Now Shoo grew to be one of the best bulls in all the county. He was known far and wide for being pretty darn good at doing what bulls are supposed to do.  Other farmers would occasionally even bring a few cows over to visit ole Shoo.  Every year Daddy would have a nice bunch of calves that looked a lot like Shoo, and Shoo came to think very highly of himself.  He was the king of our farm, and everybody knew it.  Shoo would spend his day lounging around and when the occasion called for it, he would wander off into the herd of cows and do what bulls do to earn their keep.  

The years went by and one day Shoo noticed that Daddy had a little bull calf over in another pen.  Shoo remembered back to the time when he was a young bull.  He could barely recall that Daddy had taken the older bull on the farm off in a trailer down the road somewhere, and just about that time Shoo started receiving the grand treatment. 

Now like I said earlier, Shoo was smarter than most and he knew that he liked life here and would just as soon keep things the way they were.  But how?  He knew that my Daddy was always happy when Shoo was out doing his job, and by golly by gum, that’s just what he’d do.  But old Shoo also knew that as he was getting older, sometimes it took awhile for even the prettiest cows to get him. “in the mood.” 

Then one day while Shoo was eating his hay he noticed that there was a bundle of paper in his hay.  Now while Shoo was smart, he was, of course, just a bull.  He took a bit of the paper in his mouth and started to chew.  Now about that same time, a very pretty little cow walked by and gave old Shoo… the look.   Shoo, having been well rested from all his thinking about his problem, immediately took the matter in hand, shall we say.  The next day Shoo again took a bit of the paper in his mouth to chew, and again another pretty little cow sashayed by with similar results.  Did I mention that as bulls go, Shoo was smarter than most?  Shoo got to thinking that this paper must be bringing back the vigor of his youth. So he gobbled up a bunch of the paper and hid the rest throughout his pile of hay.  As often happens, mind over matter took over, and all of a sudden Shoo was doing his job so well that it made Mama and us kids blush.  The cows even became a little scared when old Shoo was in the pasture.  Daddy, on the other hand, was very pleased and even bought a few more cows to keep Shoo busy.  

This went on for awhile and in Shoo’s next pile of hay he found even more paper, and Shoo chowed down.  But all this paper along with the extra activity started taking its toll on Shoo.  He started getting skinnier and skinnier, and Daddy started giving him more and more feed, but old Shoo just kept eating his stash of paper.  Pretty soon, Shoo was looking pretty ragged, and it was plain to all that old Shoo just couldn’t keep up.  But Shoo was afraid that if he stopped eating the paper, he wouldn’t be able to take care of all those cows like he was supposed to.  

This continued until the time came for all those cows to bring into this world their calves.  But, low and behold that time came and went and only a few calves were born, and for some reason they looked more like that new little bull.  Then Daddy remembered how one of us kids left a gate open one day and the new bull got into the pasture with the cows for a couple of hours.         

Without the income that comes from new calves, we didn’t have much and just struggled through the next several years.  It was a tough time for us on the farm for awhile and Daddy even had to work in town part-time to make ends meet.   Daddy took old Shoo away in a trailer, and I do remember we ate a lot of hamburger for awhile. 

We learned a valuable lesson from Shoo back then.  You see, a bull full of bad paper is only worth as much as the hamburger you can make from him.   

I consider them perfect mowers.  They are fueled with the same free grass that I want to cut, sunlight and water.  These wonder mowers also fertilize the lawn as they mow.  They trim to the very edges, under fences and around rocks and they will even trim the bushes — a little too much if you aren’t careful.  

As you’ve probably figured out by now, these mowers aren’t made of steel.  These mowers are our herd of dairy goats.  These goats can mow a half-acre yard in about two days, depending on the height of the grass. The grass will be clipped evenly and neatly.  I hear sheep also do a good job of mowing, but for us goats are the ticket.

When the goats can’t keep up we have a scythe as a back up.  It’s hard to describe how it feels to have a quality tool like a scythe in your hands.  This is a tool that is impossible to improve upon.  The blade, when sharpened properly, cuts through grass almost effortlessly with the momentum of your swing.  The action of the grass after it is cut reminds me of the cartoon character Wile E. Coyote when he falls of a cliff. There is always that little hesitation before the fall.  Tall grass reacts the same way.  As the blade cuts through the grass, there is a slight pause like the grass can’t believe that it has just been sliced off at its base. The grass continues to stand for a split second before falling over all neatly aligned in opposite the direction of your swing. Taller grass can then be left to dry for a few days and put in the barn as hay, or most often we just throw it over the fence for the goats to feast on. 

In the meantime my neighbors are buzzing around their yards on their zero- turning- radius mowers, shaking their heads, and wondering how in the world they ended up living next to somebody like me. 

For years, Congress has encouraged the expansion of large scale, industrial agriculture and slowly-but-surely killed small diversified and localized agriculture.   Farm bill after farm bill continues to subsidize just a few commodity crops leading to bigger and bigger monoculture farms. Now if you were in the business of making a wide range of products — some selling better than others — and the government comes along and guarantees to buy all you could produce of just one of your products, what would you do?   You’d do what most American farmers have done, you would produce as much as you could as efficiently as you could. 

The economics are very simple.  Farmers cannot differentiate their commodity products.  One kernel of dent corn is indistinguishable from another.  So, a farmer can only increase their profitability by growing as much as possible, as efficiently as possible.  This was the theory behind 70’s era Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz’s mantra to, “get big or get out” and “plant fencerow to fencerow. “  The result of this policy is high fructose corn syrup, feedlot cattle and concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO) pork and poultry.  And who benefits?  According to our politicians, you do, in the form of cheap and abundant food. But the real beneficiaries are the Archer Daniels Midlands of the world.  And while you might think the current run up in commodity prices might hurt ADM, you would be wrong.  In our appetite for cheap fuel for our cars, what was formerly food is now being diverted into the production of fuel.  And the industrialists are taking full advantage of their control of the commodity supply driving food prices up.   

We are finding this formerly “cheap and abundant food” comes at a very high price.  This industrial food is not only making us fat and sick, but is poisoning us.   It also contributes to  the degradation of our soil, and the destruction of rural  communities.

But more importantly, our modern industrial food system has placed us, both physically and philosophically far from the sources of our food.  We don’t know who grows our food, or where it comes from.  If our food supply becomes tainted, as the FDA is discovering, it is impossible to find the source of the contamination.  This has led to big government consumer groups to call for fruit and vegetable tracing and the USDA to propose the National Animal Identification System (NAIS) to trace your food supply from the producer to your table. 

But here’s an idea.  Wouldn’t our food supply be safer if you knew the farmer that produces your food?   Think of it, instant traceability with no huge taxpayer funded boondoggle program.  Or even better, grow your own food, talk about tracing efficiency!  No bar codes, and no middle man, just you and your garden.

This was an actual telephone conversation I had the morning of December 10^th 2007.   I didn’t think too much about it other than this was the typical tactic I have seen over and over in my time in politics.  Later that day, another seemingly unrelated incident happened when my wife went to a local organic grocery to pick up a few things.  My oldest daughter wanted some spinach.  My wife picked up a package of frozen spinach and read the label.  This particular spinach was certified organic by a company in California, distributed by a company in Connecticut, and in very small print on the bottom of the package it was marked, “Product of China.”    

At that point, it hit me, everything that so many had worked for over the years in the organic food movement was lost.  When I say “lost,” I really mean stolen.  The hippy farms that the industrial farmers made fun of for so many years are now the objects of corporate covetousness.  Under the guise of free markets, safe food and standardization, the industrialists took their plans to Washington to take the hippy farms as their own, and certified organic was born.  The irony of it all is that the industrialists got the hippy farmers to fight their legislative battles for them.  Now, the state of organic is industrial confined feeding operations, international distribution systems and Chinese spinach.  In the meantime, local farmers who try to produce products for their neighbors find themselves on the receiving end of the government’s wrath.   

To bring this story back to the beginning, I am arguing that we need to be a little smarter, a little more organized, and a little less willing to fall for the Republican or Democratic party’s, either / or paradigms.    As a group, we don’t fit into their checkboxes.  We are hippies, liberals, libertarians, born again Christian conservatives, vegetarians, and omnivores, but above these designations, we see ourselves as stewards.   We are in agreement that we are sick and tired of being made sick and tired by the industrial food establishment.  We want to sell our products to our neighbors, and when we say neighbors we don’t include China.  Spinach grown in China, sold by somebody in Connecticut and inspected by another company in California is not and cannot be sustainable.