Problem:
A lot of rural people think they can starve the cities into submission.
I hate to say this but, until we figure out how to synthesize everyone, we're kinda at their mercy.
Rural people aren’t farmers. This isn’t the 1860s.
Farming is an industry of less than 3 million people, mostly farmworkers, and a lot of the farmers are de facto corporate middle managers via contract.
Rural America explodes, and Monsanto puts up electric fences and hires armed guards.
You're looking at the large scale farming numbers (which yes, have been dropping for years) not the small scale farmers who sell to local markets and trade with each other.
There's a whole lot more farmers and ranchers in rural America than you believe.
I am from rural America and am very familiar with who owns what land where I am from.
The niche specialty farmers are a niche. Most farms are “family owned” because families can take advantage of federal allotments and crop insurance..
Take those away, and the “family farm” largely vanishes.
I'm from rural America, and I also know who owns what.
And you're not looking at the new folk coming in and making new family farms. Not niche farms with specialty items, actual farms. Without the federal assistance. And succeeding in small markets.
You know, like it used to be in the 1800s.
I’m looking at the overall land use patterns and economy. I’m also from North Carolina, which is well along the way to the massive wave of farm-to-table/farmers marker consolidating and corporatizing.
Sustainable family farming is a great thing, but it is also held up to romanticize a big business.
/2 Eat their own food and other local food, be free of the current global food system as much as possible. To raise their kids differently. And the younger adults are starting to return to the family farm.
This side of the mountain is different people than the Asheville crowd. Both types exist.
In NC, sustainable small farm hippies/white survivalists tend to be the genesis of the movements - see Asheville - but those eventually corporatize if successful or just fade away.
Any back to the land movement has to contend with corporate capture when scaling beyond farmers markets.
/2 This is a whole different breed of folk over here than is even in Hot Springs - and the older, generational folk of Hot Springs are like the folk here.
Honestly, you should come over the state line and see how hard the locals are fighting the corporate capture - or corporations at all.
"Cultural Project"? A Cultural Project was the Foxfire series of books - still amazing valid today.
Not every life choice is a "project" or an "experiment"- it presumes you can just up and leave it when it doesn't work out. Not how having a farm works for people actually farming.
I’m not opposing you. I’m saying that this doesn’t scale.
It didn’t when the Grange tried it. It didn’t when the hippies tried it. It didn’t when the farm to table crowd tried it.
That’s not a personal criticism or a knock on choosing that path.
It’s just the vast scale of Monsanto and friends.
In all seriousness. the very first thing anyone asks you when you try to buy out in this county is "what are you going to do with the land" - and if they go all on about developing and so forth, they are discouraged from buying here, even by the greedy.
It's an odd, good place to be.
It doesn't need to scale - that's the whole point.
You stated that they were dying. I stated they were not.
The Grange and farm to table are historically different goals.
If the folks don't sell to the corporations, the corporations don't get the land. It IS that simple.
Then lots of people outside those networks starve.
I’m a big advocate for what you support and have been dancing around this, but that’s why the community you are talking about is jam packed with survivalists and white supremacists.
Hence, corporate farming is important to improve and care about.
It's not. It's really not. Farmers are part of the farming economy, and are counted in the stats even if they don't have 200 acres planted or 1000 head of cattle. If they are selling excess (as so many farmers have since forever) or raising to sell certain crops specifically, they are counted.
They can’t feed 7 billion people. They supply small
businesses on a small scale.
I am not arguing that
they aren’t highly valuable and should be supported into something larger. I’m saying focusing on them is like Car and Driver saying Model A collectors are at the heart of the auto industry.
They're not trying to feed 7 billion people. That was never the point of the family farm for the majority of farmers, now and historically.
But because enough commercialized, we're now all at the mercy of the global market for what we can't produce. And financially, it's screwing us all.
The point is that we are having two conversations.
The family farmers locked into contract systems for generations outnumber them by 1000 to 1. They cannot break out of those systems.
The people you are talking about are in another economic system. Good for them.
I’m talking life under FarmCorp.
yes. So am I . I'm state line E. TN, and the massive influx of people moving their families here to farm since 2020 is a non stopping wave.
Subsistence farming has made a comeback here; it's not romanticizing anything. It's people trying to eat what they raise - apologies for a second post coming.
