Re: What happened to farming pride?

Posted by Dave D on February 11, 2005 at 08:37:58 from (66.155.201.82):

In Reply to: What happened to farming pride? posted by Youngfarmerguy on February 10, 2005 at 21:54:54:

This is an interesting thread. I live on the remains of a 255-acre New Hampshire hilltop farm, in the family since the 1830s, where my grandfather, until he sold off the barn so he could retire in 1955, scratched out a living raising sheep and haying and harvesting a little timber with a horse team and oxen. My grandparents never had electricity, had a handle pump in the sink and a 2-holer for plumbing. Grandfather had no internal combustion-driven equipment because there was no money for it. He had 3 sons and prized education; they all became educated professionals (the Army drafted and educated my dad via the ASTP in WW2) and moved to other parts of the country altho my generation is gradually moving back in either retirement or semi-retirement.

Perhaps you can still make a living family-farming in the midwest but not in New England, with our rocky soils, unless you're in the dairy or maybe the apple business. Land values are high and you can't get the economies of scale you need to make it pay nor do you have access to the cheap Mexican labor that you do down in Texas and Oklahoma, for example. Nobody left here but me still wants to lift glacial boulders out of small fields mostly gone back to woods. And I had to acquire a 240 loader to continue adding to those miles of "picturesque" stone walls -- purely as a hobby -- that my ancestors created by the sweat of their brows out of life or death necessity to improve the next harvest.

And so times change, the U.S. economy shifts, and our 19th century agrarian nation becomes an industrial powerhouse in the 20th century only to send its manufacturing base overseas in the 1980s and 1990s. And now we are busily transforming our nation into what our president, the former governor of our second most agricultural state (I'm guessing California is still No. 1) is pleased to call the "Ownership Society".

What is it that we actually own again?

Follow Ups:

• Re: What happened to farming pride? BillB 09:18:25 02/11/05 (0)

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