With technological advancements, farming is becoming more efficient – delivering more food to more places. But family farmers are shrinking in California. Victor Davis Hanson, historian and farmer explains what is lost in the transition to corporate farming and its impact on our farming communities.
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LOVE YOUR STORIES OF YOUR GRAND PARENTS.
WHEN I WAS ABOUT 8 RIDING WITH MY GRAND FATHER IN A MODLE A, HE WOULD SLAM THE BRAKES, GRAB A SPADE AND CLIMB OVER THE FENCE TO CUT DOWN A THISTLE ON A NEIGHBORS FARM.
BEFORE CHEMICAL WEED CONTROL.
LOOKING FORWARD TO YOUR TALK IN LOS ANGELES LATER THIS MONTH AT THE CITY CLUB. BRINGING MY SON AND GRAND KIDS..
BOB RUBY
Your observations & reminiscences about agrarian life really resonated! I’m 73, and my Dad grew up in the 30’s and 40’s as the 6th child of 8 in a poor, white tenant farm family in south central Alabama. They settled down and ultimately bought (probably financed by a federally insured loan) a 55 acre subsistence farm. My father was a career soldier, and when we couldn’t travel with him, my mother, brother & I would stay on that farm with my widowed grandmother, who was born in the 1890’s. I watched her kill a chicken for supper, milk a cow, and churn butter. I helped her gather eggs and shell peas. She told me how, in her prime, she would pick 300 pounds of cotton in a day for the pay – around 3 cents a pound. Even today, speaking with my 99 year old uncle (my father’s older brother), I hear about following a mule’s rear end, plowing up long-ago fields. And my grandfather’s moonshining activities are now common knowledge in the family. The land was actually very poor, so it’s reverted now to grazing cattle and growing pines. So while my 24 cousins and I have heard of the virtues of an agrarian ethos, what we learned, we learned by precept, not experience.
As to the west coast elites’ affectation in the use of y’all: I use it because I grew up with it. You must admit: it’s kind of nice to have a substitute for the 2nd person plural personal pronoun that English lost along the way. The affectation that annoys me more, though, is the pandering use of the word “folk