sixty years. Land availability was, and is, one of the major factors. After all, why grow crops or raise chickens, with all the accompanying aggravations, when you can sell the land to developers and make more money immediately than you could over a few more years of farming? The only problem, is that with more population, we need more food. And without the family farm, less food is produced. Of course, technology provides higher yields per acre, heavier cattle, and more egg and milk production, but then the environmentalists force their religious ideology on the government, so we're told its better to "save the planet" than produce more food. And now we sell more to other countries, waste corn by concentrating on corn based ethanol (what a joke), and so on and so on.

We need to get back to the small farm philosophy - more agricultural tech high schools, more family farms which will provide more and better food to the public, more farm markets selling locally grown produce, poultry, beef, and pork products. The benefits of the small farme are numerous, including the savings on transportation costs. The only hitch is the restraints which would be put on by our federal government agencies. But after all, who are we, as individuals, to think we have the right to buy and eat the food products we want? Apparently, federal agencies don't believe we do.

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