Judy and Lyla.

If you believe everything you read and hear and see about family farms, they are doomed, unable to survive in the Corporate Nation, where profit and size seem to overwhelm every other ideology and impulse. To see what is about to be lost, just look at the photo of Judy Baldwin and her daughter Lyla, able to live their lives in the proud and individualistic nature of the family farm, a mainstay of American tradition, values and life.

I wouldn’t want Judy’s job, but she loves it, and her knowledge of cows, animal health, genetics and breeding and nutrition is amazing. Family farms are disappearing because they can’t compete in the Corporate Nation, which is relentlessly degrading service, work, the law, health care, security and quality of life. Corporations hide from us behind websites, corrupt the political system, treat human beings worse than most farmers treat their cows, compete unfairly with small businesses,  eviscerate loyalty and security and destroy the opportunity of the individual to life a free life of their choosing. We all seem to believe we need things that corporations sell  technology, medications and proceedures,  news, health care, notions of aging and retirement.

When I visit family farms to take photos, I think I am angrier than they are about what’s happening to them, as they tell me they can’t survive endless government and and animal rights regulations, rising costs, expensive technology, bizarre milk pricing practices,  competition with cheap immigrant labor and corporate farms that house hundreds of cows in warehouses day and night as milking machines.

Anyway, back to work on my Bedlam Farm Diary, Vol 2. One family farm. Hope to be done by Monday.