4.2.06

The Agricultural Interior

In order to operate a farm, you have to be a crazyman, especially in the early 1900s before all this modern machinery started to get introduced. You had to sacrifice, and I mean sacrifice your overall sanity, earthly comfort, and thin skin for the privilege of being able to make something from nothing.

Once a person had started a farm, there were many, many things they had to constantly be thinking about to be able to keep their operation going. The farmer and their family had to be their own personal accountant, keeping track of purchases and making sure that they wouldn’t go overboard just to fall into horrible debt. This seemingly simple job needed the awareness of a few things. First, the farmer had to keep his eyes open to the ever-changing reality of earth. What was thriving? How much precipitation was coming down? Was it a dry year or a wet year? Failing to keep the mind open to these many factors would result in death to the crops, or not maximizing the potential of a farm.

Not maximizing the potential of a farm was a horrible thing. The farmer and his family had to feed themselves, and make a profit. Failing to submit to nature’s delicate conditions would result in hunger and a tiny profit. Most would rather be self-sufficient than depend on the relief that many relied on.

The main factors that a farmer has to pay attention to today are quite similar to what they were in the 1900s, albeit with less extreme of a risk. Today, farmers are shielded with the power of science through the mysterious power of being able to speak in the language of nature and be able to change the very particles that make up a seed to meet the typical farmer’s desire. The race of the farmer is also dying out. This is due to the gradual automation the trade has been experiencing, thus requiring less human muscle and sinew. To go into more detail, the general definition of a farm has changed! In the 1900s, I’d guess that it would be:

Farm – Area where a family of humans dwell and produce grains by working the ground and meat by bribing the animals, all for the community to eat.

Nowadays, it’d probably be something more along the lines of this:

Farm – Area owned by a corporation where employed workers operate machines and pump fertilizer into the ground to get the desired results.

The owner of the farm still has to worry about the same general stuff though. Pests still affect crops, and we can’t control precipitation. The trade of farming has changed a lot, and is due to change more, moving less from the family-run farm to the corporation-run farm. There are also new places like the community co-ops at Fort Whyte that support the traditional nature of farming. There are also farms where new-age hippies go to and try to revert almost fully to the olden ways of doing things, with the exceptions of computers and televisions.

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