And I don't mean to dishonor your Grandmother, but old people have a strong tendency to remember past hardships rather fondly... while enjoying current comfort.. (I walked six miles to school every day, in the snow and it was up hill both ways!)

Not having money meant that they could not leave the farm and placed them at the mercy of the small merchants and the "company store."

And it was the economic boom of the post WWII era that brought factories and unions where there had been farms and sharecropper.

This, coupled with a technology expansion in farming equipment, destroyed the requirement for both sharecroppers and the "hired man." John Deere  was more reliable and less costly.

I share your belief that we must honor our past, and that we must insure our children have a knowledge of how to grow, raise, harvest and slaughter our own food, but having lived it, I do not want to return to the past.

ok, who is this guy, and what has he done with the real jim? that sound you hear is ice cracking in hell, because jim and i are in agreement.

peaches, if the small family farm had actually been a self-sustaining enterprise, the compulsion to leave wouldn't have existed. it wasn't, because the top soil had been blown away, hence, the term "dust bowl".

even before the economic disaster of the 30's, the small farm had already started giving way to larger, non-family operations; with the industrialization of farming, economies of scale made the large operation far more cost efficient than the small farm could possibly hope to ever be. when dealing with fungible goods, cost efficiency is what makes profit.

Thanks for the comments!

Jim, you don't dishonor my grandparents and I agree with you that we all tend to remember our hardships of the past with a sense of nostalgia that can be mistaken for fondness. What I did not say in this diary was something my grandmother also told me. I wrote this after driving my grandma to my grandpas gravesite this past July.

"You wouldn't even believe it, Andy. The wind, it was blowing. Where there were fences was a mound of dirt and the pigs and cows would walk right over the fences. People were starving in the cities. We had food. We always had food. But, Dad worked so hard. He would have to go to the county and pick up feed for the cows. Just a little handful a day - enough to keep them alive, and then in the winter he had to repay them for the feed by working all day putting gravel down on the roads. He found a trucker to take the horses to a field near Granite Falls, because they had some rain, see? And, then we heard that one of the horses had sleeping sickness. So, they sent him home and he died. Dad worked so hard...

Farming is hard work, there is no doubt and the risks associated with weather, yields and crops can lead to even worse hardship in a short while.

But, the question I have is whether or not we have really made our lives easier in today's modern world and where we are going. CP makes the point about subsidies and he is correct. The family farm is not viable or sustainable when exposed to world markets without some sort of government subsidy. The question is whether or not we want family farms to be sustainable and viable because a global free market does not. Especially one that is regulated by world trade organizations and free trade treaties where a farmers are restricted in labeling his or her product as being free of GMOs, hormone free, locally grown, etc. So, the question is whether or not we want to have food that is healthy and soil that is not depleted over time like what happened in the dust bowl years and continues to happen today throughout America due to the free market sustainable, but not ecologically long-term sustainable industrial agricultural practices.

I know from where both of you are arguing and I freely admit to being nostalgic for times long past. I have embraced ideas that can be described as Luddites, because I know longer have faith in free markets, science, big government, or technology to be either sustainable or to lead to conditions where democracy can thrive. In fact, as my later diary on power suggest, I believe free markets and new technologies are leading to the exact opposite. There are a litany of reasons for holding such views that can be categorized under environmental, technological, militarism, imperialism, or economics. To me it is intuitive and as a parent I have come to believe I have a responsibility to teach my children the skills and practices necessary to feed themselves through cultivating the land, despite it not being a pecuniary sustainable career choice. It just might save their lives and a few other peoples. Then again, someone might drop a bomb on them.

[Sigh]

Forget about profit and think about community, thrift, savings and debt. Don't let the Greenspans of the world confuse you into believing there is something natural and free about global free markets - there's not. The financial world of debt financing is complex, but sound, thrifty, pragmatic economics is really very simple.

My man - Ventura.

In the interests of brevity, we'll confine our examples to banks. Until well into the 20th century, most banks in the former U.S. were locally owned and operated. A merchant, farmer, or skilled laborer, using measurable collateral (which might include the banker's knowledge of his or her character), applied for a loan at reasonable interest, then spent that loan locally, benefiting the community. The bank, profiting from the interest, in turn loaned more money locally, also benefiting the community. This was, more or less, honest commerce, which is, in its essence, trade - a means by which work was done and goods and services were made available. Mostly, these goods and services were not superfluous; they concerned the basics - food, tools (in its most inclusive meaning), clothing, shelter. Quality was a value. Materials were durable, and objects of all kinds - from typewriters, say, to houses - were built to last. Work, too, was a value. To do even humble tasks well and responsibly was generally considered worthy of respect. If this portrayal sounds too rosy, we need only remember that every human system from time immemorial has been rife with excess, greed, pettiness, exploitation, and cruelty; this one was no exception. Nevertheless, this form of commerce, at its heart, involved supplying what is necessary to an orderly society, and necessity makes for a kind of baseline of sanity.

Time passed; things changed. How they changed is all too well-known; no need to go into detail here. Suffice it to say that, by the end of the 20th century, the bank was no longer locally owned. It had become a "branch," as it was called, of a much larger tree. The health of the community was no longer necessary to the health of the bank. (We are using banks only as a convenient example; the same became true of many enterprises.) Commerce was still important, for life had to be sustained, but speculation became more profitable. A citizen applied for a loan, but it was no longer the same loan. The banks "packaged," as the saying went, many loans and sold those loans to larger entities; these entities, in turn, used the packaged loans as collateral for grander investments and speculations. In this system, banks (and other enterprises) profited from the debt of the community. It was in the interest of banks (etc.) to keep the community in debt. The more debt the community incurred, the more the banks (etc.) could package and sell that debt to larger entities, and the more the larger entities could prosper by speculation. Gradually, speculation replaced commerce as the central source of wealth.