No Farm No Food

        As you travel round the local produce markets, the livestock auctions, and flea markets , fairs and festivals where farming families hawk their wares one wonders why do they do it? To see so many children being toted around these places would give one a clue. The adults often are subsistance farmers because as children they learned how. They often inherit family land, equipment, and tools and more importantly they inherit a love of growing things. Their first memories are of walking barefoot in tilled earth and the smell of freshly baled hay. They learn to love the lowing of a cow to her new calf, or the low bawl of competing bulls calling each other names over the fence. They cherish the taste of a vine ripened tomato or the flavor of an orange round fresh fried egg that was still warm from the hen when it hit the pan.  These are the treasures of farm life that money cannot buy.

    The simple fact that for every bite that goes into your mouth has to at some point been a living growing thing, a product of millions of years of evolution is ingrained in the psyche of farming people more than any others. It is hard to relate your hamburger and french fries to the land if you have never picked up a potato or walked through a field of wheat or drug a bale a hay to feed a hungry cow in the winter.