Northern Farmer

As another week is ending here on the farm the good ol’ July heat is back. Most of the jobs that were planned got done, not all, but most. At least all the cement pouring was done during cooler weather. Even then there are few jobs that are tougher. When the last ready mix truck hit empty I proclaimed, “that’s the last cement I ever plan on pouring!” I can’t see anymore jobs that require such construction anymore. Any future plans will be portable and light duty as far as I can see. But I’m glad we did it, it’ll make life alot easier around here where winter feeding is from late October to mid May.

We took a couple of hours off this afternoon and went to the county fair. With the fair they had a good sustainable farming fair along side of the normal one.They even had “Family Friendly Farming” books for sale there amongst all the rest of the literature. It’s nice to see this movement quietly swelling amoungst corporate dominated ag.

Seeing how scientific I always am, (joke), I’ve been noticing certain trends just in the past few weeks in central MN. These are all small, but growing. I don’t know if the corporate hogs are taking notice yet and I hope they don’t for a while yet. One thing I read in a U of Mn publication they send here free is that small state inspected butcher shops are on the rise in rural MN. In my own little area I can name three that have started from scratch in the last few years, all doing a brisk business. That’s besides the already established shops that have been around for ever. Some of these make some good products from old recipies that have been handed down for generations. Farmers markets are expanding into towns and villages where they’ve never been before. And from what I can see we still must have a few state’s rights left in MN because the state’s dept of ag seems to be going out of it’s way for small farmers to market direct. Many of the horror stories I hear about direct marketing in other states seem to have been avoided here. I hope we can keep it up. And plus the acceptance of sustainable agriculture at the fair.

It’s easy to be caught up in the doom and gloom of this world, but there are little things happening, accually big things for the people whom are doing it. We might not be able to challenge the big corporations directly, “yet”, but in our own neighborhoods we can make a difference.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 30th, 2005 at 7:13 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.