SheriM
Lovin' The Homestead
I'm coming in late here, but I just have to get in on this fascinating discussion. I trained as a cultural anthropologist and am now a small scale farmer. It was, in fact, the development of agricuture that paved the way for specialized labor and the move away from each family producing its own food. Once crops were grown and livestock was managed on a large enough scale to produce a surplus, it allowed other people to develop their skills as weavers, potters, etc and trade their wares for food rather than producing their own food.
Jump ahead a few centuries and we have the industrial revolution, which led to even more people becoming wage earning employees rather than self-sustaining homesteaders. The companies employing those people got bigger and bigger as mechanization took over.
Take another quantum leap into the 21st century and you have mega-corporations like Microsoft, etc. that earn billions of dollars a year and employ huge numbers of people...people who are, in some cases, now centuries removed from the process of producing their own food. The concept is as foreign to many of them as computers would have been to their grandparents or great grandparents.
Like it or not, this is where we're at. I have to agree with FarmerChick. As preferable as it may be to have many more people producing their own food or at the very least buying from the small scale local farms, the trend toward the urban lifestyle that began back in the industrial revolution has rendered that impossible. Regardless of how beneficial it would be to the health of both the people and the planet, we are not likely to see a mass exodus from the cities in favor of a rural SS lifestyle any time soon and there has to be a way to feed those masses who have never set foot off the concrete.
Having said that, don't even get me started about businesses that don't truly support themselves. Here in Saskatchewan, a person must earn a minimum of $10,000 a year to be considered a "real" farm and I struggle darned hard each year to meet that arbitrary figure. Some years it take some very creative (but still legal) accounting to make it happen. And then I turn on the news and hear about the huge bail-out of mega-corps like General Motors and my blood starts to boil.
I listen to all the daitribe about the poor employees who are expected to take a pay cut from $70 an hour down to $40 or $50 per hour and I just have to give my head a shake. I work off farm to support my lifestyle and I'm lucky if I bring home a $500 pay cheque for two weeks work. Admittedly, I have chosen to limit the number of hours I work away from the farm because of the increasing care my husband is requiring, but good grief, if I was making $70 an hour, I could work 7 hours a week and collect my $500!
Okay, okay, I'm climbing down off my soapbox now. I just wanted to offer a few thoughts. I really didn't mean to turn this into a personal rant, really I didn't.
Jump ahead a few centuries and we have the industrial revolution, which led to even more people becoming wage earning employees rather than self-sustaining homesteaders. The companies employing those people got bigger and bigger as mechanization took over.
Take another quantum leap into the 21st century and you have mega-corporations like Microsoft, etc. that earn billions of dollars a year and employ huge numbers of people...people who are, in some cases, now centuries removed from the process of producing their own food. The concept is as foreign to many of them as computers would have been to their grandparents or great grandparents.
Like it or not, this is where we're at. I have to agree with FarmerChick. As preferable as it may be to have many more people producing their own food or at the very least buying from the small scale local farms, the trend toward the urban lifestyle that began back in the industrial revolution has rendered that impossible. Regardless of how beneficial it would be to the health of both the people and the planet, we are not likely to see a mass exodus from the cities in favor of a rural SS lifestyle any time soon and there has to be a way to feed those masses who have never set foot off the concrete.
Having said that, don't even get me started about businesses that don't truly support themselves. Here in Saskatchewan, a person must earn a minimum of $10,000 a year to be considered a "real" farm and I struggle darned hard each year to meet that arbitrary figure. Some years it take some very creative (but still legal) accounting to make it happen. And then I turn on the news and hear about the huge bail-out of mega-corps like General Motors and my blood starts to boil.
I listen to all the daitribe about the poor employees who are expected to take a pay cut from $70 an hour down to $40 or $50 per hour and I just have to give my head a shake. I work off farm to support my lifestyle and I'm lucky if I bring home a $500 pay cheque for two weeks work. Admittedly, I have chosen to limit the number of hours I work away from the farm because of the increasing care my husband is requiring, but good grief, if I was making $70 an hour, I could work 7 hours a week and collect my $500!
Okay, okay, I'm climbing down off my soapbox now. I just wanted to offer a few thoughts. I really didn't mean to turn this into a personal rant, really I didn't.
