An English Sheep Farmers View of Rural America

[elleng]

MATTERDALE, England — I am a traditional small farmer in the North of England. I farm sheep in a mountainous landscape, the Lake District fells. It is a farming system that dates back as many as 4,500 years. A remarkable survival. My flock grazes a mountain alongside 10 other flocks, through an ancient communal grazing system that has somehow survived the last two centuries of change. Wordsworth called it a “perfect republic of shepherds.”

It’s not your efficient modern agribusiness. My farm struggles to make enough money for my family to live on, even with 900 sheep. The price of my lambs is governed by the supply of imported lamb from the other side of the world. So I have one foot in something ancient and the other foot in the 21st-century global economy.

Less than 3 percent of people in modern industrial economies are farmers. But around the world, I am not alone: The United Nations estimates that more than two billion people are farmers, most of them small farmers; that’s about one in three people on the planet.

My farm’s lack of profitability perhaps shouldn’t be of any great concern to anyone else. I’m a grown-up, and I chose to live this way. I chose it because my ancestors all did this, and because I love it, however doomed it might seem to others.

My farm is where I live, and there is actually no other way to farm my land, which is why it hasn’t changed much for a millennium or more. In truth, I could accept the changes around me philosophically, including the disappearance of farms like mine, if the results made for a better world and society. But the world I am seeing evolve in front of my eyes isn’t better, it is worse. Much worse.

In the week before the United States elected Donald J. Trump to the presidency, I traveled through Kentucky, through endless miles of farmland and small towns. It was my first visit to the United States, for a book tour. I was shocked by the signs of decline I saw in rural America.'>>>

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/01/opinion/an-english-sheep-farmers-view-of-rural-america.html?

[PsychoBabble]

1. Beautifully written piece that ...

Gives us an alternative view of our problems. Worth the click

[ms liberty]

2. Fascinating and insightful. Thanks for sharing it! K&R n/t

[mopinko]

3. it's a good read but

american farming is already changing a LOT.
urban farming, small farmers growing niche crops, direct to consumer plans like csa's and expanding farmers markets are all a push back to what this guy is talking about.

maybe next time he comes here, he can come visit me.

[elleng]

4. and my daughter!

Chicks and goats!

[Warpy]

5. He's lucky no one has wanted his land

I live in one of the last places that rural people cam make a living, again because the land is all up and down and resists mechanization.
Small holders in NM make their livings on guess what? Sheep. They make enough to feed themselves and keep going. Just.

Mechanization has depopulated much of the country as efficiently as it later depopulated the factory floor. Farmers who lost their land moved into industry and now the industry is gone, first overseas to foreigners and now back with machines doing the work the people used to do. Some people have been made irrelevant twice in their lifetimes.

Rebanks saw the closed stores, schools, clinics, and other amenities, surrounded by a country full of abandoned, decaying shacks. He also saw the human wreckage, although I'm sure he didn't recognize it, of people in gas kiosks, working the early shift at fast food places, and staffing 7/11 stores, now the only places to buy food in some areas. The despair and rage are often difficult to see, people keeping them hidden to keep their jobs, but they're there if you know how to look.

This country feels like it does on a muggy summer day just before the squall line heralding a cold front moves in.

[elleng]

6. Right. The despair and rage may be difficult to literally see,

but we saw it's consequences November 8, and will live with it henceforth.