Respect Our Farmers

It seems to me that being a farmer is a pretty thankless job in many ways. It's hard work, it's not very lucrative & there are many obstacles outside of your control to worry about, like weather. We need farmers & the fruits of their labor. They should be respected, valued & appreciated in our society because they feed us.

But it seems that farmers are frequently getting shafted by local government regulations that favor sprawl. In the greater Pittsburgh area, there are frequent news stories about local farmers being unduly restricted or even driven out of business.

All too often, the stories are the same: Someone sells an old family farm to a developer who wants to build a lot of houses on postage-stamp sized lots to create a big, ugly subdivision.

With the archaic property tax scheme in PA, municipalities welcome sprawl with open arms, no matter how unsightly. Sometimes they even court it because more houses in the tax base equals more money in the coffers.

The developer then rapes the land of all it's charm, bulldozing stately forests to build a bunch of houses that all look exactly the same. Then they plant a little bit of grass & a few trees around because, hey everyone loves nature, right?

Soon, people with no imagination pay a lot of money to buy a house that looks just like all of the others, is too close to all the others & has no privacy. Then they all sign a code of conduct, effectively agreeing to the predetermined color scheme of the plan, prohibiting the hanging of laundry & forbidding such atrocities as swingsets.

Apparently, you want to project the illusion that you throw away clothes after wearing & simply buy new ones. You want the world to think that your children are entirely too refined to spend time swinging or acting like children.

Then they all move in to Stepford Villa & realize that there is a farm nearby. And you can see the farm & those cows are even more aesthetically horrendous than a jungle gym!

And then you realize that animals smell. And then you realize that you can actually hear the horses whinny or the whir of a tractor cutting hay. This is unbearable. It’s a thousand times worse than the Wilson’s new gutter – which is sage when they know damn well that they are only allowed to have pebble clay.

So what do you do? It’s a small community & you probably know the powers that be. Your kids play nobody-loses soccer together or you may even be on some commission or other yourself. Next thing you know, the township has passed some ridiculous new law that puts the farmer out of business so that the residents of Stepford Villa don’t ever have to see those cows or hear their moos again.

Finally, there may be an end in sight of this poor treatment of farmers. The PG reports that the PA Attorney General is calling out these practices & stepping up to protect farmers. It’s about time because farming is the #1 industry in PA & it’s something we can’t do without. Beyond the fact that this is just plain wrong & stupid, jobs depend on it & we need food to survive. So the residents of Stepford Villa may hate their neighbors but they’d be damn hungry without them so they should learn to appreciate them.