What is a Farmer?

Photo taken courtesy of Google Images.

I have always really been into history, especially the history in our country. When I look back to about the 1940's and earlier, I notice a shift, not only in our food but in the social status of what it meant to be a farmer. A big chunk of my heritage comes from the south and has been there since they sailed over in the 1600's and many of my ancestors were farmers.

When I looked back to the beginning up to about the early 1900's, I noticed that the social and financial status of what it meant to be a farmer was extremly different from what it meant in the 1940's, 50's, 60's and beyond. When I look back at my 4th great grandfather, he was not only a farmer but he was an inventor, a prominent member of his community and he founded a local militia when the civil war broke out. He was a person of respect but was mostly known as a farmer. If you look at our US presidents, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and James Monroe were farmers. John Adams was even a farmer and a lawyer! Many of these farmers lived in beautiful plantation style homes, lived lives of leisure and farmed the land, since it was what they had to do for food.

Now, not all farmers lived like this and there were plenty of people who farmed and were quite poor but it wasn't as if being a farmer meant that you were poor, it didn't label you as such when it came to social status. Around the 1940's what it meant to be a farmer slowly started to change. For example, when I look at my grandmother, she grew up on a farm and grew up dirt poor. I remember hearing stories of her having no heat, no water and living in a house that when it snowed outside, it snowed inside. This is around the time that the "Green Revolution" began to take place, but it didn't fully begin to gain momentum until the late 60's and boy was it ever anything but green.

The "Green Revolution" introduced a way of farming that relied more heavily on industrial equipment, herbacides, pesticides and genetically modifying seeds to increase crop production and make them more resiliant to natural enviromental factors such as pests, drought, etc... Aside from these factors, it began to be more difficult to make it as a farmer. Family farms began to give way to giant industrialized farms that recived bonus', tax incentives and had the backing of the government to produce a higher yeilding, lesser quality crop. Small family farms could not compete with this and it began to make it much harder to make a living when they had so much competition that was able to sell there produce at a much lower price.

Essentially, that was the transition. Farmers went from making an honest living and earning a decent amount of money to just being poor and barely being able to make ends meat, unless you sold out to the larger industrialized farms. When I looked at my husband's ancestry, his father was literally the first generation from as far back as I could go (roughly 250 years) that was not a farmer. In the 1800's roughly 90% of the population lived on farms, in 1995 roughly 1% of the population lived on farms. It led me to wonder, "Is being a farmer a dying occupation?" If I had looked at this even ten years ago, I would have said yes, but today I can honestly say we are starting to see a comeback and a total redefinition of what it means to be a farmer.

Enough people are slowly starting to see what modern industrialized farming is doing to our planet, our health and our future. Many people are leaving their daily jobs behind in hopes of greener pastures, literally. In 2012, football player Jason Brown left the St. Louis Rams and a millions of dollars to become a farmer. When he was asked why, his reply was simple: "I am doing this to help others." Brown donates a majority of what he grows to his local food pantries. He isn't the only person doing something like this either. I recently interviewed a young organic farmer about his farm up in Michigan and one of the questions I asked him was "Why do it? It's a hard job?" His reply was simple and amazing "I have two young kids and its worth it to me if they get to eat good food and grow up out here in the fresh air and the dirt. I also get to supply people with food that I know is good for them, not food that is poison."

Big picture here, people are getting tired of what industrialized farming is doing and they want to make a difference. I think we are at a real turning point and we are starting to actually see more people have an interest in not only traditional farming but in growing their own food in cities as well. In hundreds of cities across America, urban food gardens are starting to pop up everywhere. Urban food gardens are quite often times organic gardens that are maintained by a small group of people that offer fresh produce to the public, since not all of us have access to country farms. I think that it is completely possible that within the next twenty or thirty years, we could see a real shift in what it means to be a farmer. As more and more people get tired of GMO's and herbacides destroying our planet and making us sick, they will become the change that they wish to see. After all, if you want there to be change in the world, than take action, make a stand and become the difference.