A man owned a small farm in Norfolk.

The Department of wages claimed he was not paying proper wages to his staff and sent a representative out to interview him.

‘I need a list of your employees and how much you pay them,’ demanded the rep.

‘Well,’ replied the farmer, ‘there’s my farm hand who’s been with me for three years. I pay him 200 a week plus free room and board. The cook has been here for 18 months, and I pay her 150 per week plus free room and board. Then there’s the half-wit. He works about 18 hours every day and does about 90% of all the work around here. He makes about 10 per week, pays his own room and board, and I buy him a bottle of whiskey every now and then.’

‘That’s the guy I want to talk to…the half-wit,’ says the agent.

‘That would be me,’ replied the farmer.

It Is What It Is, 3 Time’s A day, Thank Goodness For Farmer’s

The one thing I know about this is that “somebody” knows the answer. When we were all farmers, or at least 97% of us, it was all very organic in every way. We just did not think about the word “organic” because it was just who we were before chemical fertilizers. This was before the word “organic” was used for marketing to get your whole paycheck. At first, it was just a way of life for us – “the good life”. So let’s look back to the 20th century, just in the USA, to see how we went from a nation of organic farmers to a nation of consumers of unhealthy foods with proven health hazards.

In 1935, there were 6.8 million farms in the United States. According to the USDA, in 2000, there were less than 2.2 million farms. Then, we went from a nation of farmers to a nation of chemical agribusiness for the most part, with promises of chemical-based agriculture that could feed the whole world with a lot of cheap food without a lot of hard work. So let’s look at some time lines.

DDT was first used in the United States as an insecticide in agriculture in the 1940s. Some of the first chemical fertilizers came to the farms in this part of the world in the 1940s, the same year a British agriculturalists named Sir Albert Howard put a book out called An Agricultural Testament telling us how all chemical fertilizers are bad for us in every way. Now remember this the next time you say, “How was I to know?” And, “Shouldn’t somebody fix this before it kills us?” From day one, somebody told us about the dangers of the chemicals in our food chain – the land, air and water. Lady Eve Balfour wrote “The Living Soil” in 1943 and it was the first book about what we were getting into with chemical farming. Do you see how fast it took somebody to see what we where getting into, not long at all.

Now how about the birth of the words “Organic Farming”? Well, here in the US, it seems to me it came from somebody named J.I. Rodale, who published Organic Farming and Gardening magazine in 1942, which is now Organic Gardening magazine.  Research from his farm, the Rodale Institute in Pennsylvania, has been here providing us with info about the need for organic farming and how to farm organically from the 1940s. Then, we were being informed about the need to go back to the small farms in the 1960s, for whole fresh unprocessed foods grown local in an organic way without chemicals. At this time, we had just started to go down the wrong road. We did not even have all the health problems that have come from chemical foods, but books and info were telling us to turn around and go back to the simple life, which was almost around the same time big corps were figuring out that they could make a “KILLING” from feeding us cheap chemical foods for a lot of money. Then, a great book, Silent Spring, got the first small part of the masses into a movement for organic foods and the need to move away from the chemical world we had fallen into – I’m glad someone was doing something to help fix the wrongs. Silent Spring was published in 1962. We all need to know how a book by a biologist named Rachel Carson exposed DDT and how its effects as a harmful chemical and pesticide were harming our food, people, animals, the environment, and the world, not just the USA.

In Silent Spring, Rachel Carson wrote, “For the first time in the history of the world, every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the moment of conception until death.” She wrote this in 1962. Then we had the 1970s. Not a lot, but a few good things came out of the ‘70s – a counterculture, a revolution of supporters to stop death by chemicals. The world had its first Earth Day and one of the first acts to ban DDT (1972). But a little too late in 1985 when Dr. Arnold Schecter, a professor of Preventive Medicine, said, “In the United States we’ve found that not somebody but everybody’s got dioxin in them.” It is sad that we have had this info the whole time right from the start. But big corps have more money to fill our minds with lies, and authors just have facts they put into words, not radio or TV with actors and props.

When somebody tries to get the word out, they’re called environmentalists in a bad way, like they’re some radical stoned hippies. But today, they’re educated consumers. And yes, some of them have graduated from being stoned hippies to educated hippies. They have a voice because they are part of our middle-class that is purchasing food. That makes them somebody making a demand for organic products. The power of the consumer over corporate involvement with our food is on somebody’s side if somebody uses it. We have to use this power right now while we can. We now know what they told us were lies, how they could grow all the world’s food chemically. So now we know chemicals in our food network are bad. We need to stop all the GMOs and pesticides in our children’s food; the synthetic fertilizers in our rivers, lakes, and drinking water; the antibiotics and hormones in our animals’ feed and factory fish farms. Faster foods with longer shelf life and more food miles is what it is all about for the food factories.

So here we are in the 21st century. We know that we started with about 7 million farms in the United States, and now we have around 2 million; it looks like somebody lost about a million farms every 10 years. Do you see why every time I write I talk about the need for somebody to become a farmer? It’s not that we need more than we can use, it’s that we have less than 2% of farmers left to grow our food for 98% of the consumers in the USA. It’s just bad math. It doesn’t add up and that’s why we have food factories.

So the same year (1940) that chemical-based agriculture was pushed on us, somebody gave us books about the dangers of chemicals in our world. Then, 20 years go by and we are shown the effects of this chemical life in 1960. Then, 20 more years and we are told that all of us have a dangerous chemical (dioxin) in all of our bodies. Do we need to wait 20 more years to see the effects of GMOs and all of the chemicals that we use today and what it can do to our babies? Let’s stop, read and learn about how we can work together to stop this kind of madness – death by chemicals. As I have looked at all the bad that has come from the chemical world we live in over the years, I have often wondered why “somebody” is not doing something about it? Now I realize that I am that somebody, and maybe you might be somebody, too. Think about it; who is that somebody? As always, what the hell do I know anyways, I’m just an old farmer.

All the best to you all,

The Bio-Farmer, Mike Dial

Now That’s a Greenhouse,

Farmer and sons walking in the face of a dust storm. Cimarron County, Oklahoma, USA (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

HOW CAN THIS BE, that we grow and produce two time’s the amount of food we need, but there is people suffering from malnutrition and hunger. On the other side we have billion’s of people suffer from obesity. HOW CAN THIS BE, we want more and more from the land and it has given all it has to give without a rest. In Indian over 150,000 farmers have been pushed to suicide, because too much  has been asked of them and they have no more to give so they take their own life’s. Are we going to wait to see how long are farmers can hold on with out help or a rest? (NOT MUCH LONGER) So now were down to the last of are hard-working farmers, are we waiting to get to the last farmer before we do anything to help save them. They are the ones who made the USA a great nation, now are we going to tune in the TV and sit to see the last US farmer die. HOW CAN THIS BE???   If you see what I see get up and do something, let us show are young one’s HOW IT CAN BE AND SHOULD BE. And what do I know, I am just an old farmer anyway.                                                       BUT I THINK I KNOW HOW IT SHOULD BE.