Can Our Farmers Continue to Feed Us?

I just watched an interesting documentary based on a farming family in the US who are 4th generation farmers running the land they cherish and depend on. They represent the farmers from around the world who actually care about the future of our land, and what I mean by our land is the very limited space that is left to grow food that we as humans need to survive. The family provide good quality, healthy, organic produce to a number of restaurants in their area who otherwise have trouble in acquiring the same quality elsewhere. They treat their land with respect, just like their grandfathers before them. How long they can do this for is anyones guess!!!

Our world population is growing by a staggering 80,000,000, yes 80 million extra mouths to feed EVERY YEAR. Lets break that down into the extra meals we have to provide just for our newcomers to survive. 80,000,000 mouths X 365 days a year = 29,200,000,000 EXTRA meals a year based on only ONE meal a day. The Western world has 3 a day.... To provide shelter for these extra people we need more land. So what do we do? We use our farmland and our forests to build new cities. I'm not a professor in mathematics but even I can see an issue here!

The multi national corporations have control over most farmland and have one objective.... Increase profit... Our farmers may own much of the land but the majority are under the total control of big business to churn out maximum yeilds day in, day out, year after year. They have no choice but to work their ground harder than it can handle because if they don't, they simply go broke. The competition is so fierce that many crops don't make it to the consumer because the farmer would lose massive amounts of money due to the cost of harvesting and transport all because big business won't pay a fair price. When a farmer goes broke and has to sell up, who buys the land???

Generations of nurturing the soil that has fed the world for thousands of years is rapidly coming to a complete stop. How long can we sustain this traditional way of growing the food that every one of us needs to live? Being a very optimistic bloke at the time of writing this I honestly think we have quite a few years left in our farmland BUT we have to do something NOW to stop what will a greater problem than any other event the human race has faced since time began. 

My simple solution is "everybody must become partly self sufficient and grow what they can". We can't all have have a jersey cow in our lounge room to give us milk for our cereal, nor a sugar refinery on the balcony to sweeten our coffee, but we all can grow the produce that provides us with many ingredients to add to our everyday meals. 

And as an added bonus imagine knowing that your salad was completely chemical free, and your kids just learnt how to grow a lettuce and will teach their kids, and that obesity can become a thing of the past, and that healthy food doesn't have to be expensive, and the list goes on.

My Vision is and will always be

"CREATE THE FARMER IN EVERYONE"