On approach to LAX it becomes nauseatingly clear that Los Angeles is a city of suburban/urban sprawl, which stretches its homogeneous breadth from Orange county all the way to the desert. It's ugly, even from the air. Looking down from that height, it's clear exactly how much land space was wasted for concrete and streets and houses that celebrate commonality.
Somehow, someway, the suburban mindset travels like an air born disease, which also affects people's sense of how to be neighborly. In the countryside, where generation after generation of farmers live and plow, big business landed and surveyed.
The landscape was beautiful and serene, and so they started buying up farmland. Farmers these days have a tough road, because industrialization has put a big fat feather pillow on the face of American food production and suffocated the first line of defense. Driving down prices to inflate their own bottom line, our mega-corporations like Tyson Foods, et all, have made living as a farmer practically a service to charity.
So when these companies come and offer money for land, the farmers see a profitable way out and sell and run, and Jeffersonian America's perfect independent citizen is one step closer to extinction. And now---welcome suburbanites to the country.
But there are farmers who stay and do what they do, which is, believe it or not, actually farm. The newly transplanted suburbanites hoping for countryside tranquility get a taste of sharing the road with tractors, smelling hogs and cows, breathing dust when the hay is bailed. And that's country life.
But that's not suburban life, and there is an inherent clash. There is a clash when a stray calf makes his way into the neighboring suburb. There is a clash when the farmer has a 1978 Chevy truck that doesn't match his suburban neighbor's idea of "transportation." There are grounds for lots of clashes.
But here's the question: why would you want to move to the country and build on a pint sized lot near hog farms and dairy farms and corn and bean fields, and then complain about the thousand acre hog farms and dairy farms and corn and bean fields that have been there for many, many more years than your suburb?
What's the point of leaving of Suburban-Where-You-Already-Are, USA? And if you do get that call-to-nature, and go, why complain about the lifestyle you are inherently joining by moving "to the country"? And why buy a house that probably looks like the one you are leaving?
Bitching about farmers in farmland makes as much sense as moving to Puerto Rico and bitching about the Puerto Ricans. Why move there if you aren't ready for the culture change? If you're closed minded, don't go. Do the locals a favor, por favor.
Farmers have it hard enough without a bunch of bored suburbanites knocking on their doors to tell them that their horses smell.
But know what? Horses and farmers built this damn country. Go pick up some literature by a man named Thomas Jefferson. And land developers: ignore a part of the country called Brown County, OH. It's really beautiful and we have a lot of farmers, and I like it just how it is. It smells like horses, cows, and pigs. It's dusty when it's hay season, there are tractors on the road, and at times, steam engines. Suburbanites, you would hate it.
*To read a discussion on the suburban encroachment topic on The H.A.M.B., click on this link: http://www.jalopyjournal.com/forum/showthread.php?t=284286&highlight=farmer Be warned, though, that this is a forum of traditional hot rodders. If it's not your type of thing, they will immediately sense this and out you. Also, if you're a dick, they will punish you, and you will have deserved their flagellation. Enjoy!
Skeptically Yours.
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