Northern Farmer

Yesterday was my high point of summer at the mailbox out on the gravel road. The summer edition of Small Farmer’s Journal” finally arrived. It’ll take me a few weeks to go through most of it but I’ve been paging through it and it strikes me how much I’m in tune with it or is it the other way around, I don’t know.

The editor, Lynn R Miller’s editorial is great, no wonder he’s gotten so many people angry at him over the years. I’d like to quote the first two paragraghs of the magazine. I hope they don’t mind so just to cover my behind anyone can order it online, the links on my side bar. Hope that does it.

Title; Preserving Farmland

“Why on earth do we find ourselves needing to defend the concept that farmland is fragile and valuable? If our food does not come from here- your here, my here, every here- we are vulnerable. If our food always comes from there, somewhere over there, somewhere else, somewhere we have know influence over, we are vulnerable.
We trade off our farmlands at our own peril. When we scrape off the invaluable top soil to make room for concrete pads and asphalt and building, as we’ve done at increasing rates for decades, we destroy cubic tons of our capacity to grow food, of our capacity to sustain life. We trade life for a convenient place to put a building or a parking lot. We should be putting our buildings and parking lots in those areas of the planet which have less or no capacity to sustain life. We should have reverence for that which sustains life. Our farmlands should be a sacred preserve. No thing should rank above saving farmland, nothing.”

Well, from my point of view, this sure makes sense to me. I don’t know if any remember that TV commercial years ago of the Indian, native american, that had a tears because of how people littered the landscape. Sometimes that’s how I feel about the destruction of farmland, I can’t believe the maddness, the happyness of complete destruction. How it is call good. I look around and love the countryside God created for man to nurture and to make bloom. My prayer is that our family will always follow God in the stewardship of this land.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 20th, 2005 at 9:37 pm and is filed under Northern Farmer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.