Get the government out of the way and industrial agriculture would have serious competition and the U.S would have some of the world’s best food. From Jeffrey Tucker at theburningplatform.com:
[The following is an excerpt from Jeffrey Tucker’s book, Spirits of America: On the Semiquincentennial.]
It’s impossible to speak of American history without reference to the life of the farmer and the land. The experience shaped many generations. It formed the basis for the belief in freedom itself, the conviction that a family can provide for itself through hard work and defend its rights based on the little slice of physical land that the family controlled.
Read any of the writings of the Founding Fathers, and you find an unrelenting romanticization of life on the land. “When I first entered on the stage of public life,” wrote Thomas Jefferson, “I came to a resolution never…to wear any other character than that of a farmer.”
The idea rattles us a bit. We don’t really have agronomy anymore. We live in cities, type on laptops, play with digits, farm information, and our only connection with food is the grocery store and restaurant.
Reading Jefferson, then, makes one think: we don’t live on farms anymore, so all must be lost. That, of course, is untrue. His point is simply that the agrarian life provides a bulwark, not that you cannot have freedom if it gives way to other modes of living.
And the agrarian life did give way, for reasons both organically evolving but also through force, which is deeply regrettable. As the Industrial Revolution advanced, fewer and fewer people lived on farms. We moved to the cities. By 1920, it was pretty well done: industry beat agriculture in its overall contribution to American productivity.
I love the men in overalls built this country while men in three piece suits destroyed it meme.
Or the it ain’t much but it’s honest of the jolly farmer.
Gotta love the kulaks and White Russians.