CivilEats.com has a nice essay about how America ought to reconsider its farm policy. To understand farmers and why they’re important, you’ve first got to figure out who’s a farmer, and who isn’t. And that definition varies widely by source and by time. Unfortunately, continuing to define farmers in the terms society has typically used may no longer be in our best interest:
So I offer this new definition of a farmer: someone who grows crops in sufficient quantity to be a true commercial entity, yet is still close enough to the ground to bring human scale and values to the process. Not the backyard chicken enthusiast, nor the corporation behind the feedlot, but the individual human on the land, growing our food.
The remainder of the essay offers a convincing argument for why it’s in our best interest to define farmers in these terms. Link.
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