The Omnivore’s Delusion: Against The Agri-intellectuals

Farming has always been messy and painful, and bloody and dirty. It still is. This is something the critics of industrial farming never seem to understand.

by Blake Hurst - July 30, 2009 - The American

... the parts of farming that are the most “industrial” are the most likely to be owned by the kind of family farmers that elicit such a positive response from the consumer. Corn farms are almost all owned and managed by small family farmers. But corn farmers salivate at the thought of one more biotech breakthrough, use vast amounts of energy to increase production, and raise large quantities of an indistinguishable commodity to sell to huge corporations that turn that corn into thousands of industrial products.

Most livestock is produced by family farms, and even the poultry industry, with its contracts and vertical integration, relies on family farms to contract for the production of the birds. Despite the obvious change in scale over time, family farms, like ours, still meet around the kitchen table, send their kids to the same small schools, sit in the same church pew, and belong to the same civic organizations our parents and grandparents did. We may be industrial by some definition, but not our own. Reality is messier than it appears in the book my tormentor was reading, and farming more complicated than a simple morality play.

Food production is another topic where the intellectual motor mouths have become echoes of stupidity not enlightenment. The liberals are absolutely sure that farming is an evil exercise because it does not conform to their morally superior belief of purity of process. Yet if we followed their prescription it would lead to the starvation of millions of people. Even when this is pointed out to them, they don't care. As on many other issues, their opinion means much more to them than truth.

This is a great article, by a farmer, that explains why Democrats are (once again) wrong in their prescriptions for the future of our nation.