Northern Farmer

Over the past few years since I bought my first computer, five years to be exact, I’ve used it mostly for agriculture information. Rarely if ever do I surf the net. I didn’t even know what a blog was until this spring when I stumbled onto Scott’s blog, Homesteader Life. Before that the only interaction with other people on the internet was through forums. On some forums it could really get bloody, to say the least. A favorite pastime of mine was to participate in debating, if you want to call it that, with people that are in lockstep with corporate ag. Even with a bigtime ag economist. The one thing I learned is that these people have no feeling for the land, or the future of families. Their god is the corporate dollar and nothing else. They are hard to debate because they can play with dollar figures to make it seem to come out on their side. When you bring in the human factor the only thing they can do is call you a radical, protectionist, religious nut, you get the picture. And they can get very underhanded in this. It’s a breath of fresh air reading the different blogs nowdays that have the same views as myself and my family.

One thing they cannot understand is how a family can live on next to nothing and be happy. They classify all people the same, expecting them to live modern. Consume, consume, consume!! Imports will raise our standard of living, they say. Well, I have some ocean front property in North Dakota I have for sale too! One huge gap in our different ways of thinking is to them time is money, to me time is time and money is money. They are different and separate. They try to get it in our heads that we should figure out how much money we are making an hour on the farms and if we’re not comparable to some “good job” we should just give up and join the crowd of happy consumers, get a life according to them. I find I can’t agree with anything these people come up with. In a Christian Agrarian life our various jobs and labors are part of our pay. It’s a gift that we can get up in the morning and tend God’s soil and livestock. Labor is a privilage in this life, instead of trying to get out of work the Christian Agrarian looks forward to the new day. The worker in the industrial world tries to figure out any way possible to get out of work. Always looking forward to the weekend, holidays or vacations. Half the time I don’t know what day it is and don’t really care. I don’t know what time it is during the day and it works out fine. These things are really not that important. I’m tired after a hard days labor today but am looking forward to a full day tommorrow. The google eyed economist and myself will probobly never agree, but that’s OK.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 28th, 2005 at 9:07 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.