2021 Holiday Reflections. The Agricultural Edition.
This will be an unusual post for here, as I'm doing something unusual in general.
Anyhow, this blog, which used to simply be a catalog of agrarian themed entries on Lex Anteinternet, has grown into its own a bit and now has a little original content, although not much. Anyhow, we're going to run this post independently, even though another Resolutions thread will already be up on Lex Anteinternet.
Well, two, actually.
Anyhow, this past two years, if anything, have been ones that have shown how Chesteron, Leopold and Abbey were quite right, even though they remain voices crying in the wilderness. The voices we've heard instead, most often that of an ex President and his hard core acolytes, haven't been helpful. Maybe it's time to drag out the Vanderbilt Agrarians, Chesteron, and Wendell Berry and see what they have to say.
Indeed, that will be our first resolution for agrarians, farmers, would be farmers, and just folks in general.
1. Check out Berry, Abbey, Leopold, or Chesterton
The current pack of yappers is offering little in the way of deep content, and a lot of what they have to say about anything is outright destructive. Every now and then something of value is stated, but it's hard to hear it in the general mess of things.
Let's be honest. Almost all of the current "we need to go in this direction" is at least a little bit misinformed. If you aren't grounded in what's real, any wind can blow you over.
Doing a little reading of some grounded folks would be a really good start in things.
And things be Wendell Berry, Edward Abbey, Aldo Leopold and G. K. Chesterton would be really good starts.
2. Cut out the citations to the "I’m a billionth generation farmer/rancher" in the wrong context, and don't support it when its made in the wrong context.
This is one of a couple of posts here that are really directed at a very narrow few, rather than the majority of ranchers.
Actually, it's not directed at ranchers at all, but rather at the rancher ex pats. Those who hail originally from the soil, but now no longer are working it. For those who descend from prior generations of ranchers and are still in it, the more power to you.
I've posted on this already, but it really doesn't matter if your great-great-grandfather broke the sod in Niobrara County in 1890 if that doesn't mean you are in agriculture today. And it doesn't make you royalty. And. . .
3. Knock off the "agriculture is a hard way to make a living" line
Now, I want to be careful here.
Agriculture is a hard way to make a living, because of economics.
What it isn't, however, is a hard way to live.
This has been on my mind, to the political year, anyhow, but it recally came into the forefront of my mind again recently listening to an episode of Wyoming: My 307. It was the one on ranching, which you can find here:
RANCHING IN WYOMING
In it, it had a long session pondering "why do we do this?" which arrived at a very interesting conclusion, that being "it's a vocation".
I think there's something to that.
But, we ought to be careful thinking that somehow because we're out in nature, and nature is a bit rough, that we're suffering. Far from it.
I've been a lawyer, a solider, worked on drilling rigs, a writer and a stockman in what now amounts to a whopping 45 years of working (I started working for pay at age 13). So I think I know a little about work and what hard work is, and isn't. And what work is like for most people.
Somewhere at some point in time somebody fed a line of crap to agriculturalist that their work is uniquely difficult in an existential sense. Perhaps in a physical sense, that's somewhat true, but there's plenty of other dangerous physical work that puts you out in all kids of weather.
And most modern work is, quite frankly, utterly meaningless. Most Americans don't like their jobs, as no rational scientient mammal would like most of the jobs that now exist.
What agriculture isn't is something that makes you work more hours per day than other people, particularly professional people, in horrible conditions. Not even close, quite often. And the working conditions and nature of agriculture are far better than that for most other people. If you think that your job is somehow worse than a computer engineer in a cubicle, you are fooling yourselves massively.
Indeed, this sort of whining, and that's what it is, really needs to stop. It's self deceptive.
Indeed, its harmful it two ways. It's self-delusion and makes us think that, if we believe it, we are really working a lot harder than other people, when in fact that's just not true, and it also causes us to force children off the land for a better "town job" that won't be better.
Almost everything about life in the towns and cities is worse. We ought to realize that.
If you doubt it, leave the ranch or farm and go into town. You can't come back, and you'll regret you left. Pleantly of people will line up to take your place.
4. Having land doesn't make you "landed" nobility.
This, I'll note, is also directed at a narrow few, not the broader majority, of those in agriculture.
Something really disturbing has developed in the US over the past century in which those lucky enough to be born in to agriculture sometimes sort of regard themselves as petty nobility in a way. It expresses itself in all sorts of odd ways.
Now, I don't want to suggest this is common.
Most farmers and ranchers aren't this way at all. But you'll see examples of it where people in agriculture will express a degree of contempt, on rare occasion, about average people. It feeds into the thing above, in a reverse fashion, in that there's a sort of "we work hard for a living" without realizing that a lot of other people do as well.
I'll be frank that the last two items are sort of in reaction to a current political campaign. I'm not going to get into the pluses and minuses of the merits of any candidate, but something about the videos of the campaign really strike me the wrong way for their strong rancher pull. I'm tired of people appearing on political ads in cowboy hats arguing that you need to vote for somebody because they came from an agricultural family that knows what real values are. It's insulting.
5. Support getting people into agriculture.
The worst enemy of ranchers in the west are ranchers and by extension this is true about agriculture in general. Agriculturalist decry those who regard their units as big public parks, which they should, but at the same time they don't do anything to try to help average people get into agriculture.
The reason for that, in no small part, is that it would mean a big personal sacrifice. We could support legislation that made agriculture and agricultural land tied to actually working the land as your real and sole occupation, but we don't as that would massively depress the value of the land. It's that value that operates against us in the first place, as it means the Warren Buffets of the world become the only one who can afford the land.
We could pull this up by the root and cut it off at the head. If we really think we're special and the real examples of the common men, we should.
6. Think local and organize.
My entire life I've heard complaints about the midstream in agriculture. The price of beef goes up, and cattle on the hoof do too, and the very few packers there are reap the rewards. It's hard on consumers, and it's hard on ranchers.
I'm sure the same is true in other fields of agriculture as well.
Well, enough of that. We know it's unfair, so what we have to do is to replace the middle men with processors of our own. We could do it.
Indeed, some agricultural enterprises, like sugar, do in fact do just this. But it should expand. Co-ops for this purpose, organized to process for the member's benefits and not their own, would be ideal, and could more than compete with the big packers.
7. Think Agrarian
Modern agriculture suffers heavily from the worship of materialism that intruded heavily into the 20th Century and, along with it, specialization of everything. We in agriculture often hear of "monocultures", but we almost all do just that.
Our predecessors did this much less. Up into the mid 20th Century it was really rare to find ranches that didn't also farm a little bit, for the table, and every rancher hunted (often illegally) as well. Farmers were the same way. A wheat farmer in Kansas was a wheat farmer, but he was probably also taking some game with a shotgun and probably kept a few pigs for the table,, and so on.
We have the resources and could lead the say on that, and indeed, some do. But the real banner carriers on this sort of thing shouldn't be people in the "homestead" movement, who are mostly chopping up big parcels of land to the ultimate detriment of everyone.
8. Know who is your friend and who isn't.
This doesn't apply to everyone either, but I'm sometimes surprised how some in agriculture can be hostile, intentionally and unintentionally, to those who aren't, but who want to enjoy something on the land.
"No Trespassing" signs and "No Hunting" signs are signs to locals that they aren't welcome. Signs stating "This Land Leased To Outfitter" are the same thing, except they show that the lack of welcome has been monetized.
Bills to privatize wildlife are the ultimate acts of hostility. Falling in second are bills to transfer public lands into private hands.
We should realize that there are people who are genuinely hostile to agriculture. The local newspaper publishes op ed articles by members of an organization that definitely is. There are a lot more people who aren't in agriculture than who are, and we tend to forget that, as for most of us most of our friends are in it.
Given this, at some point we really risk public hostility. Shut access off to the land, and next thing you know you'll be seeing "tax ag land like other land" and things of that nature, and you are out of business and out of cash.
It doesn't really take that much to be friendly to people.
Likewise, for some reason those in agriculture often support entities and operations that are land destroying. I've never understood that, indeed as we'll often complain about the same entities if they're on our places.
9. Think really local.
None of us are here forever. Try to keep that place, and keep the familiy in it.
People do a lot of things for a lot of reasons, but every time I encounter somebody, and I do fairly frequently, who ends up telling me "I grew up on a ranch", and I find them working as a lawyer, doctor, accountant, or whatever, I think it's a tragedy. That shouldn't have had to happen.
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