Fast Forward to Farming

One of the things I’ve been finding incredibly encouraging over the last few years is the strength of a growing movement for... well, for better.

A decade ago -- and certainly two -- it was sometimes difficult not to despair. Not to think about hell and hand baskets and wonder where it was all going to end up.

Think of it: global warming, melting icecaps, shrinking glaciers, landfills, factory farming... there seemed to be an endless list of things to be concerned about. And for those of us who were concerned, it was sometimes easy to feel like a Pariah; to feel really alone. So many things wrong in the world. And so few people who seemed to care.

Fast forward to 2009. Inroads are being made in almost all areas. Sure: we have a long, long way to go and we can’t back down from our caring and concern and hard work, but it’s truly amazing, sometimes, to relax a teensy bit. To sit back and see how far we’ve come; how much we’ve accomplished in a relatively short time of wide awareness. I guess I mean, it seems possible -- finally -- to self-congratulate a little bit. We are moving, after all this time, in the right direction.

There are many examples of this but, for today, let me share just one. Farm Forward was incorporated in 2007, though core members of the organization have been active with the work they do much longer. It’s a non-profit advocacy group “at the forefront of pragmatic efforts to transform the way our nation eats and farms.”

In real world terms, Farm Forward works in the field on behalf of farm animals and sustainable farm practices. It works to help educate people about what goes on in contemporary farmer’s fields and barns and it works to help both farmers and laypeople think about the way things could be done and how they really should not be. From the Farm Forward Web site:

From years of innovative efforts to improve conditions on farms and in slaughterhouses worldwide, we have built a unique network of strong relationships with animal welfare experts, food retailers, nonprofit animal advocacy organizations, religious leaders, scholars, small farmers, and writers concerned about farmed animal welfare. This unprecedented network and our tight focus on rolling back factory farming allows us to enhance the effectiveness of existing organizations and implement comprehensive new strategies that are unavailable to other groups.

I’m encouraged by what Farm Forward is accomplishing in part because, as they point out, the descent into factory farming happened very quickly:

Largely out of public view, factory farming began on America's poultry farms in the 1920s and quickly spread to every sector of the meat, dairy, and egg industries. Factory fishing, including fish farming, quickly followed. The use of new technologies could have been a positive development, but instead it has ushered in an era of factory farming and fishing that has brought with it systematic abuse of animals, pollution of the environment, and destruction of rural life. Today, more than 99 percent of our nation’s meat, dairy, and eggs are produced on factory farms, and nearly all seafood comes to us from factory fishing.

As I said, it all happened very quickly. Does it not stand to reason, then, that with our own passion and new knowledge forcing us to activity, we can help roll things like factory farming back even more quickly than they took hold and took root?

Farm Forward is just one example, but it’s a good one. If you’d like to know more about the terrific work the organization is doing, their Web site is here.