Archive for the 'future' Category

And Not a Single Regret: On Doing the Crazy Thing

admin March 15th, 2011

The earth keeps some vibration going
There in your heart, and that is you.
And if the people find you can fiddle,
Why, fiddle you must, for all your life.
What do you see, a harvest of clover?
Or a meadow to walk through to the river?
The wind’s in the corn; you rub your hands
For beeves hereafter ready for market;
Or else you hear the rustle of skirts
Like the girls when dancing at Little Grove.
To Cooney Potter a pillar of dust
Or whirling leaves meant ruinous drouth;
They looked to me like Red-Head Sammy
Stepping it off, to “Toor-a-Loor.”
How could I till my forty acres
Not to speak of getting more,
With a medley of horns, bassoons and piccolos
Stirred in my brain by crows and robins
And the creak of a wind-mill—only these?
And I never started to plow in my life
That some one did not stop in the road
And take me away to a dance or picnic.
I ended up with forty acres;
I ended up with a broken fiddle—
And a broken laugh, and a thousand memories,
And not a single regret. – Edgar Lee Masters “Fiddler Jones”

A lot of people have warned me that our decision to adopt through foster care is completely insane.  This I knew.   Some people we love are worried about it, and they are probably right to be worried – they certainly aren’t making up the risks.

When I was thinking about how to answer someone who asked me “aren’t you worried that this could be terrible?”  I found myself infected with her worries – after all, her questions are perfectly reasonable – and I don’t deny it could be terrible.  I can think of a long list of ways it might be – the kids might be so damaged that the placement doesn’t work and we’ll have done more damage to them. Our own kids might hate us for needing to shift attention to other children.   Someone might get hurt or damaged.  Our lives might become chaos that prevent us from doing everything else we want.  I’m actually good at imagining negative scenarios ;-) , as you can probably imagine.

I don’t have an answer to those risks.  I don’t deny their possibility.  At the same time, my entire adult life can pretty much be described as a history of doing the crazy thing, the risky thing, the thing that made no sense to other people.  Our history is one of taking the crazy leap without enough preparation or knowledge – and somehow having it turn out all right.  Or better than that.

It was perfectly reasonable for loving people to doubt whether two grad students living in an apartment in one of the most densely populated cities in the US could make a go of a farm.  They were right – it was a crazy thing to do.  What the hell did we know about farming?

It was reasonable for people to ask whether we were too young and financially insecure to have children.  Was it crazy for us to get pregnant?  Probably – we were financially insecure, newly married, uncertain.

It was reasonable for people to ask whether we were insane, married only a year with a colicky baby, to take on the care of my husband’s aging and fragile grandparents and buy a place with them.  It might have been the unmaking of our marriage, too much stress and strain.

It was reasonable to ask, upon the diagnosis of my oldest child, whether we were nuts to have risked having more children, given that autism runs in families.  They were right – another severely autistic child might have been more than we could bear.

It was reasonable for everyone to wonder whether it was crazy for us to start a CSA – after all we’d only had one full gardening year in our new place, had never run a farm business, and we now had a disabled toddler and a baby, as well as building on for Eric’s grandparents.  It was hard and it might have been too much.

It was perfectly reasonable to wonder whether I was crazy take on not one, but two book contracts when I’d never written a book – and had four kids under 6, one still a baby.  What the heck did I know about writing books?

It was perfectly reasonable to ask whether I had lost my mind when I took on a third book contract before the second one was finished and before any of them had been published (and it would have been even more reasonable to ask that of my publisher ;-) ).

What did we know about dairy goats?  About slaughtering our own chickens?  What did we know about silvopasturing or cisterns?  What do we know now about parenting traumatized children?

Most of our friends and family didn’t ask these questions.   The miracle is that they were supportive, enthusiastic and generously kept their doubts to themselves, or offered us good critical thought and advice.   Still,  I don’t doubt they were secretly looking up the requirements for commitment hearings.

Inexplicably, however, miraculously, however,  what happened was that all of these things were more successful, led to greater happiness and to better outcomes than we would have expected.  The CSA was a howling success.  Eric’s grandparents were the joy of our lives and we wouldn’t have traded that time with them for anything.  The farm has been the basis of everything we’ve done since.  The books weren’t a howling success, but a moderate flow of goodness that still serve us.  The children were gifts and delights – autism turned out have more pleasures and gifts than anyone would have expected.   Every time something seemed too hard (and on some days it certainly did) the hard was achievable, or manageable.  We struggled.  We made mistakes.  We risked a lot – and in the end, like Edgar Lee Master, had not a single regret.

At the same time, the few occasions when I curtailed my natural insanity and listened to either my doubts or someone else’s didn’t work out that well – I finally left the grad school I’d seen as the “safe” choice for me, the logical outcome, the low-risk career choice.  It was safe – but it wasn’t right.  The one time someone told my husband and I we couldn’t do something, that it would ruin our lives, and we didn’t is one of my greatest personal regrets.

Does all that history mean that I might not end up regretting all this?  Not at all – I make no mystical claims about the influence of the past on the present.  This could be the thing that puts us over the edge – and I do have fears and anxieties about adding more kids to my family.  But I found it helpful to put together my own history and look at my past and realize that when I’ve taken wild leaps of faith, I’ve never regretted them.  I’ve only regretted *not* doing the crazy thing I really wanted to do, not taking the big risk.  It is not all the truth that ever was, but it is comforting to know that insanity has its virtues.

Perhaps there are other people out there who would like to do the crazy thing.  I cannot promise you it will work. I can promise you that sometimes you will wonder what the heck you were thinking.  I do say that if fortune smiles on you, if hard work and good luck can make it happen, the crazy thing has much to be said for it.   I’m shooting for what Fiddler Jones had – he was a bad farmer that one, because farming wasn’t his crazy dream like it is mine.  But the outcomes, oh, that’s worth having.  A broken laugh.  A thousand memories.  A body and a fiddle or a scythe and shovel worn to broken.  And, by and large,  not a single regret – at least for the things you took heart and plunged into because they felt right.  But you only get to that by risking failure, by risking regret, loss, disaster.  Its an irony, but a price well worth playing for.

Sharon

Dmitry Orlov on Post-Peak Career Choices

admin January 6th, 2011

Orlov outdoes himself again meditating on the best possible high-return career once “collapse predictor” stops being a job, and after dismissing “scrimshaw dentistry” chooses to combine two exercises with similar predictive capacities to become an “astro-economist.”  I wonder if Eric could do that too?

If, as I argue above, all of these alignments, through the force of ignorance, act together in concert irrespectively of distance and time, then the signal conveyed by astrological data is complete randomness: pure, high-grade noise. It is not just any old ignorance but the purest, highest-grade, most reliably fact-free signal imaginable.

And this brings us to astrology’s sister discipline, which likewise benefits from purity of ignorance: economics. It is well-known that stocks picked by expert money managers do slightly worse, overall, than stocks picked by monkeys throwing darts. (Good monkey! Here’s your bailout!) The reason for this should be obvious: monkeys produce better results because of the superior quality of ignorance that drives their decision-making process. Similarly, economists who struggle with econometric models and statistical data collected by government and industry are sometimes accidentally correct in their predictions, raising expectations and creating false hopes. But if instead economists plugged in the pure nonsense of astrological data averaged across an infinite universe, they could easily achieve a six-sigma rating, being repeatably wrong 99.99966% of the time. And wouldn’t that be exciting!? Oh but wait a minute…

Come to think of it, perhaps astroeconomics is not a promising career choice either. Back to square one, then…
 
I’ve long assumed it is only a matter of time before being an apocalyptic prophetess of doom is no longer a growth industry, but I’m not as creative as Orlov – I figure like every other disaster in history, people will be desperate for escapism, so I can just take my old skill set and tranfer it into bodice rippers.  As far as I can tell, it just involves using the words “heaving bosoms” a lot, and if there are enough heaving bosoms and assertive men in tight pants, no one cares what the larger content is.   Thus, I think it perfectly viable to imagine a career writing something like the following:  ”He threw her down on the bed and watchd her heaving bosoms rise and fall like interest rates, and told her passionately, ‘Green beans must be water bath canned at 10lbs pressure!’  ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ she cried, throbbing with passion, ‘high acid foods are the only sort that can be safely canned in a water bath without risk of botulism.’   Moaning with pleasure, the two fell upon one another, measuring their love in the heaving of her bosoms and multiplying jars of preserves on the shelves.”
How could it not sell?  What’s your plan?
Sharon

Lessons from the Edge

Sharon November 3rd, 2009

One of the best things about being invited to present at conferences and events is that I get to meet the other speakers, and usually talk with them in at least a semi-relaxed setting.  Generally speaking, at a good conference I can count on meeting at least a few people who I’ve never heard of, but should have, at least one person who I regard with a measure of awe (sometimes even more), and a whole lot of just plain interesting people doing important work.    I usually come away with at least one new friend (and this should not be regarded as trivial – friends are worth a lot) and often with new contacts for ideas I can pass along, and new perspectives on the movement as a whole.

Thus over the years I’ve gotten to hang out and drink a beer or eat dinner with a whole lot of amazing people – from the founder of freecycle to nobel peace prize nominees, from radical activists to conservative ministers (and at least one who was both), from IPCC scientists and petroleum geologists with maps of Saudi Arabia in their head to poet and novelists trying to make some sense of the stories we’re telling.  I’ve met people who have chained themselves to trees and people who do their activism with a pen or in a classroom or on the streets.  I have come to believe that Paul Hawkens is right when he writes in _Blessed Unrest_ that the world preserving movement is the biggest single movement in the world – and every time I meet another branch of it, my view of it gets enlarged – and my sense of the heroism involved in telling out story is increased.

I’ve noticed though, that there’s a pattern to these gatherings.  In most cases, they are designed to move people, to get people to change, to bring out their votes,  their activist energies, the donations, the commitment.  The talks always end with what is needed from the audience, with the dance of hope and fear, with how tell enough of the truth and also move people.

And then, often, the speakers retreat with their beer or to their dinner, and something else happens.  We start talking about our sense that we have to do this work – and our increasing sense that we are failing, that we cannot possibly succeed – whatever our definitions of success.  It is almost invariable – the conversation begins with black humor and jokes about possible solutions and their likelihood of failure, and often rapidly moves towards, well, despair, and how hard it is to convey a way forward that doesn’t sound like a lie. 

I don’t know if this is true for everyone, but telling the truth as you know it, speaking to an audience and conveying your own passion and sense of our situation, while also making sure that you balance their panic, make everyone laugh just enough and give them a sense that they can still act is an awful lot of work.  It isn’t just for the sake of the environment that I don’t do it every week.  For me, as I step onto the stage, there’s a rush of energy, and I’m in the performance, the dance, modulating my voice here, and raising it here, trying to move people here to laughter and here to sympathy.  In a purely physical sense it involves nothing more than standing on a stage or at a podium for an hour or so.  In both a physical and psychic sense it is more exhausting than loading hay all day in July, or than chopping wood.  When the adrenaline pulls back and the crash comes, the only thing I can ever remember being so completely enervating is childbirth.  I enjoy doing it – when it is going well, and my audience is responding, grasping it, going with me, it is stimulating, energizing.  But when it stops, so do I.

Many of the people I meet do this dance 50 or 100 or 150 times a year – they are constantly on trains, planes and automobiles, enduring the exhaustion of travel, the rush of doing something important presumably compensating for the physical price.  I admire what they do, even though I can’t emulate it.  Most of them are driven by the fact that their work matters – and it does. But they also know that most people will say “great talk, really interesting” and go home and live their lives much as they did before.  And they will get on a plane and play Cassandra again tomorrow in a different city, or at home in another article, or another paper – and most people won’t listen.

So after the conference, we talk about what it is like – what it is like to imagine things most people don’t want to imagine, or look at numbers that no one else wants to hear.  What it is like to try and get funding for research that shows this, or to make governments pay attention.  What it is like to be dismissed or reviled.  What it is like to do all you can bear, and know that it almost certainly isn’t enough to preserve what you want most to preserve. 

But what I never hear – and I think I would – is that it isn’t worth doing the work – spreading the word, working for change, trying to make things better.  You’d think that you would hear that – that people who express profound doubt in the efficacy of their measures – or at least whether they will be enough – would consider stopping.  But they never do.

We don’t usually see each other long enough to get really intimate – the personal bits and fears you get peripherally.  You notice the questions people don’t answer, the hesitations when the talk about their beloved grandchildren and their future, or their kids, the way we all compartmentalize what we’re willing to think about, the way the black humor gets blacker as the night goes on. 

Not every event is like this – some are lighter at heart, some never do give you a chance to sit around together, sometimes you come in and leave and barely connect.   But often enough you sit around and come down to the brass tacks questions – what do you think will happen?  And generally speaking, what comes out is harder than what came out in the presentations and in public.  There are arguments and jokes, but when it comes down to it, at the end, I find a remarkable unity of opinion from radical activists and crunchy cons, from Jews, Moslems, Christians, Buddhists and Athiests, from Brits and Aussies and Indians and Russian, from left and right, from men and women – we are headed into dark and unknown territory.  And our job is to say so – but gently, and more softly than we will to each other.  And even the athiests, asked what they feel we can do, sometimes refer, jokingly, of course, to prayer.

It would be easy to say that it is important to be wholly honest – but I don’t think that what’s needed is a greater degree of bleakness in our talks – the truth is that breaking news to people who may be first encountering it is different than the kind of conversations people who live in the dark have with each other. 

But I think it is an important thing to know also how close to the edge we are in the estimation of the people who know the truth best - other writers have pointed out that scientific reticence has not always served us well in the climate change discussion, since many people take the modulated language of science to mean that the issue simply isn’t that serious.  So too, I think the language of professional optimism (and by professional optimism I do not mean the mindless selling of optimism documented in Barbara Ehrenreich’s new book _Bright Sided_ but the carefully modulated articulation of things that are frightening to people with a clear set of guidelines for action) sometimes serves us ill, leaving people believing there are lower stakes and more time, that this is just another talk.

Even if I could remember it all, I would not repeat on this blog the personal discussions had between friendly colleagues at these talks – that would be unjust in the extreme and a radical invasion of privacy.

 But sometimes when I deal with people who don’t think climate change is real, or that serious, or who don’t think that peak oil will be a big deal, I forget that I have something they don’t have – dozens of backroom conversations with people who care desperately about the mending of the world, who care so much that they are willing to put their family lives, their time and energy and even physical wellbeing on the line to spread the word - even though they know they are likely to fail to protect what they care most about.    Not “we’re doomed” but “we’re on a precipice, and we’re not sure which way we’re going to begin to slide.”

And what also strikes me is this – the sheer courage it takes to do this.  As I say, I’m a piker – I go home to my kids and my goats and breath deep and do laundry and keep my computer between me and other people.  It would be easy to take from their sense of loss the idea that we should stop trying, that it is all hopeless.  But that’s not what one gets – at the end of the night the sense is this – that though the odds are increasingly small and the abyss below us increasingly vast, what matters most is that we live our lives as though we can succeed, because every bit of harm we prevent and every blow softened matters, and in the end, how you lived matters as much as the winning.  Most of what we do may not work, in the sense of preserving it all, but ought to preserve some -and some is a great deal when measured in human lives and happiness. 

I can’t name all the people I’ve spoken with on these panels – or the not famous ones like them I meet who work just as hard and as bravely in their communities -  but from them I have learned a great deal about courage and strength, and how to live in difficult times, about the value of work and life well lived, about managing fear and about what to hope for.   What I hope for most is this – a planet full of people angry and frightened, telling dark jokes and laughing at them, worried and hopeful all together – people who get up every morning and do their share of this work, even if it seems it might not be enough, even if it hurts, even if they are tempted to let go and give in to despair, even if it means walking on the edge of dark places and along the abyss.  I hope for people who do what is right, no matter what the outcome.  And I feel I can hope for this among millions and billions, because I have seen such men and women, and I know that they are ordinary and they are real, and if they can do what they do, so can I.  And so can you.

Sharon

Escape

Sharon October 15th, 2009

I want to go shopping.  I don’t mean I need to go shopping – I don’t, particularly.  I just want to go out to a store somewhere and spend money and buy something fun or pretty – a trashy novel, cute clothes for the boys, yarn or maybe a nice tablecloth for my table.  I need to spend money, I really do.

I want to watch television. I don’t mean I want to watch some particularly good or edifying television show that I’ve been longing to see. I mean I want to get a tin of pringles and zone out on the couch while watching something completely mindless, maybe in the infinitely repetetive “Law and Order” family, if they still exist.

A big pile of celebrity gossip magazines would do, maybe.  Particularly if it came with a gin and tonic and a big pile of Reese’s peanut butter cups, and maybe a couple of lottery tickets to allow me to dream of having all the money I want.

And yes, I’m quite  serious.  A reader of mine asked me how it was that I deal with all the bad news and the fact that my kids are going to be living in a much tougher world than the present one.  The answer is - variably – some days gracefully, some not, sometimes lightly, sometimes heavily.

Right at the moment, I deal with it about the same way most people do – I want a high from sugar or spending or numbness from a drink or television, and a good healthy dose of denial thrown in.  I’m a normal person, and if I were in a yarn shop right now, there’d be no stopping me.  All cookies flee from me right now. 

I’m in a lousy mood – I’m tired from a late, sleepless night.  I’m depressed by the news on the economic and climate front.  I have a cold and my back is bothering me.  Various other minor affronts are bugging me, and Eric is pissed about a mistake made by our bank and stomping around the house. 

Now the good thing about this circumstance is that my ability to indulge my desires is pretty low.  We don’t have tv reception, and YouTube plays so slowly that I might as well not bother.  I don’t have any gin or tonic, no reeses, no lottery tickets.  I can’t bring myself to go to the yarn shop, given the size of my stash,  and I don’t have time to go anywhere further out.  I suppose I could drive out to the local convenience store and read the Enquirer, but I’m just not that desperate, or quite that pathetic..yet.

I also know it will pass.  Truly, I do.  I know myself well enough to know that in the end, I won’t enjoy the feeling if I eat too much junk food (this does not mean I don’t ever do this), or the time spent reading trashy magazines.  I might enjoy the shopping, but, well, the boys have to go to Hebrew school and the car with them, and I have to stay home and milk and cook dinner.

I hate this feeling, and I want to escape into something, anything else – a fantasy, denial, anything to make the lousy feeling of fear for my kids and sorrow for my world go away.  I know that this too shall pass, and it couldn’t possibly happen soon enough for me.  And it will – I don’t usually stay down long. 

I don’t want my boys to grow up in a warmer, more depleted, more damaged, poorer world.  I want better for them than that.  And not just my boys, but my nieces and all the kids I love.  And I can do a little bit about it - just not enough.  Not enough.  It sucks.  It hurts.

Mostly, I choose to focus on the work to be done, and not on the likelihood of failure.  Mostly I choose to focus on the day to day.  Mostly I choose to hope things won’t be as bad as I suspect, or that if they are, I can insulate my kids, protect them, that somehow my children and I and my husband and the rest of the people I love will get to be insulated.  I don’t know that I believe it, but since I can’t know what’s going to happen, I try and trust that there’s a future worth having out there. 

And I know that people do have decent lives who are much poorer and live in tougher circumstances than I do – my great-grandparents and those that preceeded them had lives worth living, joys and comforts in with the tough times.  I try and distinguish between the objects that we associate with a life worth living, and the life itself – to remind myself that the objects themselves are only objects.

But I still miss them in anticipation of their loss.  I still have my down moments.  And I’ve tried chocolate, and exercise, I’ve tried beer and television, I’ve tried fantasies of escape and retail therapy, I’ve tried lying to myself and reading escapist novels. They all work, for a little while.  I’m not really opposed to any of them – they all have their place.  The problem is that they all have a small place – otherwise they become pathological, an endless repetition of something that fails to bring you out of yourself, and just makes it worse.

The only ones that work for me in perpetuity are these – prayer, the kind of disciplined, conscious prayer, that, if there is a G-d, one can imagine penetrating the divine consciousness simply from the sheer annoying repetition of it ;-) , and good work, ideally in service to an idea or to other people.  Even better is both at once.  So I’ll find myself some good work – ways to care for my kids or for other people, things that need doing on the farm, and silence the noise in my head with the music of prayer.  And probably sneak some chocolate in there somewhere, too.  As we’ve noted before, I’m not perfect.

I’m writing this, by the way, not to get your sympathy, or just to whine, but because I actually thought it might make a few people feel better to know that I’m not immune to whining either ;-) .

How do I deal? Pretty much the way you do – I whine and I cry, I get grumpy and bitter, I deny and I fret, I pick fights and I slack off.  And then, when I’m done, when I’ve allowed myself a little time to feel all these rotten things, I try and put them back in the box for a while – and no, it isn’t easy. But I do try, and mostly succeed, because the darkness of the future isn’t all there is, and it would be as false to wallow in my suffering, to indulge my anxieties for longer than strictly necessary,  as it is to escape endlessly into celebrity magazines and chocolate. In some ways I’ve got it easy – I don’t tend toward depression, I don’t have to fight my biology the way some people do.   I know that, and I’m grateful.  Just not that grateful right now ;-) .

Sharon

In the Long Term, Small and Local Wins. In the Short Term, Not So Much

Sharon September 1st, 2009

Several people have noted that in _A Nation of Farmers_ we spend a lot of time talking about very small-scale agriculture – home gardening, farms spread across multiple yards, very small home farms – and less time talking about farming for a living – and this isn’t an accident.  One of my standing bits of advice to people who want to become farmers is this – do it.  But make sure someone in your household keeps a job with a paycheck.

This, of course, limits the scale on which anyone can do this work – if you have to farm around your night-shift at Walmart or substitute teaching, or driving deliveries, this cuts into your time for the farm.  If you have to watch the kids and farm at the same time, because your partner is off earning the health insurance and mortgage, you are going to spend a lot more time taking people potty and getting snacks than you would if you could farm full time without kids.  So why aren’t I advising more people to farm full time?

 Don’t get me wrong – I want to see more full-time farmers.  But while in the longer term, I think that small scale agriculture is going to win, in the shorter term, Walmart and the economy are going to devour a lot of small farmers.  The trick, as you are planning your course of adaptation, is to learn the skills now, maybe obtain the land if you can get it, but hold in reserve for the time when you can make a living doing the work.  Don’t get me wrong – if you are already trying it, or called to do the work, I encourage you.  But have a backup plan – we need you, but you need to make a living.  With less than 1% of the US population involved in agriculture, the average age of farmers at 59 years old and the average age of small farmers at 65, we need, waiting in the wings, a relief force.  But we can’t pay them yet.

Had oil prices continued to rise without affecting the economy, we might have seen the gradual evolution of a local farm economy as local providers were increasingly able to compete with industrial ones.  But that, as we all know, didn’t happen.  Instead, volatlity is the name of the game – and that means that most Americans will never know, from year to year, how much basic needs like their utility bills and groceries are going to cost them.  And when price rise and jobs are lost – people stop paying premiums for their food.  That $7 gallon raw milk stops being a necessity for your family’s health and starts being a luxury, easily replaced by $4 gallon milk at WalMart.  The CSA share cost seems more and more onerous.  The grassfed meat may taste better, and be better for you, but, well….

We’re already seeing this – organic and raw milk dairy farmers are struggling just like everyone else – organic milk sales are expected to drop by 15%.  Organic food sales slowed to a 6% year over year growth last year, up from 26% the year before – still growing as of January, but expected to decline overall this year.   The truth is that people are committed to organic and local – but only so far.  And small and niche producers just plain can’t compete with larger farms with contracts.  They depend on affluent consumers who care about good food to keep going – they need people to be able to afford their food,  and to care enough to buy it.

Meanwhile Target and WalMart and the rest of the industrial producers are pulling out all the stops to convince us that their organics, their faux-local food is just about the same at half the price.  Never mind that for this food we pay twice – in agricultural and corporate subsidies, in health costs, in welfare and food stamp payments for the farmers and the WalMart employees.  The vast majority of people will, for a while, probably go back to WalMart and the rest’s milk and vegetables because they are trying desperately to get by. 

In the very long term – local food is likely to win this battle – the larger scale industrial middlemen can’t succeed in an era of high energy prices in proportion to buying power.  Their margins are tight, and higher energy costs and other factors are likely to drive them out of business – eventually.  But we’re not there yet, and their death throes are likely to be long and painful, as they devour market shares of small farmers. 

In the longer term, there will be a shift to paying more of our limited incomes for food – we’ve never paid less.  Toby Hemenway and I once discussed this, and despite some differences, we both agree we’re headed rapidly (over the next decade or so) to a life where people in the US and other rich nations spend 30% of their income on food.  But that’s a long and painful shift – one in which other costs decline proportionally, and in which a lot of people are ground between the stones of declining budgets, not enough food to go to the end of the month, and their desire for decent health and good food.

This is why I don’t spend more time exhorting people to take up full time agriculture for a living – I wish I could, since it is so desperately needed.  But my own view of the future is that a lot of farmers will be driven from their land and run out of business – we are down to less than 1% of our population farming – but my own estimate is that the crash in farmers is going to come down further still – and that believe it or no, we’ve got a ways to go.  I suspect we’ll lose as many as a half million farmers in the next few years – and I say this with great sorrow and fear.  The combination of one more economic straw on the camel’s back, aging and foolish agricultural policies are going to bring us to the brink of disaster – without the people we need most to pull us back.

So please, grow that garden, start that little farm as a side income, begin your retirement agricultural venture, and please, if you can, buy local, buy from the good guys, not the huge industrial organic farmer, but the little guy who still raising grains in your neighborhood.  Train your kids to grow food.  Learn as much as you can.  Talk to the old farmers, get to know them, help them out if you can.  Because in the end, we will need you all.  The time is coming, but it isn’t yet, and there’s hard stuff in the middle.

Sharon

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