Sign O' The Times

 There is a sign near my neighborhood that haunts me. It reads: No More Factory Farms. Stuck as it is to a chain link fence in the middle of some of the most urban landscape that Oakland has to offer, it seems a bit incongruous. Which isn't why it haunts me. Or maybe it's part of it. 

But the real echo in my head about factory farms is the one that reflects off my own experience with farms. The planter boxes I maintain and have maintained for the past few summers. I have grown a bushel of cucumbers, a great many cherry tomatoes, and we maintain a crop of potatoes from which we never seem to fully dig up and move on. There's nothing factory about that fraction of an acre, unless its the vegetables we buy from the supermarket up the street to supplement our rather meager production. This in turn reminds me of the way my father's green thumb seemed to extend primarily and specifically to growing zucchini that could not have been consumed by an army in a plot of our back yard that had always seemed better suited to hosting a swing set. 

Then there was the beet farm. The one in Wiggins, Colorado where we made our yearly Thanksgiving pilgrimage to come that much closer to the food for which we were so very thankful. There weren't a lot of beets on the table back then. Mostly because that was the business of the farm. Just like the pigs we met in the pens outside were only eventually destined to be part of our meal, going out to the farm meant visiting the corner of the sprawling acreage that was planted and harvested in rotation by those cousins, where they lived. The moment in time when Americans were raising their own food had passed by, and the idea of a family farm was under attack by the creepy reality of agribusiness. A life in which you would wake up in the morning and go out to milk the cow and get a few eggs from the chicken coop before breakfast has become the sort of thing we now imagine in the dystopian future after the human race has been forced out of the cities and made to fend for themselves in that old-timey way. 

Until someone figures out that you can get a lot more milking done with a machine and a whole herd of cows, and that chicken coop could be much larger and put together in such a way as to aid the collection of eggs as opposed to the comfort of the chickens. Currently, nearly twelve billion pounds of garden produce grown here in the United States becomes food waste. A situation not unlike my father's zucchini ranch, but on a much larger scale. Only in a factory could you imagine being paid not to produce what you were supposed to be making. That's what happens with many farm subsidies these days. 

Come to think of it, maybe we should have paid dad not to grow those zucchinis.