Heirloom Economy

photo credit: mahalie

Between the Rows

by Tim Wightman

Even though this blog was in the works for six months it is perfect to begin writing now, given what has been going on these past months related to our nation’s economy and our perceived place in the world.

This blog is born from the miles and acres that have measured my life, balanced against the changing face of an uncertain future.

Uncertain to many, yet, understood by those who still hear the heart beat of the earth and walk to its beat with every action, leaving betterment in their wake and a current of understanding for those who wish to hear.

This blog will attempt to forward the wisdom of my nearly 48 years. Wisdom passed on to me by those who had it passed it on to them and from those who passed it on for 7 generations.

Not all the wisdom was correct, however, but still a lesson just the same. Brought forward now to understand who we are in the scheme of things and help us to discover our true place in nature, and to know our responsibility as consumers and producers to not only to feed ourselves but to enhance the web we rely on. We need to respect that balance, or we will be asked to remove ourselves in a not so kindly fashion.

When I was eleven I was told by my grandmother that my great grandmother had willed the farm to stay in the family and pass it on to those who would care for it and in turn, pass it on themselves.

Knowing my father had no interest in the farm I set out to learn as much as I could about farming.
However in the late 70’s early 80’s when I was old enough to begin working on the local farms, there were not many paying jobs, for those years were not kind to the farming industry.

So working for the experience fit well with the times and I never went hungry.

For quite some time, I did not learn the end result of, “fence row to fence row”.. and “get big or get out” would lead us. I was too busy helping the families I worked for, to cover the ground needed to pay off the “cheap” loans given out to promote the expansion that progress promised.

Cheap money didn’t last long, neither did the farms.

All 57 farms I worked for in a span of seven years sold out by 1986.

This track record did not bode well for the family farm waiting for me at some point in the future.

Nothing I had learned seemed to be “sustainable” (which was not even a word back then), so the open road seemed to be the best way to find what I was meant to do.

The road created a lot of questions (more on that in my next post) but did eventually lead me to an answer after 10 years and nearly a million miles of driving past corn and bean rotations and every now and then, new mown hay.

It wasn’t till I met the Amish and a scale of operation that made sense, and Community Supported Agriculture, a new idea from the coasts, where farms were feeding people not corporations, that I was able to take home the answers to scale and purpose.

I was not alone in my thinking. Farmers markets began to spread, organic production took hold, sales of local began to taste good to the informed consumer.

Extra cash from the dot com income began to fill second home refrigerators with our stuff. The seemingly endless expansion began to trickle down to us big gardeners and people liked the fact that we grew food without detriment to the land, the original carbon trading…or, perhaps buying local eased the guilt of excess in some cases.

I did however see the cheap money cycle repeating itself.

Farmers were not the takers this time, just everybody else it seemed, and no one saw an end in sight…except us who had seen it before and knew from the signs that it would not last.

We did however make in-roads into the eating habits of a significant number of people, enough to draw fire from those who controlled the market we challenged. Big Ag defended its market share with enough fire in some cases to scare people away from the alternative.

Given this pattern I realized that there had to be a measure of planning in this business of food. Natural cycles and state regulatory actions did not naturally behave this way, unless it is manipulated by man and called “natural” like “supply and demand” “consumer preference,” “top down integration.”

Towards the end of the last bubble, I began to research the history of food distribution, looking for ways to improve local and sustainable distribution given we were facing higher land & input costs and transportation to the markets we were now supplying.

I also sought to understand why farmers/producers, bought in/sold out in such an unnatural way (even in capitalistic terms) repeatedly and in reoccurring cycles.

This blog will attempt to set out how we got where we are today as it relates to food, rural economies, who has control over our food (and why) and who should really have it.

Check in next week to see why the very first farm bill in 1942 was directly related to, and the cause of, the 2008 stock market collapse.

Please leave your comments and ideas in the comments section below and I look forward to “growing” our way back to true economic growth and eating some great food along the way.

Take care, eat well, talk to you soon

Tim

Wednesday, May 6th, 2009, by admin, Filed under: Wisdom from the Sages| agriculture, economy, farming, heirloom, sustainable| 4 Comments