Boxhead in the Lilly Pillies

Lettuce and other vegetables
on a farm in California.

What I found in the news
In "Why Industrial Farms Are Good for the Environment," Jayson Lusk argues that the massive decline in the traditional, small American farm over the past century, when almost half of Americans moved from farms to cities, has been largely positive for the environment (2016). Lusk reports that farmers long ago "dreamed about tools to make their jobs easier, more efficient and better for the land," and those tools now exist, from bio-technology to monitoring by drones. Lust says that these tools have enabled US farms, which remain largely family owned, to greatly increase food production while reducing the amount of land and labour used to produce that food.

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My response

Swan Bay and environs
 - my childhood home.

For me, the single most impressive statistic given in the article was that from 40% before World War I, the number of Americans now living on farms has decreased to only 1%. That got me thinking about all those people who no longer grow up on farms. I'm very glad that I did grow up on a farm My childhood was spent running around my family's dairy and sugar cane farm in Northern New South Wales, about 700 km north of Sydney. I have lots of memories, although not so many photos, of playing in the tussocks with my brothers and sisters, of having picnics under massive oak trees that my father had left untouched amid the fields, and most magical of all, of exploring in the patch of native scrub that he had left uncut.

When my ancestors arrived from Italy less than 140 years ago, the entire region was covered by the thick mix of trees and bushes. We weren't allowed to go there too often, which both protected it from damage and kept it special for us. The scrub on our farm was almost impossible to walk through, and the vine laden trees cut out the sunlight, as we explored tunnels and caves formed by the native plants. Sometimes we even saw possums, bandicoots, the spiny echidna and other small native animals. We had to watch out for deadly snakes, and it was best to avoid walking into the spider webs, although the spiders at least tended not to be deadly. Our parents also taught us which berries it was safe to eat, strictly warning not to eat any we were not sure about. It must be forty years now since I've enjoyed a crisp, tart lilly pilly, the small crimson berries we gobbled straight from the trees.

Around the time I started primary school, we switched from dairy farming to sugar cane, but we continued to keep a few house cows for milk, and we also had cattle for our own meat supply, although we sent the slaughtered animals to a local butcher for converting into steaks, mince, roasts and other fleshly delights. Since there were so few cows, we had names for them all, like Boxhead, named for the unusual shape of his head. Boxhead and his mates would hang around the scrub, but spent most of their time eating the grass on strips of land between the cane fields and on the paddocks set aside for them. The chickens that gave us eggs and the ducks that made tasty additions to the menu were not usually named. Our house and its associated buildings beside the tree-lined Richmond River were as fun a playground as the farmland. What Google Maps shows today has changed a bit from what I remember.

But like the 40% of Americans who decided they preferred city life to the farm, I also escaped as soon as I could. Since finishing high school and leaving the area to study at Sydney University, I have loved living in large cities. It's great to enjoy the quiet, green beauty of my brothers farm, complete with koalas, when I visit family, but traditional farming was also very hard and isolating work, as I also remember well from getting up at 4:00 AM to bring in the cows for milking in all weather and the tedium of days spent on a tractor ploughing large fields. I never wanted to be a farmer, and am happy for traditional small farms to continue to disappear as larger ones more efficiently use less of our limited environment to feed us better than ever. I don't know, but suspect that the same is happening in Thailand as the children of farmers sensibly opt for better lives in the big city. Who, given a choice, would not escape life on the farm?

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Reference

Lusk, J. (2016, September 23). Why Industrial Farms Are Good for the Environment. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/25/opinion/sunday/why-industrial-farms-are-good-for-the-environment.html