Quote:
Originally Posted by bluecarebear
I made a similar statement over in the Green Living forum. People were all excited about leaving the cities or graduating from college, buying farms, and growing organic products. Living off the grid. They have quickly discovered that their style of off the grid living is being done on a regular basis by farmers. Yes, it is called farming. I know there are a ton of spin terms but it is farming. Those city folk have found country living to be a little bit more difficult than expected. Their products aren't selling or others are undercutting their prices or their land isn't producing. The truth is the majority of small farm owners have real jobs outside of the homestead. The city folk believed these grandiose promises of rural utopia. Now reality has hit.
The other issue is all the new information is recycled. For example, Old Mother Earth News magazines carry almost every trend that has been pushed in the last 10 years. This isn't new stuff.
The boom to the homesteading/prepping phase was between 2008-2012. Have the preppers gone to ground? No. They have been around the whole time but there is a large group of people who got caught up in the wave and realized the lifestyle isn't what they want.
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Mhm.
Let's dispel this myth that country/rural people all farm. They don't. Not even a simple majority of them farms.
The problem with the "farmers" today is mostly that they are not green. They are mechanized, burn through fossil fuels at an alarming rate, owe a ton of money to the banks, are largely monocroppers (all eggs in one basket) and they all douse their products in nasty chemicals galore. They are basically indentured servants caught between Monsanto, John Deere and the bank.
That's VERY different from the small 5-10 acre organic farm that composts, grows varieties of veggies and fruits, has bees, is into solar or wind energy, runs their old diesel truck on vegetable oil and lives in the small straw-bale house. 99% of your rural "farmers" do none of those.
They do one thing well though: get in debt.
Most of the land around me is capable of feeding the families that own it and then some. My immediate neighbor has 70 acres that support two horses and a donkey and there are three families living on this land - all buy their groceries at the store in the nearby town.
My 5+ acre "farm" is all organic, I compost and spread the manure from our two horses around, built almost everything ourselves, fencing, home stuff, solar, so on and so on. This year my organically grown tomatoes and peppers had a bumper crop - I have been feeding most of my neighbors who have more land than me with these tomatoes. Just finished a hoop and in it my first zucchini is coming in, so is chard. I have some watermelons and the okra looks like it will have a bumper crop too.
I am on my way up - next project is to deer-fence the property so I can grow anything, anywhere (we initially put in basic fencing around the whole property but that is not enough for the deer so I grow in small plots that are fenced themselves for now but that's getting old
). Mind you, about 2 acres of our 5.2 acres we fenced and cross-fenced for our two manure producers - the horses. By the time I am done with the 3 acres, I will be making enough food to feed at least 3 families in season. Oh yeah, I also keep bees.
I just convinced my neighbor to sell me an acre at below-market price. That acre will be farmed too - I will probably plant olive trees on it. The next acre I buy from the same neighbor will be planted in grapes. So on and so on. One acre at a time....
The funny thing is, with my ****ty 5 acres I need to have 6 beehives to get an ag exemption. All my neighbors with the 70 acres have to do is feed the deer and they get a wildlife exemption. It's not like the deer are getting extinct around here, quite to the contrary. The bees on the other hand?
Some of the bigger land lots here have cattle on them. Not that anyone works it horseback like God intended
. The cattle just sits here for - you guessed it - another tax exemption.
Anyways, please stop perpetuating this myth of rural people farming. The vast majority do not and the ones that do are definitely not "green".
Now, I do think that Mother Earth News and a myriad of other magazines and books are just great vehicles for the authors to make good money regurgitating the same BS over and over again. However, I will take that any time over the mainstream "American dream" of being an economic slave, commuting to the office and back every day, waiting for the corrupt government to enforce the watered down, crooked laws made by their corporate overlords. Our food supply is tainted, our water supply also, people are getting poorer, jobs are disappearing to foreign lands and the military industrial complex is doing what any other complex would have done in its shoes - beefing up its capabilities to spy on the hungry and increasingly dissatisfied population so that unrest can be identified ahead of time and be dealt with quickly.
But you cannot beat laws of physics: life is getting increasingly more difficult, jobs are disappearing, not everyone can be a salesman (how many middlemen can a product price take between China and the retail store in the States before its price becomes too inflated for anyone here to afford?), medical system is 3rd world quality, people are getting raped by medical providers, insurance companies, the tax man, so on and so on. In a situation like that, I will take my ****ty 5 acres with food I make on them. I would encourage everyone else to think about all this and make up their own minds. Going back to the land is the ONLY choice, in my humble opinion.
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