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| Authored by: artp on Friday, February 15 2013 @ 03:03 PM EST |
Well, willingly is also a relative term.
When Secretary or Agriculture Earl Butz, under President
Nixon began to promote exports of commodity grains, it went
against every lesson ever learned for centuries. But
commodity marketing - aiming for the bottom of the price
margin - became the ONLY market of any size for American
farmers. It started with the mantra "Feed the Hungry", but
once a critical mass of the market was attained, it didn't
matter what farmers thought. The mantra was now only there
to pacify regrets.
Commodity marketing has never been a good idea. Value added
marketing always gets better results. This was obvious even
back in the 1790s, when the Whiskey Rebellion broke out in
Tennessee when the government tried to impose tax on
whiskey shipped from west of the Appalachians to the East
Coast. But farmers only knew that it was cheaper to ship
whiskey than it was to ship corn. A lesson that has been
forgotten in this weird economy that could only be loved by
the Teamsters.
If farmers want to control their prices, they need to
recreate their own economy with their own value added
enterprises and their own distribution channels. That is
mostly what the organic farming movement is doing. The
organic part is just an extra benefit. And watch the big
players try to water down the standards so that they can
play, too.
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Userfriendly on WGA server outage:
When you're chained to an oar you don't think you should go down when the galley
sinks ?[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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