most flowers are like profits, nice to have , but hardly worth eating.

So What Does it Take to be a So Called Farmer Today?

And do I really want to be one?

Conclusion

        I have briefly out lined some of my past heritage, as well as what the modern definition of farming is and now I want to share with you my thoughts of being a farmer today. I am not a typical farmer and refused to be seen as someone who follows the mold set out by corporate farming. I still believe we need  enough small farms to offset the effects of corporate farming would have, if allowed free to roam in a world market. I also believe we waste to much energy and resources sending food to foreign nations when we could better use that food at home.

      Literally and physically, corporate farming and the ideal of the American farmer is being shoved down our throats as we eat more processed foods made from genetically modified organisms or GMO’s, and these are being produced by the American farmer today to the rate of 80 percent of our corn and 90 percent of our soybeans are derived from a GMO process. GMO’s are designed to work with glycol phosphate , a weed killer and also 2-4 d , one of the so called safe weed killers that made up agent orange and manufactured by DOW chemical corporation. It is big business for them and the equipment manufacturers like John Deere who manufacture equipment specifically designed to monitor production of field crops and application rates of pesticide and herbicide rates. An exclusive contract specifically ties you in to reporting field results to them, as well as limits your ability to reuse any of their seed. GMO’ S are banned as well as glycol phosphate in Europe because little is known of the long term effect it will have on plants and animals or the environment and most assuredly us somewhere in that food chain.  Still you cannot pick up a package of food here in the United States and see where soy beans or corn meal is not used in processing somewhere down the line. It is fed to our chickens, beef, hogs, and then shoved down our mouth till we could scream enough. But all you would hear is gargling noises as we would  choke on the stuff if we think about what all goes into it.

      Is this the kind of farmer I want to be to poison my neighbors, friends, and family and subject them to a slow lingering death as they grow masses in their body for unknown reasons? Not hardly. All the while, farmers are competing on a world market to shove our products down unsuspecting third world markets. Though they are not as ignorant and backward as we would like to think they are. China one of the world’s largest markets just recently rejected a shipment of our corn known to be of a GMO variety and it was sent home supposedly.  Leaving the exporter with the tab of transporting it there and who knows where afterwards, probably Vietnam or somewhere else as I doubt they brought it back to the United States.

     Still if you look at what they sent them, they sent the best part of our fields; the grain is where all the nutrients of our production process lies. It is fertilizer the herbicide, the soil that makes it up and sunlight and water it took to grow it. It also represents the fuel oil and machinery costs, labor, and the right conditions to make it all possible. What do they give us back for our effort except cash? You can’t plant cash, and you can’t eat cash , where are we going to plant in the future when our fields are just plain worn out. It has happened before in the cotton fields down south as year after year they planted cotton till he cotton wouldn’t grow no more. It is going to be the same here with our fields. We apply high cost fertilizer the same stuff used to blow up the Oklahoma Court house by Timothy Mc Veigh , and that is Ammonium Nitrate as one of the key ingredients of providing the necessary nitrogen we need to grow crops. What happens if we have a disruption in the process or can’t find the necessary ingredients to efficiently produce these crops? We will have a total melt down of our food supply here at home and abroad , because we became dependent on corporate America to provide all our food for us.

      We will be scouring landfills and recycling the human waste we buried there when we burned it in incinerators because we felt that it was unsanitary to reuse it. Human waste is also part of the resources we are providing foreign countries when we sell them our grain. Do you think a Vietnamese farmer who grows tilapia in a pond somewhere in Vietnam cares one bit where his waste goes when he takes a dump in the floor of his hut perched over the pond as he chows down on a corn dog? He has been doing it that way for years and has no inclination to waste anything. He knows his waste will go to feed the tilapia fish he eats, and soon he will sweep his catch up in a net and sell it at the market where it will be packaged for resale back to the U.S.. Oh yeah the third world countries are giving us back something, a load of crap , we eat heartily when we head out to Crapshack Joe’s and have the seafood platter. In fact when our soils are depleted we will be buying off of third world countries who utilize the human waste as a resource, because there food will be cheaper since it is grown more organically. Do I want to be a part of this world market? I guess I would if I was chairman of ADM –Archers Daniel Midland corp.,  as they know what is most important to their success and that is consumers eating their crap daily. Archer Daniels Midland also owns Mc Donald’s as one of its subsidiaries and provides a substantial amount of corn and soybeans to the food industry and to companies under its umbrella plus to a lot more that isn’t.

      Look at the fuel costs for something like dog food where we can send the corn to China and process it into food that makes our pets sick and kills them and ship it back to your home town, and stock it on shelves in your dollar store for you pets to eat. Every step of the way we are using fuel to make a twenty pound bag of dog food, so what does it take 5 gallons of fuel to send it that far and bring it back and still sell as cheap as they do. I can’t understand why they would want to do it except dog food manufacturers over there in china are the cheapest around, if you look at the grain costs plus all he ingredients and figure in thirty percent profit per bag, still you can hardly afford to sell a bag of dog food for 7. 50. Still they do. The only thing I know is the Chinese must work for a quarter a day and all the dog food they can eat. Do I want to be part of this madness called farming? Not hardly. Somewhere on Wall Street and on Chicago market of trades and in the boardrooms of capitalist America this all sound good as long as their profit to be made. But I can’t eat profit when our fields sit fallow because it doesn’t pay to put seed in them no more, as we have created drought conditions burning fuel to make food for ourselves and our materialistic needs.  That is not the farmer I want to be.

      So to be a so called farmer is not really something I desire to be in any way. To be accused of being one even pisses me off more. As I don’t really care to become part of this rat race, I never have. I enjoy my life as it is. Yes I eat some foods I know or question how good it is for me but I still need to eat. And since we have all bought into this world market thing, we are limited to our choices at the local grocery stores. It’s not like we have a local butcher shop specializing in home grown food anymore. I grow some of my food but like you and as a single person it is easier just buying into the scheme of things and as there are few choices for organic and it is much higher in cost. Head to the Raisin Rack and see what I mean. So I will do what I can and learn to eat in a more healthy way the best I can, and hope for the best just like the rest of us. That and grow my own berries for sale to the public. Healthy naturally grown berries right here on the farm in a pick your own plot. This is the type of farmer I want to be.