{"id":37628,"date":"2018-09-11T07:41:36","date_gmt":"2018-09-11T12:41:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=37628"},"modified":"2018-09-11T07:41:36","modified_gmt":"2018-09-11T12:41:36","slug":"monster-turns-our-farmers-into-serfs-and-sharecroppers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=37628","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Monster\u2019 Turns Our Farmers into Serfs and Sharecroppers"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\u2018Monster\u2019 Turns Our Farmers into Serfs and Sharecroppers<\/span><\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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\u201cIt\u2019s like watching a state circle the drain.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That\u2019s what journalist Corie Brown said about Kansas on a\u00a0recent Strong Towns podcast<\/a>. This April, Brown\u00a0wrote a piece<\/a>\u00a0for New Food Economy about her 1,800-mile drive through the state. She discussed the state\u2019s emptying out, noting firsthand the struggles of rural towns and the farms surrounding them.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s the thing about rural Kansas: No one lives there, not anymore,\u201d she wrote. \u201cThe small towns that epitomize America\u2019s heartland are cut off from the rest of the world by miles and miles of grain, casualties of a vast commodity agriculture system that has less and less use for living, breathing farmers.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Midwest has always been a land of commodities\u2014crops like corn, soybeans, and grain. Kansas is a grain-producing state: two years ago, it grew 467 million bushels of grain across 8.2 million acres. But as farmers compete in a global market that is overflowing with grain, they are struggling to survive\u2014even though, as Brown noted during her interview, \u201cthey\u2019ve never worked harder, they\u2019ve never worked longer hours.\u201d<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, a recent\u00a0article in\u00a0The Atlantic<\/em><\/a>\u00a0<\/em>highlighted the \u201czombie small businesses\u201d amongst chicken farmers across the United States, many of which are contractors to large agribusinesses like Tyson and Purdue. \u201cThe big company provides the chicks,\u201d reporter Annie Lowrey writes. \u201cThe contract farmer raises them into chickens. The big company slaughters them for meat. It packages and brands that meat under one of dozens of labels. And it sells it cheap to the American consumer.\u201d<\/p>\n

So what\u2019s the big deal, you ask? Lowrey continues:<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/section>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u2018Monster\u2019 Turns Our Farmers into Serfs and Sharecroppers \u201cIt\u2019s like watching a state circle the drain.\u201d That\u2019s what journalist Corie Brown said about Kansas on a\u00a0recent Strong Towns podcast. This April, Brown\u00a0wrote a piece\u00a0for New Food Economy about her 1,800-mile drive through the state. She discussed the state\u2019s emptying out, noting firsthand the struggles of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,6,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37628","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-liberty","category-survival-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37628","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=37628"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37628\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37629,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37628\/revisions\/37629"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37628"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37628"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37628"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}