The Evolution The Agricultural Age

So, at the dawn of the agricultural age, farming was a very arduous business. Even with livestock, tilling the soil was back-breaking work. The whole family toiled from sunrise to sunset to grow enough hay and grain to feed themselves and their livestock. And there was uncertainty too because the farming family was at the mercy of Mother Nature. A cool, wet summer or a hot, dry summer could devastate the family’s crops. Hail, locusts, torrential downpours, insects, a late frost in spring, an early frost in the fall, war, fire, thieves were all headaches for the farm family. And throughout the ages, farming did not much change. Animals sickened and died. Early spring was a remarkably busy time as horses, sheep, goats and cattle labored to birth their young and fields had to be prepared for sowing!

Farming families were large. They had to be because there was just too much work for any father to do and few families were wealthy enough to afford paid labor until the harvest. And while tools and techniques improved, the lot of the farmer did not really change until the mid twentieth century. Sadly farming did not change for the better although the lot of the individual farmer did improve for some years with the advent of expensive modern machinery, subsidies, credit unions strictly for farmers and various cooperatives.

Today, few family farms exist. Farming has become another victim of government and Corporate America. Livestock for food are kept in appalling conditions, pumped full of hormones antibiotics as they await slaughter and die in terror on the killing floor contaminated by urine, feces and blood. Vegetables and grains are genetically modified, sprayed with pest and insecticides and watered with contaminated water. When they are harvested, the crops are radiated, gassed and in the case of grains…milled, bleached and God knows what! The ancients that made farming a decent family’s living would eat none of the “food” we eat today.
So what are we to do? Read on……………..