Farming is important to all of us. It’s really easy to forget this because, in the Western World, most of our wants usually revolve around manufactured products and we, sort of, assume we can eat what we want when we like. So why is farming and farmers important to the rest of us?
I don’t mean “Yeah OK, sure”.
I mean “Yeah! Really important! Like it’s a major issue!”
Here’s why I think farms are really, really important and we need to think much more about them or we may possibly do something rather silly … like dying!
It all boils down to eating, breathing and not getting toasted!
Firstly, everything we eat comes from farms. Perhaps one day we will be able to chemically produce nutrition for our bodies and take it in the form of tablets. Perhaps that would even be a good thing, although perhaps not much fun. I have to confess that, if I had to do the cooking, I’d almost certainly be a vegetarian. But, at this stage in our evolution, before we eat food, we have to grow food. The place we grow our food is on farms.
Secondly, everything we breath comes from nature, which essentially means farms of one sort or another. Plants grow in our gardens (OK maybe not in mine) but the space available for plant growth in most private gardens is small compared with the vast acres that our societies reserve for farms. Plants take in carbon dioxide and give out oxygen which we breath. I have to confess that I quite like breathing. It makes me feel good (well a little less grumpy, anyway). So the plants of the world have my vote and so do the farmers who grow the plants that enable me to breath.
Thirdly, our climate is controlled by farming. This seems outrageous to say because climate is so complex and it’s ‘out there’, beyond our control, doing it’s own thing. But the simple fact is that, while we are doing everything we can to wreck our world climate by manufacturing like crazy and pumping climate warming carbon dioxide into our atmosphere, the plant life on our farms is doing it’s best to counteract our best efforts to court disaster. Without plants, our planet would have probably already have ended up being toasted to a crisp like Mars.
So farming is good because it enables us to eat, breath and not get toasted to a crisp!
“Yeah, big deal, we knew that! But what should we ordinary people with gardens like postage stamps actually do about farmers and farming?”
Individually, we can start using plants a lot more. As we ordinary citizens buy and use plants, an increased supply of plants will be produced to satisfy our demand. It really is as simple as that. Our individual buying habits really can change the world and enable us to eat, breath and, probably, sleep more easily.
So how can we start using more plants?
The answer is to use bio fuels (bio-fuels). It really is the quickest and easiest way to encourage plant growth.
Bio-fuels are fuels that are produced from plants directly. The process is simple. The plants grow, they are processed a bit and then we stick the liquid product in our motor vehicles, cars, tractors, lorries, trucks and possibly aeroplanes so we can go about our busy daily lives, feeling good about ourselves.
It’s called being ‘carbon neutral’. Sure, when we burn our biofuels in our motor vehicles, we create carbon dioxide but this is offset by the fact that carbon dioxide was mopped up out of our atmosphere when the plant was growing.
The more we drive around, the more we need to grow plants to enable us to drive around. We create global warming carbon dioxide by driving around but we use up carbon dioxide by growing the plants that enable us to drive around. It’s beautifully simple.
“Gosh, is this hi tech modern stuff?”
Nope, I read somewhere that Henry Ford thought all cars would run from bio fuels and that was around the turn of the 20th century. It’s just that somebody invented another product that then became more popular because there seemed no reason for it not too. The product used plants that died long ago and rotted into a useful form that could be processed and put in our motor vehicles to make them go. It’s called oil!
Admittedly, when we run our cars on oil based petrol or diesel, we are running our vehicles on plants, but they are not renewable plants. When we have used a plant up in the form of oil, we don’t reach to grow another, we simply reach inside the earth and find another dead one. The bit where the newly grown plant takes the carbon dioxide out of the air isn’t there … and that bit matters, unless we want to be toasted!
In my local town, I hear there is a small company that collects vegetable oil from the fish and chip shops, filters it and runs all it’s diesel vehicles on the vegetable oil. I recently saw a UK television program (called ‘Top Gear’) where they ran a diesel car across Scotland on vegetable oil as an experiment and it worked fine.
“OK, so you’ve put the arguments for biofuels and farmers, but what are the arguments against?”
Well, I don’t need to put the arguments against bio fuels because they will be put very strongly and very effectively by some of the most powerful people and corporations in the world and their friends.
Oil companies are currently sitting on a crock of gold that they don’t want us to believe we can do without. If we all start demanding that our fuel is currently grown, before we use it in our motor vehicles, the oil companies crock of gold turns into … well something less appetizing, (although the plants would grow well on it metaphorically speaking).
So expect a lot of people to argue against biofuels but always look which vested interests they are representing.
Since oil companies have huge resources with which they can very efficiently lobby Governments, I don’t think the Governments will be moving very fast on biofuels. It’s going to be up to the ordinary people to create the demand.
The logic is simple, we grow it, we process it and then we drive around on it. In doing so, we support our farms and farmers and enable us to eat, breath and sleep more easily without getting toasted to a crisp.
Since the oil companies have the means of distribution of motor fuels all tied up, I’m looking for suppliers over the Internet. After all, if all I’m doing is ordering something like vegetable oil, how dangerous can that be?
I’ll keep you posted.
Bye for now
Rob
(Rob Hopcott - a really rural online writer)
