Facebook and Twitter have been very eye opening to me. I get followed by the oddest folk.
We’re practically old hippies living off the land. We are farming Yankees, trying to make a buck any way we can. We are talking about selling the 200 year old rock piles out in our woods to some flat-lander.
I get all sorts of Big-Ag people following me. Really? I am pro-raw milk and pro-grassfed and a Michael Pollan fan and I make the best damn granola around. I use raw sugar and maple syrup and the only things I buy in grocery stores are booze, coffee and spices.
Sometimes they’ll interest me and actually engage with me, but honestly, I have to spend most of my time actually farming rather than talking about farming. But sometimes it’s a rainy day, and I engage.
Big-Ag reminds me of the tobacco companies years ago, fighting for their very survival. It’s safe! It’s healthy! Stop seeing and listening to what you see and hear in the world around you and watch the dangling clock — tick, tock, tick, tock. La la la la. Ignore the obesity epidemic, the rates of autism, the early maturing of baby girls. There’s no way that could have anything to do with diet. La la la la.
I lived in Texas for 24 years. I know beef cattle. When my grandfather went to Cattleman’s Steakhouse and was offered a salad before the meal, he replied “Salad? That’s what food eats.”
Only they barely do, anymore. Now they eat corn and soy, laced with antibiotics.
But not on my farm.
No matter how much they yell and scream that their “conventional farming” is okay, I don’t buy it. I’m not going to poison the land or the animals. Yesterday, one of them very stridently said I had “drunk the Kool-Aid”. Actually, she sort of started foaming at the mouth and YELLING IN ALL CAPS, posting over and over again until I deleted her as a “fan”. She’s not a fan of our little tiny farm, but somehow how we live our life threatens her. Crazy.
It sort of makes me think we are doing something right! Again.
