Bestest Friend and I are in the middle of a blog project. Each day of
the month we will post a picture on a pre-determined theme and write a
little something about it. The theme for the twenty-fifth day of each month is "Courage."
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Today was a celebration of the American farmer. We started the
day at the Farmers’ Market where I lusted after honey and eggs from organically
fed, free range chickens.
Along the way , I learned some things. 97% of farms in the United States are family farms – not the factory farms I always think of when I think about the meat, poultry, and produce in our grocery stores. But farm and ranch families make up less than 2% of the total population of the country. Since the early 1980s, most farmers and ranchers have taken a “pay cut” of about 50%. They feed this country, but because of production and labor costs, their take home pay shrinks every year.
I don’t want to get all preachy here. I know that there are
bad farms out there where horrific abuse is done to animals in the name of
meeting quotas and keeping food costs low. But most of the farmers I know are
hardworking men and women who keep busy every second of every day while they deal with constant worries about droughts, floods, and blights. They take on crappy
second jobs in the “off season” working in restaurant kitchens, doing the books
for co-ops and other small businesses, and pushing mops. They take out loans to buy a few acres of land
here and there and hope that at the end of the growing season they have enough
left over to feed and shelter themselves over the winter and have enough to
replant in the spring.
And they feed us. If
you get a chance to thank a farmer sometimes, you really should. They work hard
for all of us.
****************************To see what Bestest Friend wrote about the theme of the day, check out her blog, Too Legit to Quit.
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