Is Your Doctor Going the Way of the Family Farm?

Image from Stockvault

I used to be a farmer. I should say, I used to be a farmer the way farmers used to be. I raised pigs, chickens, goats, and cows. I tried to raise ducks and geese, but they flew away. I had a quarter acre garden and grew acres of buckwheat and corn. I helped the neighbors put up their hay, cut their wood, and tap their trees for a share. I butchered my own livestock, made cheese, and picked and pressed my own apples. I built barns, walked fence, pruned grapes, and fixed my own truck and tractor when they were broken down, which was often. That’s how I used to be a farmer.

That’s not the way people farm anymore; not usually. Farming is now a big business. They have big tractors, big fields, big silos, and big, big, big debt. Farmers are often employees, answerable to people who are not farmers and have never seen the farm; who sit in glass towers in the big city and move money around. I had a small farm. The most livestock I had at any time was thirty-five pigs, a couple dozen chickens, ten goats, and a couple cows. Farms these days will have thousands of swine, tens of thousands of hens, hundreds of milk cows, and seldom any goats; but they will have only one kind of livestock on each farm. Everything is specialized and ruthlessly efficient.

I started farming when farming had already begun to change. I should have realized it then, when…