Having grown up in the city, to me a farm means chickens, cows, sheep, horses, vegetables, grains, a fruit orchard and a farm house. It also includes a farmer. Those of us who live anywhere near the Amish can't be blamed for having such notions because Amish farms are something like this. So are the very few remaining family farms, like the ones you see in some places in New Jersey and Pennsylvania (these are the places that I know best). In the farm belt (which I consider to be Western PA, Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, etc...) the farm as I know it is nowhere to be seen. This was most apparent in Wisconsin. I put several posts on Facebook asking "where are you people hiding the cows?" This state is well known for it's dairy industry. We saw a total of about 30 cows in the western most part of the state. What we saw instead of cows was not even empty pasture lands. In fact, from I-90, one can see no pasture land at all. There are two things you can see, corn and to a lesser extent soybeans. In every single state we drove through, corn is all you can see. The saddest part of all this is that the corn is not even edible. It is the corn that will be used for the additives to packaged food and gasoline. The most prime farmland in the entire world, the American Midwest, is being wasted on corn and soybeans--which no person will ever eat except as high fructose corn syrup, corn maltodextrin etc. Some of it is also probably being grown for chicken and beef feed. This is the world's bread basket?
On to South Dakota, which is beef country. Here, there are cattle in every pasture. I know that they go to a confinement lot before you eat it to be "finished" on corn, but for the majority of their life, they are roaming on the open prairie ranches. The fact that these ranches have all but decimated the native bison is a separate issue, the cattle at least are living like cattle should.
So this begs the question, where the heck are these amber waves of grain? In a trip across the farm belt that took days, we did not see one single solitary farm growing wheat. I read somewhere that the majority of wheat these days comes from Russia. In the political world right now many pundits are calling for and end to our dependence on foreign oil. I tend to agree with these folks--we should drill our own oil if we want to use so much--and we should have to put up with the environmental degradation that goes along with that. I would like to argue that we should also try to end our dependence on foreign wheat and foreign vegetables and foreign meats. Such a plan would require that we reclaim the bread basket of the nation from the corn agribusiness that has quietly taken that away from us over the years. A nice start would be ending--yes totally ending--farm subsidies. People have a misguided idea in their heads that farm subsidies are at least helping family farmers and that makes it somewhat more palatable. Not so. Farm subsidies, should be called what they are, agribusiness subsidies.
In answer the question of where the cows are in Wisconsin, a friend on Facebook (who lives in WI) told me that 10 minutes from her house they are building a confinement lot that will hold 4,500 cows. My guess is this is where all the dairy cows are these days, in confinement lots, where they get no pasture, no time outside and their manure has to be stored in manure lagoons which emit an ungodly smell. In their pasture lands--which I think are rightfully theirs, their is high fructose corn syrup growing.
Since most people don't actually drive through the flyover much, I think they don't realize what is going on out here. I wonder if we'll ever see the day when a candidate runs for president on a platform of ending farm subsidies. I wonder if the incentive to grow all of this corn was gone what would happen?
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