I am not a real farmer, my neighbors say, because I don’t do it for money. That’s almost funny because the economists are saying that nobody’s farming for money this year. Although the corn crop is good in most of the midwest, there’s not much profit in it. Some go as far as projecting that on average, corn farmers will lose $8 per acre over the whole midwest. If that is the case, I’m not a real farmer for sure because I figure on netting $550 an acre on my corn.– Gene Logsdon » The Race Goes Not Always To The Fastest.
I first read an article by Gene Logsdon sometime about fourty or so years ago. In other words, his name and philosophy has been on my radar for all of that time through articles in Organic Gardening and The Mother Earth News and now his blog at OrganicToBe.org.
We’ve now seen banks that were “too big to fail” cost us quite a bit of our future. We seem to have had agricultural processing units (so called farm) that are “too big to fail” for years now with our farm policy full of crop subsidies on commodity crops. There is talk about how maybe it’s time to break up these “too big to fail” banks…My thinking is, maybe the “too big to fail” agricultural units need a rethinking too.
Conventional thinking for the last half century has been that bigger is better…Always. That thinking is becoming as outdated as the idea yhat you can make a profit raising more pork than the economy can consume, even as the actual costs of production are hidden or passed down to future generations…Who really pays for those subsidies anyway?
Anyway, go read some of what Mr. Logsdon has tho say…
The Race Goes Not Always To The Fastest
“No One With Land Should Be Without A Job”
Kill People But Not Dogs and Cats
An Offbeat Way To Make Good Hay
We’ve Been Going “Back To The Land” For A Long Time
Our House Frog Liked Beethoven
My Clunker Pickup Is Too Old To Junk
Good Farming Was More Advanced A Hundred Years Ago
The Two Sides of an Organic vs. Chemical Story
A Startling Lesson in Pasture Farming
Sometimes Its Hard To Tell the Vegetables From the Flowers