Yet another hot and rainy day outside, as I look outside today. Everything is such a nice green color outside. Yeah, 'All He Wanted Was To Be Free' website is currently down. It's sticky out.

I was looking at two articles online about agriculture and small time organic farming, that were interesting, so I reduced them down, printed them up, and put them in my archives of things the are interesting to look at—at least for now, I'll probably won't keep them. I've been thinking about agriculture and forestry quite a bit lately, probably because I saw that article last week in The Nation, that was a review of Wendell Berry's book on agriculture.

I've written about farming a few times here before. I've noted their freedom from police harrassment most of the time, their depency on nature, and their closeness to it. Then I wrote about freedom, economic demands, and their crack nature of farm subsidies.

Yet not much on debt and low profit that tends to pleque farmers. Heck, if that wasn't a problem we wouldn't have those massive farm subsidy programs—like loss prevention (payments for loss crops and products) and conservation programs (which are good, because they encourage better use of land).

Thoreau once said In the wilderness is the preservation of the world. I guess that is probably true. But then, as you probably would note, that farming is not wilderness, it's taking wilderness and exploiting it for mans use. Yet unlike cities, they are also keeping many animals and plants alive, they are learning about what nature truely is.

To quote Jerry Russell in his Sierra Club book On the Loose:

One of the best-paying professions is getting ahold of pieces of country you jve in your mind, learning their smell and their moods, sorting out the pieces of a view, deciding what grows there and why, how many steps that hill will take, where this creek winds and where it meets the other below, what elevation timberline is at now, where you can walk this reef at low tide or have to climb around, which contour lines on a map mean better clifts or mountains. This is the best kind of ownership, and the most permanent.

Interesting. Nature is nothing short of magnificant, and the only fool out there, is one who tries to understand the incomphrensenble. While we rarelly use such non-pragmatic thought, we probably should when it comes to farming and nature. It's a great tool, if we know how to use it.

Relying on others makes us all too morally corrupt, it takes responsibility and choice, and tosses them out the window. Do you really know how that commerically made milk was made? By jamming cows in as small of space possible, feeding them antibotics, because they live in unsanitary conditions; milk that passes state & federal restrictions, yet you never know the quality, because it was bottled by some giant corporations. And yes, organic products by factory farms exist, so that's no better. Or clothes from Siapon with the Made in USA label, created in sweatshops. So if you want to know what it's from, do it yourself.