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Michael Olson’s Food Chain Radio Show #1287
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GUEST: Corwin Heatwole / Founder & CEO Farmer Focus
Thomas Jefferson’s idea was to build a nation on a foundation of small, independent farms. The reason Jefferson held up the small farm was not its economy, but rather, its morality.
Michael Olson Food Chain Radio – Freeing Farmers From Servitude
Looking across the pond to Europe, Jefferson could plainly see that manufacturing, with its attendant commerce, disrupted the relationships of people, engendered greed and corruption, and forced many, if not most, into dependence and servitude. In other words, Jefferson saw Europe being built on a foundation of shifting sand!
On this side of pond, with an entire continent of land waiting to be tilled, Jefferson believed that a strong agrarian society could be built on the moral foundation of small, independent farms. Listen to how Jefferson described his farmers: “Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, endowed by the Creator with “substantial and genuine virtue…. It is they who keep alive the “sacred fire”.
And again, “”Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators is a phenomenon of which no age or nation has furnished an example.”
In contemporary terms, Jefferson believed a new America could be built on an internet of small farms operated by people who are self-sufficient, independent, and God-fearing.
Jefferson’s agrarian internet worked like a charm, until Americans moved off the farm into town in order to work in factories and offices. Those who remained on the land then had to farm with money instead of with people. With that migration, farming became manufacturing.
The manufacturing model of farming has many economic advantages, but few of those advantages go to the farmer. Farmers now grow commodities they sell for pennies per pound to manufacturers who sell them for dollars per pound. To participate in this manufacturing model of agriculture, many farmers signed contracts that, in effect, made them serfs on their own land.
Looking at this model of agriculture, it is easy to see what Jefferson saw when he looked across the pond to the economies of industrial Europe: disrupted relationships between farmers and consumers; greed, corruption and consolidation; and dependence and servitude.
Seeing in all of this a foundation of shifting sand, we pause to ask:
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Michael Olson’s Three Laws of the Food Chain
#1 Agriculture is the foundation upon which we build all our sand castles.
#2 The farther we go from the source of our food, the less control we have over what’s in that food.
#3 Cheap food isn’t! READ MORE
