Tag: farming

In many ways, the Los Angeles County Fair is not so different from county fairs all over the country ... except for its agricultural exhibit.

Here are the local puzzle pieces that we somehow need to fit together: great farms; committed, hard working farmers; a university of world class researchers; a highly participatory local political system; obesity; unemployment; lack of food processing capacity; plentiful fresh food that doesn't reach our plates; farmers going out of business; and fundraisers to buy farmland that people can't farm.

Call it Factory Planet: a world in which natural processes are treated as parts of a vast world-machine operated to produce a maximum amount of wealth for humans.

Hillsdale, MI. When I first thought about writing this it was the “Ten Dollar Tomato.”  But historians are more or less required to tell...

Patrick Deneen's excellent post this morning on populism, directly invoking Kansas, gives me the occassion to repost a short essay I wrote last year for my...

Moorpark, CA.  In October of 1997 I attended the Southern Historical Association’s convention in Atlanta because I wanted to hear Paul Conkin’s presidential address,...

Amid Alexis de Tocqueville’s writings on revolution in France, there is a passage that rings true for those of us who have spent time...

“Come in and look,” Quintín urged me, as he disappeared with a shuffle through the low doorway in his adobe house.  I got up...

Claremont, CA. Wendell Berry, writer and farmer and hero to the people, might move from the farmhouse to the big house. Speaking at one of...

Many who are alarmed at the prospect of the “abolition of man” have found in Huxley’s Brave New World a dark and salutary warning...