The Helpful Gardener
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A Merciful Death For Barley

I don't think F-san was as concerned with the loss of barley as he was with the interdiction of governmental policy and international politics into the realm of the farmer. While losing a perfectly good grain crop that dovetails nicely with rice is a blow, he mentions rye and buckwheat as well. It is the loss of the family farm to modern practice that seems the biggest loss in this chapter, the one overriding the simple loss of barley.
Until now the line of thought among modern economists has been that small scale, self-sufficient farming is wrong-- that this is a primitive kind of agriculture--one that should be eliminated as quickly as possible. It is being said that the area of each field must be expanded to handle the changeover to large scal American-style agriculture, This way of thinking does not only apply to agriculture-- developments in all areas are moving in this direction.
The loss of barley is a small thing in comparison to this erosion of the more natural fabric of life. As huge corporations give up the simpler attempts to monopolize a particular crop or commodity in favor of cornering all of agriculture, we need to regard what we are losing here. What is human food? Is it food humans create? Engineer, even?

Or should we find the nature in ourselves and sustain it with the nature we find without? Or should we supercede the natural world for one we create, escewing natural capital for manufactured, economic capital?

This is the loss I find in this chapter...

HG

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rainbowgardener
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I found this chapter very sad... we have gone so wrong and now our mistakes are being exported and are taking over the world, where they will create harm on an even larger scale.

He says ideal would be if everyone lived more close to the earth farming their quarter acre. That is very radical and I struggle with it a bit. It seems to me that the epitome of human civilization has been to free people up from constantly having to worry about feeding themselves, to be artists and poets, musicians and teachers, scholars and thinkers and inventors. Perhaps it is a question of balance and the composers and poets would be better off spending some of their days in a garden?

But it does seem clear to me that society is better off when more people farm. Thomas Jefferson and the founding fathers clearly had a vision of a democracy based on mostly small family farms.

muland
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Ideally more people would be farming their quarter-acre, growing their own food and living in harmony with their neighbors and other forms of life. True, we do not have to worry about gathering food each day or worry about scarcity, but for how long? And is this only for the small percentage of us here in the United States and other "have" places? Personally, I think the abundance created by modern agriculture, and by modern I'm thinking the past 12,000 years, has only been for so for the classes that control production and the surplus. That's a pretty small percentage of human society as a whole. Yes, it is sad. :cry:



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