> Alan Rudy wrote:
> > Not only is Joseph right but a huge percentage of "family farms" in the
> US
> >that don't hire seasonal employees earn the majority of their income in
> >multigenerational pluriactive employment off the farm... across the
> >mid-west, the majority of small "family" units now hire a farm manager
> (who
> >also manages a number of other units) to determine what commodity to
> plant,
> >how to maximize production and who to hire, when, to do that...
>
> Is this some kind of a joke?
>
> I don't have time right now to get into it but just a very quick search
> found this.
>
> "Hired farmworkers, who include farm and nursery workers, livestock
> workers,
> farmworker supervisors, and farm managers, make up 30 percent of all
> farmworkers (the other 70 percent are paid/unpaid family members)."
> http://www.ers.usda.gov/Briefing/LaborAndEducation/FarmLabor.htm#Numbers
>
> <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk>
>
I don't know what planet you live on sometimes... off-farm work by farm
families wouldn't be counted by the USDA as farm labor... secondly if - here
in the mid-west - a farm manager hires machinery operators to till,
fertilize, plant, spray herbicides on, and harvest the crops, usually some
kind of corn, soy, wheat mix, across a significant number of farms, s/he
wouldn't need that many people to cover lots of farms where the farm
residents could still be being counted by the USDA - perhaps the source of
the most corrupt and purposely inaccurate statistics collected by the
federal government... I know, I worked with them extensively in CA and MI.
Secondly, please look up the definition of a farm - I knew about thirty "farmers" about 25 miles NW of Boston who had an acre of apple trees or a tree farm as a tax break, most years their trees went unharvested or were made available for U-pick (no labor) - and think about the number of small farms relative to the number of large farms and then think about the amount of unreported farm labor and then think about the statistics again. Around mid-Michigan (and I here the same about upstate NY, western MA, and VT/NH, there are an ever-increasing number of u-pick, once-market oriented, berry and fruit producers and more and more maple-syrup as a sideline "farms"...
Furthermore, you'll notice how I said "across the mid-west", I did not say the farm manager world was true across the northeast, mid-Atlantic or small farm south (I don't know about this issue in those regions) where units are even smaller than they are here.
But even with all this, do the hundreds of thousands of small farms that grow corn, or alfalfa, or blueberries, or apples, or milk cows for direct marketing, cooperatives, Kroger, Meijer or WalMart's "local" produce section have any role in setting prices? Do the majority of them have any engagement with reconnecting consumption and production? Are anything like the majority of them even partially cosmopolitan families interested in diversifying their commodity mix, participating in alt-, slow- organic-food production/consumption and/or engaging their children in intellectual pursuits and travel experiences around the globalizing nation and planet? Does most alt-, slow- or organic food consumption get consumed in an alternative, slow or socially organic manner? Isn't the fastest growing sector of these production/consumption arenas been snack, canned, frozen and prepared foods for the last 15+ years?
I'm an alt-consumer and a bit of a foodie but I have no illusions about its transformative power having worked closely with people who believe in the social ecological transformative power (and others, in the movement, who're deeply critical of it) for twenty years now and watching them get more and more angry and depressed as their market share grew and grew and grew... but just about always in directions and by means they disapproved of because it went against their communitarian and populist assumptions, hopes and dreams.