Hi All, To me agriculture is not so much a vehicle of industry or a ways of purveying produce and livestock, it is much more.
It is adherence to the land. It is the simple life. And it is an honest days work. Coming from a large city, I have had a long-standing love/hate relationship with agriculture only in that agriculture to me always meant 4-5 hour car rides down to Aunt Missy's house. But even sans cable TV, Internet, and conventional entertainment, the agricultural community down there has always triggered some intrinsic transcendentalist sentiment.
The freedom, the smell of manure and the corn as-far-as-the-eye-can-see landscape always brought me to a different state mentally. It may sound hackneyed to say, but when I was down there, I was able to transcend time and space; to escape the trivial pressures of suburban life and leave the phone in the car. (There was no reception, any ways.) Being down there and seeing how whittled down people's lives could be though made me depressed; how one's entire future and livelihood lie contingent on a few uncontrollable factors.
It is only now that I see how rewarding the honest life can be. And further, how each one of those single farm units work as a functioning cog, turning the great machine that serves something so far beyond me. I now wonder if I am the foolish one. And if all of this time my conspicuous consumption and my materialism, the things I once maintained put me so above these simpletons, was the butt of the joke and I'm not laughing along.
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