Northern Farmer

Just got back from shopping at the local co-op. Had to pick up some stuff for around here before it closed. Also I listed a couple cattle to get butchered and wouldn’t you know it, the first available date is the last week of November. Around here every small town practically has a butcher shop or meat processing plant. In fact it’s expanding every year it seems. They’re every where, in town, in the countryside, everywhere. And they’re all busy, very busy. Now I was always one that looks at stuff like this in order to get a handle on how peoples lifestyles are changing. Around here there was always the core group. That’s the people and farmers that never really did get very far into the modern world. Then there’s folks like us that were a ways into the modern ways and then came back to what we once knew and loved. The modern ways were gradually exposed as being a big lie. The “you can buy the vegetables cheaper than raise them” saying was exposed for what it was. A lie. Even if a person can buy them cheaper it isn’t cheaper down the road eating such sub standard foods.

Out here though, this butcher shop thing is really showing me a heartbeat that’s emerging. While our county here in Minnesota is classified as one of the poorest, a couple of months ago they opened up the largest Super WalMart in the state here at our county seat with a population of only seven thousand people. I stepped foot in it one Sunday evening around a month ago just to see what it was like so at least I know. It was basically empty. There were people there of coarse but for the sheer size of the thing there wasn’t very many people. I’ve heard from others that it’s nowhere near full ever. I don’t really know how to explain this but there sure are two different kinds of people around here. Some that follow the modern WalMart way and a huge percentage that doesn’t. The super store came in with investors and money from the outside. The small town and rural butcher shops are emerging from the local people and money.

I’ve been asked by some what I thought of the super store and I bet my answer surprised them. Instead of going on the rampage I say that it might help small farmers here more than anything else could! Because now folks are seeing the size and magnitude of industrial food production and when something goes wrong in that system the super store will be right in the thick of it. I see a good sized percentage of people waking up, even in the shadow of that thing and looking for a local place to get their foods from. And when selling our products I always use the super store as an example. Telling folks about the wonders of their hamburger, how the average pound of hamburger in that store has meat from a thousand different cows of every condition imaginable to man when they were slaughtered, from an average of sixteen different countries around the world. That’s the average, anyone getting hungry yet? And the money taken in by the super store goes “poof” that very same day and is never seen in the local community. Gone!

Yup, I see two different ways of life emerging here. And the good news is, the very good news, the countryside is in a flurry of activity building a culture of it’s own. Unplanned, not coordinated or anything. Not belonging to any group or anything, It’s just emerging and growing. Folks come here for our products and know that it’s better than organic. Hey, that’s becoming the new thinking when anyone that has any notion to investigate industrial organics, or organic from China. Trust me, there is no such a thing as organic from China but it’s sold that way in the new supposed wave of the future super store! I’m not organic farmer bashing here one bit either because I have more respect for someone that farms organically than any other kind, I’m talking about the system that was stolen from these good farmers and folks.

So as the super store’s mostly empty parking lot has a little activity every day, the local butcher shops are booked solid for a month with so many locals having their meat processed. Many little shops have locals hired for the work. And when you add up all the little shops every direction a person turns that counts up to allot of locals benefiting from other locals. Twenty years ago I’da said this would never happen, but it is. For every action there’s a reaction and the countryside is reacting! I don’t know if any big whigs even realize this yet, I hope not. Because a different culture is emerging, one a tad bit different than the money boys are planning. They didn’t take over like planned, things just readjusted a bit here and will continue to readjust. I don’t know about anyone else but this is kinda exciting! Country folks will not get stomped out al that easy! And country ways will just slide into something different but never conform to what the money changers plan. This could be interesting!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 30th, 2007 at 6:44 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.