"Organic" Farming and the True Cost of Food-A Small Farmers Perspective

[fasttense]

117. You are an example of what this poster is complaining about.

You say we small farmers are not progressive? Do you know how many free range eggs we donate to the food banks every year? Do you know how much of our produce we give away to soup kitchens?

Do you know that those 99 cents a lb chicken legs are pumped full of salt water? up to a third. So that .99 cents a pound you are paying is actually going for water. Do you know your government tax dollars go to subsidies big corporate farms. So, that $4.00 a pound ground beef, or pink slime, is subsidies by your tax dollars. If they had to compete on a fair playing field, their ground beef prices would triple. So in the end you are paying a whole lot more for the cheap food, you just don't know it.

When we went to get our $50 permit from the state, in order to sell eggs we were turned down because we had a fish tank with a gold fish in our study. Every single egg sold from within the state gets inspected but all those out of state cheap, cheap eggs are rarely inspected, that's why that factory in Iowa had to recall it's contaminated eggs. They had NOT been inspected in over 5 years and had to recall over 250 million dozen eggs in 25 states. Yet a small farmer can't sell an egg because they have a goldfish tank in their study.

Chickens are NOT chickens, not when your tax dollars go to paying off the corporate chicken farm to abuse his flock and then pump them full of arsenic and antibiotics so that those cheap eggs you are eating are slowly making you sick.

We pay our part time farm workers $10 an hour, while corporations are using illegal labor at $3.00 an hour. Tells us again how we are NOT liberal.

I could go on about how we have no waste to dump into our rivers and we do NOT pollute our country, I could tell you how your tax dollars go to the rich corporate farmer while trampling on the small farmers, I could go on and on but I have a farm to run and I'm already late with my morning chores.

So, before you slur every small farmer in the country, maybe you should look at the whole process of what is involved in our food system and know your subject matter.