Ranching: Reality VS. Romance

I understand the romantic notion of farmers working the land…getting hands dirty and putting in a hard day’s work outdoors.  It’s a career that seems pure in its simplicity compared to the masses of robotic humans sitting at their desks inside offices.  I grew up surrounded on all four sides of our house by fields of crops and beyond those fields were feedlots of cows, pigs, and chickens. ​

 My family weren’t farmers by profession; my father was a teacher and football coach, but we did live on four acres with a barn and raised a few animals ourselves, but morello the point we were part of the community, which was a farming community…I remember helping to build fences, bailing hay, playing in the backs of the grain-filled trucks and sitting on my dad’s lap as he drove the combine late at night during harvest season.  I never second-guessed the world I lived in or what I was surrounded by.  It was just the way of the land.

But this is not the world I grew up in.  We are causing mass extinctions.  Wasting paper when I was a kid meant you had killed a tree…but now we’re ra calloused society that’s satisfied when the ever-present trash on the ground is paper instead of plastic.

I never wanted to write depressing blog entries like this.  I never wanted to pursue a career where I pleaded with my fellow humans to stop slaughtering the same animals we were mesmerized with in our youths.  I didn’t want to see a planet full of people who regularly shrug off the disappearance of iconic species as casually as hearing the sports report from the previous night’s games.  The romantic days of farming and ranching are gone.  We aren’t feeding the hungry.  We aren’t feeding the world.  We’re stealing every last bit of land left that wildlife try to survive on to turn their homes into crops that are fed to cattle; NOT to hungry humans. We poison the waters and soil of a national park and cull the wildlife in that park for the sake of profits within an industry that doesn’t even need to exist.  Dairy creates luxury products that are unnecessary, arguably unhealthy, as UNsustainable as you can imagine a product to be, and cost the tax payer billions each year in subsidies.  Stop repeating the propaganda about “feeding the American people”, stop abusing the word “sustainable”, stop calling the rich and greedy “honest, hard-working families”.  It’s time for us, the human race, to grow up and set aside our selfish desires to consume things we want but don’t need for the greater good of all living creatures, including ourselves.