Logan52
Well-known member
Over the years I have accumulated a large number of old agricultural books from the period of around 1870 through the 1940s. They display a reverence for the land and an almost religious devotion to the lifestyle and vocation of farming that is absent in similar publications today. I suppose the bitter hard times of the depression shook this approach out of people's minds as much as anything and made them open to "scientific" methods of farming that were supposedly going to make things so much better.
Sometimes I wonder, wonder if all the advancements I have seen have only served to empty the countryside of people and enrich the few at the cost of the many.
We have EPDs for selecting our bulls and expensive mineral mixes that control flies, but how many families are able to live off the returns of a cattle operation?
Corn growers can grow huge crops with sprays and seed that has been genetically manipulated and spend the winter in Florida while their topsoil flows down the Mississippi. Only the leveraged few can make even this work, and then only by the force of government through ill planned programs that burn their excess crops for fuel.
I wonder if we have not been duped and that our country was stronger when large families grew up on farms and the product they were most proud of was the men and women that these children became.
Sometimes I wonder, wonder if all the advancements I have seen have only served to empty the countryside of people and enrich the few at the cost of the many.
We have EPDs for selecting our bulls and expensive mineral mixes that control flies, but how many families are able to live off the returns of a cattle operation?
Corn growers can grow huge crops with sprays and seed that has been genetically manipulated and spend the winter in Florida while their topsoil flows down the Mississippi. Only the leveraged few can make even this work, and then only by the force of government through ill planned programs that burn their excess crops for fuel.
I wonder if we have not been duped and that our country was stronger when large families grew up on farms and the product they were most proud of was the men and women that these children became.