Letter Back to a Farmer
Wendell,
First, I want to say that I appreciate you taking the time to communicate your thoughts on matters I’m sure are very important to you. I realize it must be hard to try to pack years of knowledge and opinions into a short letter and I do respect that. I think it’s easy for us young farmers to feel like it is our responsibility to understand each and every one of the injustices that have occurred since the Industrial Revolution, so having older farmers willing to share their wisdom and demonstrate their learning curve gives me a lot of hope.
I was actually quite surprised and rather grateful to see someone mention the current state of Appalachia and what exactly big name farming industries have done to the spirit of the community there. It isn’t a subject I hear spoken on or named too frequently in the grand sphere of the discussion on agriculture. Unfortunately, it seems that poverty there has created a perpetual state of purposelessness. I think you hit the nail on the head when you said “without connection to the land, people become useless to themselves and to one another except by the intervention of money. Everything they need must be bought. Things they cannot buy they do not have.” Reading it stated so clearly really helped me to understand the cycle of poverty that that region is experiencing. They have no money because, like you said, their former jobs are being carried out by machinery, and they have no connection to each other or to the land because that very issue has made it quite impossible to make ends meet.
I do think, though, that the subject of land and belonging to the land is hard to approach without considering the history of the land and the people who inhabited it before us. Interestingly, when you mention that politicians and how the system that is currently in place is not coming to save the people of rural Kentucky, it makes me think of the indigenous communities who have likely been displaced from that very land and who also cannot count on the government that carried out that act of displacement to help. It does make me wonder what your take on how first peoples fit into the picture of North American community-oriented action. How do you approach the issue of colonialism and how it fits into where we stand now and do you think it has affected the way us settlers have viewed ourselves in relation to the land we inhabit?
On another subject, I did find your proposed solutions to our current predicament to be both helpful and amusing – amusing because if distrusting (see also: completely rejecting) the federal government and looking within your direct community to get things done isn’t truly an Appalachian way of looking at the world, then I don’t know what is. I did find the list to be very inspiring, though. I think that because a lot of us were raised within the industrialized system, it is easy to forget how much power us as individuals have because we are so used to belonging to a machine-cog mentality. In the same way, we are also unable to see any solutions other than working within that system because we were never raised to believe in our own capability of creating change. I do believe that this is only part of the issue though, and that there is quite an uphill journey when it comes to human rights and equity – because we are a country of over 300 million and while, our immediate communities are a perfect place to start the fight for food security and justice, the fight should not end at the county line. That is why I so greatly appreciate the willingness of farmers across the country to share their knowledge and thoughts on the current state of the agricultural world. Through that, all of you have helped me to see that my decision to become involved in farming and the origin of our food is one of the most simple acts of inspiring change and I hope to continue to be a part of this changing world for the rest of my life.
Kathryn Allen