- I'm serving as a member of a community group that is helping to draft a section of the county's new twenty-year plan. Our section has to do with preserving farmland. In a few different ways I'm not qualified to work on this section because I've never lived or worked on a farm. But maybe I can contribute in other ways.#
- One thing I notice in the conversations is that the people who do live and work on farms talk at least as much about land, water, weather, climate, soil quality, crops, plant species, pests, animals, planting, harvest, and making a living by selling what they produce as they talk about the pressures of national and international markets, laws and regulations, economic forces created by corporations, products they have to buy in order to farm in the modern way (pesticides, fancy seeds, petroleum-based fertilizers, etc.).#
- In other words, you'd think farmers would work hard and think hard about nature, seasons, the land, but they seem to have to do at least as much of their thinking and working to attend to the international economic forces inside which their farms have firmly been planted. They aren't free to be local farmers who know the region, its resources and markets, its climate, the needs of its people for food. That would seem to be their job, but it isn't. They attend to that work only when and how the larger, more powerful international marketplace allows them to. They're in harness to invisible forces that have nothing to do with the land and the food we their neighbors need them to produce.#
- That's what has surprised and alarmed me, serving on this county committee.#
- I'm serving as a member of a community group that is helping to draft a section of the county's new twenty-year plan. Our section has to do with preserving farmland. In a few different ways I'm not qualified to work on this section because I've never lived or worked on a farm. But maybe I can contribute in other ways.#
- One thing I notice in the conversations is that the people who do live and work on farms talk at least as much about land, water, weather, climate, soil quality, crops, plant species, pests, animals, planting, harvest, and making a living by selling what they produce as they talk about the pressures of national and international markets, laws and regulations, economic forces created by corporations, products they have to buy in order to farm in the modern way (pesticides, fancy seeds, petroleum-based fertilizers, etc.).#
- In other words, you'd think farmers would work hard and think hard about nature, seasons, the land, but they seem to have to do at least as much of their thinking and working to attend to the international economic forces inside which their farms have firmly been planted. They aren't free to be local farmers who know the region, its resources and markets, its climate, the needs of its people for food. That would seem to be their job, but it isn't. They attend to that work only when and how the larger, more powerful international marketplace allows them to. They're in harness to invisible forces that have nothing to do with the land and the food we their neighbors need them to produce.#
- That's what has surprised and alarmed me, serving on this county committee.#