Did you ever think about what agriculture and the food system would be like if it was run on policies and practices that would benefit both farmers and consumers, for both present and future generations alike?

Dream on, you might think, but now a second question. Did you ever think what agriculture and the food system will be like if farmers and consumers don’t help change agriculture and the food system for the better now? Two simple questions but only the naive could believe  the status quo is for the maximum benefit of the food producers and/or
the consumers, either now or in the future.

If what I read sometime back is correct – and by sometime back I mean months ago, not years or decades ago – supposedly half of the human population is still fed by animal and human powered agriculture. I have no idea of the accuracy of that assessment, but the reality is that tractors aren’t a universal part of agriculture. To many farmers in North America where many would have a machinery yard as big or bigger than many of the smallest farms in the world, it may be hard to believe that if not half, that at least much of the world’s sustenance comes by way of animal and human powered agriculture. To many farmers in North America it may be hard to fathom how families could possibly make a living off such small plots of land, but the reality is that many farm families do indeed eke out a living off small plots of land, feeding themselves and the local and/or global market.

The guest opinion column in The Guardian of August 6 by Lloyd Kerry titled, "Cut the farmer some slack in debate over pesticides," started with the sentence, "Hardly a day goes by without seeing a cry in the media on how the farming industry on P.E.I. is poisoning Islanders with tons of pesticides." As much as I dislike pesticides, I agree that farmers need be given some slack as they weren't the ones that made agricultural policy or designed the curriculum in ag colleges and universities.
That first paragraph continued, "In her letter ("Pathway of poisons is expensive') Sandra Boswell warns of the poisons governments allow people to put on their lawns and fields. She mentions side effects: ‘anorexia, vomiting, muscle weakness, slowed heart rate, etc.' This is true, and more debate needs to take place on the use and misuse of pesticides." Yes, there needs be honest dialogue.

 Last September in this column, after quoting some of what Sue Monk Kidd had written in her book Firstlight regarding ". . . how important it is to create it (beauty) in the midst of ugliness, barrenness, and sorrow," I mentioned that I might be the middleman for two of her stories as a young nurse and a young mother. Well here’s the young nurse story retold.

That story had reappeared in the March 1995 issue of Guideposts on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of that publication. It was titled, "Don’t Let It End This way" and is retold here using some of her own words.

The previous column retold a heart-touching and heart-warming story out of Sue Monk Kidd’s book [Firstlight] from when she was a young mother with a baby girl and a three year old son. The poem that immediately follows is in effect a half-told story by an older mother that is far more heart-warning than heart-warming, but Lucy Gertrude Clarkin’s poem message to her children and her readers is as valuable as Sue Monk Kidd’s inspiring story. There is a quote attributed to Wordsworth that states, "Poetry is emotion recollected in tranquility." The words of Clarkin’s poem are in effect, no doubt, the recollected and distilled words of an older mother. That poem of Clarkin's  was discovered on the unusual grounds of a country church in Kelly’s Cross, P.E.I. and says succinctly:

 What follows is part two of a two part column and it needs more than a bit of introduction for those who haven’t read it or remembered what the previous column addressed.

One nifty feature with a word processor program is that one is able to find the words or phrases easily and quickly, even if it is a very long document. Pressing down at the same time both the Control key and the F key using Wordperfect accomplishes very quickly what could take quite a while "by hand." By hand, meaning of course running one’s eyes across every line searching for a word or phrase and hoping one doesn’t miss it. It’s one thing, for example to look for the word "agriculture" or any other word in a one or two page document, it’s quite another to find every use of that word in a many-page document.