What would be the difference in price if Roundup and Bt corn ban

What did your family do with that 160 acres back 4 or 5 generations ago?

Oh, my mistake. I wasn't aware that you were giving away all the food you grow to feed the world's starving population.

By all means, you get a free pass then on poisoning the environment.

They farmed it, corn, wheat, used horses, threshers, etc., but there were more of them then, my GGG Grandparents had 6 boys, and two live on the property hired men, and there is just one of me now! They had cattle, hogs, chickens, same as I do, but on a larger scale, that is why I have let 5 acres of the pasture go back to nature, I can't keep up with it all.

Ernie, most of us like the dream of a garden and some home picked veggies on the table. Very satisfying, neat stuff. A whole lot f farmers do that too.

China is kind of living what you are describing. Their average farm size is 5 to 6 acres, and they have the whole family working on the farm.

The problems they are running into is that everyone wants to get off the farm and into a city. The bugs and heat and all tends to get old when its no longer a dream but something you need to do to survive every day...

They are getting pretty bad soil erosion, their ground is washing away with all the tillage.

They have low yields. China imports more grains than most of the rest of the world. Certainly their large population and relatively small area of good land is part of that, but their crop yields have not kept up with North and South America.

They also have many livestock diseases that get out of hand. This past year, the dead hogs were floating down their rivers by the 1000s upon thousands..

So in a way, their reality tells us the couple acres and a couple livestock is not really all that resilient.

It stil is a great dream, and those of us who can live that dream need to cherish what we have. Since we have a grocery store waiting for us when our garden fails, or the insects come, or a blight or weeds or a flooding rain or a drought wrecks our dream, we can just buy some food easily....

We get to live that dream if we want.

And that is a good thing.

Paul

That would be a fine example of what I call "sustainable" agriculture.

A family farm that doesn't ever run out of family to work on it. A way of life that ATTRACTS your children and doesn't send them running off into the city to find jobs in cubicles.

I don't think American agriculture is even WORTH saving.

Talk about cherry-picking history. That small family farm worked for CENTURIES in China and the only problem it caused was overpopulation. Just because their current foray into industrialism has destroyed their environment and their way of life does not undermine the concept. If anything it PROVES it.

As far as "living that dream", that may be true for some people but it's not true for us. If our garden fails, or drought hits, or we can't stay ahead of the grasshopper plagues, then we've got to abandon our whole way of life. There is no simply going to the grocery store because we don't have any money to do that. Our entire way of life, just like that of my grandparents and their grandparents and all the way back to whomever started this whole muddled family line of mine, if we can't produce our own food then we have to either pack up and go be someone else's servant or die.

We don't homestead and produce food because it's fun to do (it is, but that's not the point). We do it because we don't want to die.

And when your Uncle dies, and for reasons beyond your own control you have no kids of your own, never mind, you know what, you keep your three little acres and I will keep my family farm going the best I know how. (Edit per a request from AngieM2, sorry Angie!)

Oh, and I also market garden, and what is left over I put up and feeds me well enough also.

I don't know you and I wouldn't judge you if I did, but the harsh truth is that a family farm of 7 generations landed in the hands of a single person who doesn't even have kinfolk that he/she could (or would) bring out to help.

That is a pretty damning indictment of modern agriculture right there.

Population is increasing. Farmland is decreasing.

Population increase= need for more food

Farmland decrease= less land to produce food

An estimated 10 billion people will live on this planet in 2050. We're going to need all the help we can get to feed that many mouths. Hate to break it to ya buddy, but your nostalgic and romanticized idea of "3 acres and a hoe" ain't gonna work.

Brighton, I know quite a few people who are in your situation. A few of them got into that position because of bad life choices, but the majority of them just fell into it by following the way of the world. Smaller families, send your kids off to college and they then have no desire to farm, and pretty soon that big acreage which was such a blessing to the large family has become a curse and a burden to a single person.

Welcome to western civilization.

Hate to break it to YOU, buddy, but by 2050 I'm betting that there won't even be FIVE billion people on this planet.

And the only ones who WILL survive will have 3 acres and a hoe, not a giant tractor and a tank full of poison to spray on the weeds.

I don't have children because I can't, not because I didn't want any, and when your husband decides he wants kids more than he wants a farm wife, well there ya go and there I am! Every generation prior to mine has stayed on this farm, well one crazy GG Uncle went off to California for the gold rush, and did mighty well actually!

I work really hard to keep this place going, it is my heritage, my love, my life!

Alright buddy, I think you might be spending a little too much time in your underground bunker wearing your tinfoil hat. I would suggest its time to get in touch with reality.

I don't need any explanation because I'm not saying your situation is your own fault.

I'm saying that's the way it is. When you're gone, that 160 acres that's your heritage, your love, and your life will get swallowed up by some neighbor's farm or it'll be parceled out and subdivided into 2 acre lots. Not just because you couldn't have children, but because either your mother didn't have more children or they didn't want to farm. That path to single occupancy predates even your birth.

That's what this current method of agriculture has done. Are you still in support of it?

For what it's worth, what would have been my family farm was lost to the banks before I could even drive. So I never even got the chance to try and hang on like you're doing. Best I could do was cobble together some sort of a life in the corporate system, after growing up on a farm, and then try to escape all that to give my children a chance at what I'd lost.

I guess we're pretty far afield though in people expressing their free right to dump toxins and poisons into my drinking water and atmosphere so long as it enables them to make a profit.

Roundup isn't THE problem. It's just a symptom.

Let's see, you went from a strawman argument to an ad hominem attack in the same thread.

You may be a "potato guru", but a logic guru you definitely isn't.

I must admit, you have a good point. I think it's become clear our views differ greatly.

I can't speak for others but I can tell you how my grandfather managed his 120 acres. Row crops were hand weeded by whatever labor source was available. During wwII that consisted of German POWs. After the war migrant workers from parts south did the hand work. Even ascheap as that was (8 dollars per acre during the 60s) it still made it tough to turn profit selling taters @ $3 per hundred. Enide was a godsend to him.

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"Nothing so needs reforming as other peoples habits." Mark Twain

Three acres and a hoe, is not reality and never was. There are and were always cities and towns full of people that provide goods and services that those on the farms want and need. Those people provide those goods and the farmers provide food.

Those towns are providing those knife blanks that you are selling to buy that food that you are not producing on your Farm". Being part of that economic circle is not the horrible situation you make it out to be.

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Chemicals are not poisoning the earth, people are poisoning the earth. If the earth could talk to other planets(and who knows, maybe it does) It would say "I've got this terrible infestation of horrid little humans, any cure for that? They actually think they're more important than me...."

Yeah. I love it when people think they are clever by pointing out that my small participation in the tattered remains of an economy devalues my entire point.

It's like stealing a whole loaf of bread from a man and giving him back a crust and saying, "See? You've still got food."