by Ana Grarian

-DISCLAIMER-

This blog will be about the affects of industrial farms on small farm holders, the ecology, the economy, rural towns, counties and states, the health of individuals working on the farms and living nearby and many other aspects of rural life.

I did not grow up on a farm but I did grow up in a rural town that became suburbia. I left to get a Bachelor’s degree in Animal Husbandry from Cornell University. After graduation I settled in the Finger Lakes Region of Central NY State where my husband and I had a small farm.

I know what it is to milk cows, pitch manure and silage and hay, worry about the weather, raise children in the barn, constantly worry how to pay the bills and watch it all go away when the mental, physical and economic toll became too much.

I have seen the changes in my community over the past 35 years, for good and bad. And most importantly I have learned how sinister changes can occur unseen, and unknown which affect the physical health of the land, air, watershed and individuals because of naivet窠misinformation and monetary strangulation.

I am an omnivore. This is not the rantings of a fundamentalist vegan, though I respect the personal decisions anyone might make to be vegan or vegetarian. If I did not have access to good sources of locally raised meat, milk and cheese I might go that route myself. The issues I talk about affect vegetarians also. Many of our outrageous practices affect the safety of vegetable and fruit crops as well.

So come with me on a journey to discover just how far into the gulag industrial farming, big ag and the land grant colleges have taken us, and what we can do to help ourselves and our communities…..

Come all ye conservatives and liberals
who want to conserve the good things and be free,
come away from the merchants of big answers,
whose hands are metalled with power:
from the union of anywhere and everywhere
by the purchase of everything from everybody at the lowest price
and the sale of anything to anybody at the highest price;
from the union of work and debt, work and despair;
from the wage-slavery of the helplessly well-employed.

From the union of self-gratification and self-annihilation,
secede into care for one another
and for the good gifts of Heaven and Earth.

-Wendell Berry
The Mad Farmer, Flying the Flag of Rough Branch, Secedes from the Union

ENTRIES copyright 1994 Pantheon Books