Farm plight
As mentioned yesterday, farming is not a particularly high-earning enterprise, especially not in the UK. Jeremy Clarkson has done the British countryside a favor by highlighting the difficulty involved in bare survival. Somewhere in the first season, there is mention that a single farmer is expected to do all the work involved in raising 600 acres of crops, all by her or himself, involving days on end operating a tractor for twelve or more hours a day when the harvest is ready. In Clarkson’s case, all that work resulted in gross profits of 144 pounds sterling. Someone mentions farmers in Canada would laugh at the puny British acreage. Needless to say, the fields are probably downright Canadian in America’s breadbasket.
Another farmer from the same region of England reviewed the second season of Clarkson’s Farm and had some good things to say about it. Here’s the video:
As the Funky Farmer says, the value of the show is that it introduces ordinary citizens to the world of agriculture, which is an industry that employs only about 1.3 percent of workers in the United States—farming is so tremendously productive that it takes very few people to raise so much food. It is something our forebears a mere century ago had to engage in regularly. The effort was part of what survival required. And now it’s something homeowners can do as a hobby in order to have tastier tomatoes for a month or so at the end of summer.
One downside for farmers resulting from this high productivity is that much of the population is so ignorant—innocently ignorant—of how food is produced as to be delusional. Most people have never been on farms, never raised their own food, and have no idea of the work involved. They expect government to ban Those Things That Sound Bad while imposing Those Things That Sound Good from above by regulatory fiat.
The people’s elected representatives can make use of popular delusions about agriculture in order to get elected by the traditional playbook of promising unrealistic nonsense. Government regulation of agriculture, therefore, can be expected to grow increasingly delusional and nonsensical once the sensible policies have been exhausted. No one in government—much less elected officials—argues for just leaving things alone for the time being.
My prediction is that we’ll follow the UK (and the EU) into ever more onerous regulations on farming and rural life coming from the federal, state, and local levels of government. Because this is what I have come to expect as the combined outcome of all the things that government and politics do.
We hope the National Guard was able to reunite CynthiaW and Daughter D with the rest of the family, rescuing them from the clutches of the U.S. Navy.
My husband and I found out that this show is on Amazon Prime. We’re watching it now, and it’s really good!!! Isn’t it humbling to realize that people who don’t necessarily have a college education know things that are really complicated?! Kaleb is wonderful!!