Small Family Farms are What We Want Our Future to Look Like If you could be on a government panel to help delegate how to spend 250 billion tax dollars to help our citizens, how would you spend the money? Would you want to continue to financially support the production of the main commodities like wheat, rice, and corn grown by large corporate farms? Or do we want to reinforce and protect small farms so that we can guarantee sustainable and nutritional food production? Small farms provide better health for the consumers and environment by keeping food production more local. They also boost the local economy by providing jobs; therefore, we cannot afford to lose our small family farms to these large, corporate mega-farms. Sustainable farming …show more content…
The taste of an apple just picked from an apple tree is much more scrumptious then the apple that numerous people have touched at the grocery store. Christopher Ketcham likes to quote Eliot Coleman, athur of The New Organic Grower, who notes, “That an average 2.5-acre farm suffices to provide enough produce for 100+ locals for a year.” Larger farms pollute the food with different pesticides and growth additives, small farms do not use any kind of the chemicals that would be harmful to the human body. With the bigger farms, the number of various places the fruits and vegetables end up traveling before it gets to the final destination to be sold is flabbergasting but, with small farms you know the food has not been handled to the same extentand traveled a much shorter distance to the market. Small farms support the economy by employing the people in their community instead of using the new high-tech heavy machinery. Another way small farms help with their local economy is by purchasing the supplies and material they need from the local stores in their community. Areas having more small farms have lower proverty and unemployment rates, higher average household incomes, and greater socioeconomic