Regard for the Soil

I've added a new link to the left hand side hope ya'll check out. It's for the National Catholic Rural Life Conference. I'm still exploring the website but much of what they preach seems to fit with the agrarian lifestyle Maurin and Day encouraged and attempted with the many Worker Farms.
Agriculture is increasingly becoming an oligopoly of the land with a few large factory farms controlling the production and price of food, whether it be plant or animal. Food travels further from producer to consumer and a larger amounts of our foods are imported. Local shoppers purchase their food from a grocery store, which ships in everything from across the globe at super savings. Small farmers can't compete with the prices and have no market in the community.
At the heart of the Personalist and Distributist movements is the idea of keeping it local. Farmers grow for their families and sell the surplus to those in the local community who cannot raise corn, cattle, grain, etc. While those who run factory farms may care about the consumer, their very existence denotes an effort to keep prices low. In the process, animals are not raised the way God intended, plants are manipulated and ultimately the soil is depleted.
The CRLC website has all sorts of info on the "Ethics of Eatings" and our duty as Catholics to preserve sustainable agriculture and the family farm. Check it out and think about what you're eating.

Regard For The Soil

1. Andrew Nelson Lytle says:
The escape from industrialism
is not in socialism
or in sovietism.

2. The answer lies
in a return to a society
where agriculture is practised
by most of the people.

3. It is in fact impossible
for any culture
to be sound and healthy
without a proper regard
for the soil,
no matter
how many urban dwellers
think that their food
comes from groceries
and delicatessens
or their milk from tin cans.

4. This ignorance
does not release them
from a final dependence
upon the farm.

Peter Maurin, Easy Essay