Saturday, July 13, 2019

119: Farming Incorporated

Smarsh reports that in the year she was born, 1980, "there were sixty-five thousand hog farmers in Iowa, working out to about two hundred hogs per farm; thirty-two years later, there were ten thousand hog operations with fourteen hundred animals each" (119).  Industrialized, corporate farming had a significant on small farms like her family's:  "Rural jobs dwindled, people moved away, and the services and stores and schools that couldn't be sustained by a hundred people boarded up" (119). At the same time, moving into the city has not been a solution, either, due to "overurbanization."

Has your family or your community been affected by industrialized, corporate farming?

Do you think anything should be done by the government to help protect small, family-run farms?
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3 comments:

  1. Jessica ZwermannAugust 7, 2019 at 5:23 PM

    You could say my family has been affected by industrialized farming. My great-grandfather owned a dairy farm in Shawnee. He wasn’t able to go to fight in World War 2 because the government wanted to keep him home to produce milk. He fed and milked all of his cows by hand and delivered milk personally to his customers in canisters or glass bottles. With the industrialization of dairy farming, the way he ran his farm can’t be continued now. There were apparent risks in milk contamination in a large, corporate setting, causing the FDA to issue restrictions on the production process, including the way we milk cattle. Hand-milking is no longer an option, not to mention the delivering of unpasteurized milk in glass bottles being banned. That being said, I believe that the government should place protections for small, family-run farms. Those families are doing what they’ve known their whole lives, doing more work than large corporations are for way less money. Taking that away would mean those people moving away from their hometowns just to be able to survive. Living and surviving are not the same thing.

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    1. Daniel HowardAugust 18, 2019 at 12:34 AM

      I enjoyed reading your story and explaining what you think about corporate farming! I do not have anyone in my family that farms for business, but we have provided for ourselves by milking the cow and growing tomato plants. I do not believe corporate farming has affected me as much as it has you. I hate that farmers nowadays do not get much appreciation and are overtaken by industrialized farming. I have to agree with you that the government should protect family-run farms. Farmers enjoy to do what they do, and people pick jobs that they enjoy the most, except for people who are struggling to maintain a job. Why couldn’t a farmer do what he or she enjoys to do and get paid well enough to survive? I hope the problem can be fixed.

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  2. Gabe WilmotAugust 18, 2019 at 10:22 PM

    I come from a long line of famers and my family still farms to this day. I don’t think large corporate farms really hurt us much because most everything we sell is sold on a national market scale. Corporate farms may have a larger quantity of goods, but whatever quantity we produce we can still sell for the same price. I will say that with the way farms work it is nearly impossible to start one from scratch. Family farms don’t start unless you are born into one. Once a small family farm goes under it is truly done for. It can be hard being a farmer at times since your crops are at the hands of the weather. The farmers who produce our food are extremely important and without government assistance at times it raises the possibility of a food crisis. I believe a bigger threat to famers than large corporate farms are the overseas imports.

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