Finding Farming

I spoke with my mother this weekend, a woman who has lived her entire life in a small rural farming community in Northwest Indiana. She had just returned from the nursery in an attempt to buy seedlings. Every single summer she plants an enormous garden filled with every tasty vegetable and fruit you can imagine. When my grandparents were alive, they raised their own cows and slaughtered one each year to sustain our family. My mother was annoyed, “Well, it seems that everyone in town thinks the world is going to end and they’ve all started planting gardens! There’s nothing left but a few crummy tomato plants!” My mother was right, people who normally would never spend a second with dirt under their nails are now plunging head first into self-sustainability.

An article by MYWAY news addresses that very subject as
“survivalists” discuss their transformations from grocery shopping suburbanites to farmers who can self-sustain their families via the sweat and blood from their own hands. These people were driven to self-sustainability out of fear.

"Convinced the planet's oil supply is dwindling and the world's economies are heading for a crash, some people around the country are moving onto homesteads, learning to live off their land, conserving fuel and, in some cases, stocking up on guns they expect to use to defend themselves and their supplies from desperate crowds of people who didn't prepare."

As a post peak oil future looms in the near future, the Bill Hicks' line, “The only choice in life is between love and fear” seems to take on an added significance.

Creative Commons Image via Flickr: "Vegetable Garden" by boliyou

Creative Commons Image via Flickr: "Radish" by woodlywonderworks