Hobby Farm introduces readers to all aspects of country living, with chapters on purchasing your dream farm, making the transition to rural living, gardening, raising livestock, and preserving the harvest.
SNEAK PREVIEW: CHAPTER 1
Farm Life
When the United States formed “...a more perfect Union, to establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity...”* over 90 percent of our population were farmers--or people who produced their own food and fiber, bartered for food, or bought food directly from someone else who produced it. Today, only about 1 percent of our population are considered farmers, making farmers the greatest minority in this country.
At about the time that Thomas Jefferson was penning the words of our Constitution, he wrote to President George Washington, “Agriculture... is our wisest pursuit, because it will in the end contribute most to real wealth, good morals and happiness,” and, “the moderate and sure income of husbandry begets permanent improvement, quiet life and orderly conduct, both public and private.”
Jefferson’s agrarian ideal was not new: It was a philosophy that the earliest philosophers passed down. Yet, we’ve seen the agrarian ideal give way over the last half-century or so, with an economic and social paradigm shift, resulting in a loss of culture in agri-culture, and fewer, bigger “agribusinesses” supplying our food and fiber. Corporately-controlled operations, or factory farms, have steadily displaced the mid-sized, independent, family farm. At the same time, these corporately-controlled operations have forced ex-farmers to move to the city, leaving many rural communities struggling to support basic services. As the remaining farmers grow their operations to try and stay in business, agriculturally induced environmental problems have exploded.
Iowa--the epitome of a farm state in many peoples’ minds--provides a good example: It went through a landmark change sometime in the late ’50s, with more residents living in cities than on farms and in rural communities. Iowa is also noted for having some of the most polluted lakes and streams in the world, and runoff from agricultural production in Iowa and other Midwestern states has contributed to a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico that has grown to over 7,000 square miles (an area about the size of New Jersey). The dead zone has drastically hurt some of America’s most productive fisheries. And, in spite of increased use of pesticides and herbicides for controlling invasive and noxious species of insects and weeds, the US economy takes an estimated one hundred thirty-seven billion dollar annual economic hit from these pests.
Read the rest of chapter 1: PDF of Chapter 1