OT: Sustainable Farming

[Guest guest]

Butch,

I miss the country life, not the 24/7 of it, no holidays off.

I do not miss the " organic " fertilizer or the manual (me) removal of it!

Hugs,

Jan S

www.sweetprairiesoap.com

" Tell me, what is it that you plan to do

With your one wild and precious life? "

-Mary Oliver

 

 

 

 

 

[Guest guest]

Hey y'all,

 

Might be that the idea of the continuance of successful family farms is

not all that realistic in the world today. Having been brought up on a

farm and having escaped that life after graduation from high school, I

can look back at how it was to owe a good part of your crop to the bank

and to pay that off each year afore Christmas .. and hope you had a bit

of money left to get some store bought things. ;-)

 

I left and joined the Army .. spent 30 years in that life .. got a real

good education in many fine civilian universities and Uncle Sugar took

care of most of the bills .. while my buddies back home stayed on the

farm. Many of them got degrees in Agriculture .. some even learned a

good bit about economics .. but almost all of them failed. Competition

is great in the Ag industry and cost of production is a main issue when

you figure out the annual take. A combine or good tractor can cost the

same as three luxury cars .. a Mercedes, Lincoln Town Car and even a

slick ferin model .. and unless one has more than 100 acres or so they

can't justify the cost of this machinery.

 

Crop rotation is a good thing .. ideally .. but you can't sow soy beans

if the forecast for soy bean prices is lower than a snake's belly .. so

you might sow corn or milo .. both of which suck up a lotta nitrogen so

you gotta add nitrogen fertilizer .. or go into the red. Few family

farms are as concerned about organic as they are survival.

 

As for rendering lard .. we still have smoke houses back home in KY and

most farm folks smoke bacon, hams, shoulders and such .. but I know of

no farmer who renders lard anymore. Might be some but all the folks I

see when I go back home each year are not into that now.

 

I did about every kind of work that can be done on a Southern farm and I

can tell them that ain't been there that its not a great life .. we can

romanticize it .. but we can romanticize coal mining too if we want to.

 

One of the many thoughts that sustained me while I was serving multiple

tours of duty in the 'Nam .. and in Somalia .. and in some places I

won't even mention here .. was that I was not in a tobacco patch. ;-)

 

Y'all have a gud'un .. and keep smiling. :-)

 

Butch http://www.AV-AT.com