The New Year is a great time to set goals for yourself and if being healthier isn’t something you need to work on, well, that would make you pretty awesome. For the rest of us, and yeah, that’s me and my family, learning about your food can seem like an overwhelming task. So I’ll be taking the month of January to break down some of the major concerns about the food you eat. No diet plan, no supplements to buy, just straight-forward knowledge.
I’m ready to go with posts about:
- understanding organic foods
- Antibiotics use in animals
- defining common labels like “all-natural”
- Gluten and wheat
- GMOs
Before we jump off the deep end, lets stick our toes in with a few facts.
I write about me, my farm, my family. Every farmer has his own story.
Regardless of how different they may be, 97% of of the farms in the US are owned by families. Corporations own just 3%. We are men, women, American Indian, Hispanic, Latino, African American, big, small, organic, conventional, livestock, crop, first generation, fifth generation, moms, dads, children, and grandchildren.
Nothing I could ever write would encompass us all. What works on my farm won’t help my neighbor. What is true for my family isn’t the same for a potato grower in Idaho. And for all the thousands of farmers holding to good old American values there are those who don’t. But that’s not farmers, that’s people.
In fact I can only think of two things we have in common. The first is that there are just over 3 million of us in the US. That’s 2% of the population. We are a minority.
The second is that we eat. We eat the food we grow. We feed it to our children. The choices we make on our farms are important to us, just like they are to you.
Because there aren’t many of us you might not know a farmer. Maybe you haven’t been on a farm since you were a kid, or maybe never at all. There is a 98% chance your family doesn’t grow the food we eat.
My goal is to share what we do and to help you make choices about the food you buy. I want to show you the decisions we make and why we make them. And no more than I can tell my neighbor what is best for his farm, I’m not here to tell you what is best for your family.
But knowledge is power. So resolve to learn about your food in the new year.
Daddy's Tractor 