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Anti-agriculture groups working against you

I’m dumbfounded.

The e-mail messages continue to trickle in from those of you who would side with anti-agriculture groups such as PETA before “giving in” to corporate agriculture. What part of “PETA wants you to be a vegetarian” do you not understand? What part of “The Animal Liberation Front’s mission statement which is to effectively allocate resources (time and money) to end the ‘property’ status of nonhuman animals and the ALF objective which is to abolish institutionalized animal exploitation because it assumes that animals are property” do you not understand?

One reader accused me of being closed minded. Another said he eats rather well when with his vegetarian friends. Another said she’d rather side with the animal rights groups than those big corporate farms that are “stinking” up the countryside.

Let me set the record straight here. I am not asking you to “give in” to corporate anything. I’m asking you to stop and think for one minute. I am sorry that your friends, your neighbors, your father, uncle, grandparents and father-in-law had to sell their farms. I wish all children today could grow up like I did with two parents working at home on the farm raising hogs, cattle, corn, soybeans, wheat, milo and hay. I am sorry, but that is not a reality for many family farms today.

Chances are your friends, neighbors, father, uncle, grandparents and father-in-law worked hard, loved the land and their livestock and took good care of their equipment. Chances are they were smart, business savvy and maybe even pillars in their community.

Maybe “corporate agriculture” is at the root of their decline, but that does not mean that teaming up with people who believe that owning livestock should be illegal and butchering a pig illegal is going to have any positive outcome whatsoever.

One reader wrote to me, “We should maybe examine who our ‘friends’ in agriculture really are.” (He was suggesting that corporate agriculture is not a friend to the “small” farmer.)

Is corporate agriculture unfair competition? Are mega-farms running small, family farmers growing number 2 yellow corn and Round-up Ready soybeans out of business? Has contract finishing of hogs and turkeys changed the face of animal agriculture in America?

It does not matter how you answer those questions. The bottom line is that anti-agriculture groups are working against you. They are working against corporate agriculture. They are working against 4-H and FFA, Farmers Union and Farm Bureau. They are working against Brownfield Network and Illinois AgriNews and American Corn Growers and National Corn Growers and meat-eating Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians and Green Party candidates.

Wake up, people. These anti-agriculture groups are working against agriculture.