Grist's Dispatches From the Fields feature the reflections of Ariane Lotti and Stephanie Ogburn, who are working on small farms in Iowa and Colorado this season. Lotti writes:
Why should we care about the loss of what has come to be called the "agriculture of the middle," the mid-sized family farms that were once the backbone of the farm economy? In short, because we lost the grassroots base for action on federal farm policy.
As the farm crisis took hold, policy change could not happen fast enough to stop or reverse the heavy bleeding of farmers out of America's heartland. (Nor, one could argue, was there the political will to keep the mid-sized family farmers on the land.) Farmers lost the farm and left Rural America, and with them went the voice of opposition to farm policies that rewarded the consolidation, monoculturization, and corporatization of agriculture.
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