How a farmer thinks

A random (I really don’t know how I was on this list) publication arrived in my inbox this morning from a publication called Barn Raiser. Here’s their tag-line: “Your independent source for rural and small town news”.

The article that caught me was from a multi-generation farmer from Montana, and how corporate oligarchies and government policies have fundamentally changed farming away from food supply to profit supply. https://barnraisingmedia.com/harvesting-destruction-neoliberalism-gilles-stockton/

Here’s the lead-in to catch readers:

In the book’s introduction, Stockton notes that according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 2019, “209,007 farms produced 78.7% of commodity sales. The other 21.7% is shared by 1,820,192 small family farms.” In the following excerpt, he looks back at the neoliberal policies that have plagued agriculture since the 1970s, allowing monopolies to take over food production and squeeze out family farmers and ranchers.

Barn Raiser

I asked Microsoft CoPilot ‘what is difference between traditional and factory farms?’ The answer was perfect

  • Structure and Management: Factory farms are specialized and standardized, functioning like biological assembly lines. They are managed as economic bottom-line businesses, focusing on managing money, land, and people1. Traditional farms, on the other hand, are diverse, individualistic, and interdependent, guided by a culture of social responsibility rather than economic expediency.
  • Environmental Impact: Factory farms can produce significant chemical and biological waste, potentially polluting the air and water of rural communities and threatening the safety and healthfulness of the food supply1. Traditional farms integrate diverse farm enterprises to mimic healthy living ecosystems, where wastes from some enterprises become productive inputs for others.
  • Treatment of Animals: On factory farms, animals are often treated as machines, not as sentient beings deserving of dignity, respect, and humane treatment1. Traditional farming practices tend to respect the animals as part of a healthy living system1.
  • Regulation: Traditional farms have traditionally required minimal regulations because they operate within a culture of social responsibility. Factory farms, due to their industrial nature, often necessitate more stringent oversight and regulation to manage their environmental and social impacts.
  • Economic Focus: Traditional farms provide multiple benefits to communities, consumers, and society in general, not just profits for farmers or corporate investors1. Factory farms are more profit-driven and may not prioritize the same community and societal benefits.
Microsoft CoPilot

Stockton leaves the interview / article with a very profound question (emphasis is mine):

Earlier in this essay, I made the observation that only 209,007 farms produce 78.7% of sales. One reason for this fact is that the agri-cartels find it more convenient to deal in large quantities of production. For instance, procuring chickens a few dozen at a time from hundreds of chicken farmers is, for them, more inconvenient than sending a semitrailer to pick up thousands of chickens from a factory farm. Ultimately, what we as citizens and consumers need to consider is whether this efficiency in scale warrants the environmental risks, the social dislocations and the vulnerabilities to the supply chain.

Barn Raiser