There was an article in The Guardian last year, How America’s food giants swallowed the family farms, that included a paragraph that might as well be included in an update of "Grapes."
“Investors buy the land, and they have tractors and combines that you can run by computer,” she said. “They’ll hire somebody to sit in a little office somewhere and run that stuff off the computer and farm the land that way. Now what you’ve done is you have lost the innate knowledge of how to grow food and raise animals. You’ve lost a whole generation of it, probably two. Now we are going to rely on a few corporations to decide who is going to eat and who isn’t. We’re one generation away from that picture right now.”
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| will this corn become ethanol or cattle food or...?
Photo by J. Harrington
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There seems to be increasing numbers of folks who recognize that there's nothing much for ordinary folks to gain by going back to what passed for normal before the novel coronavirus pandemic hit. One of the major obstacles we all face (at least all of us in the 99%) is that there is increasing consolidation in global corporatism. One place to work toward diminishing those obstacles is in rural America. Rebuilding our food systems to support local communities rather than global corporations would help a number of towns that have been losing population as farms consolidated and "got big."
I grew up in and around Boston, near where a Minuteman fired the "shot heard round the world." I'm pretty sure if there had been any corporate sponsors of the Boston Tea Party or the Battle of Bunker Hill I would have heard about it. The war was fought by patriotic individuals on the American side. The British had mercenaries, which, I suppose, made them corporate employees of a sort.
According to the High Country News, "Four firms control over 80 percent of all the beef slaughtered." That's not the kind of system that's likely to benefit independent cattle producers, even if, especially if?, the cattle are all pasture raised. Is it? Would you want to live next to or just down wind of a Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation [CAFO]? We deserve a better food system than we have where we get the table crumbs and corporate executives and investors get the main meals -- even if we have to pay a little more for higher quality food. Our "new and improved" approach to our food system should reflect a concern that can be stated: Get Big? Get Out!
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| some solar gardens include apiaries and wildflowers
Photo by J. Harrington
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Wendell Berry has given us a manifesto on what and how to get ourselves out of the system that's trapped us. It's ending is perfect for the times, since today is Holy Saturday and tomorrow Easter Sunday.
Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front
Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won't compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion — put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?
Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn't go.
Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.
—Wendell Berry
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