Spread the Joy: Advent 2025: Day 13

No Farms. No Food. 

There's pretty much no way to get around it. We need food in order for everything to survive. Automation has done wonders to make it to where we don't need as many farmers as we use to have. And yet, we still need human beings to grow our food, raise livestock and maintain a food supply for the next generation. 

Smaller farms are losing a lop-sided battle against larger, corporate farms. They cannot compete paying living wages to workers when a larger corporation can afford robots, artificial intelligence and automation to offset the need for human workers. I'm not saying that a corporate farm is all bad. Some entrepreneurs do merge a mix of technology with the human equation in order to do the most good helping people find and maintain employment while producing enormous amounts of food. However, such companies are the exception; not the norm.

Every nation on the world is essentially 1 horrible harvest season away from a global food crisis. And I'm not just talking about famine and drought. That's not liberal fear mongering because we came really close to such levels of hunger with the pandemic. While food was plentiful, getting it into the hands of the population was severely disrupted. Some argue that 2020 was proof for more automation. But what are we going to do when there's no more jobs because we lost them to a machine?

These kind of questions are not new. Voices have been expressing fear in loss of employment ever since Jethro Tull and John Deere introduced their first plows for sale. By the mid-1980s, farmers were losing their homes and livelihoods are an accelerated rate that musicians John Cougar Mellencamp and Willie Nelson took inspiration from Live Aid just a few months earlier and put on a massive concert in America's heartland called Farm Aid to assist farmers who were facing losing their homes to foreclosure or corporate giants. 

According to Willie Nelson, he thought that one concert would be enough to solve the problem. Enough money would be raised and not another farmer would ever face economic uncertainty. But the Earth has weather that is constantly changing. Unexpected floods, drought, frost or an massive heatwave could wipe out one farmer's entire crop for a year while down the road, the guy growing broccoli hasn't been affected. As a result, Farm Aid has become an annual event.

Along with raising funds for disaster relief and helping farmers to avoid bankruptcy or worse, the organization runs educational programs to help new farmers create homesteads and alerts to American people to the need for farms. They also have a crack team of lawyers and lobbyists that have helped get vital legislation passed to help the American farmer. 

Now if we could just get legislation passed where instead of paying farmers to not grow food, nor arrange for them to destroy it, and figure out a way to get food to the homeless and needy without jeopardizing competitive wages on the global market. I don't care. Wasted food should never be a thing and a field that was paid for by the government to remain barren is a misuse of resources.

If keeping the American farmer from going extinct is an important cause for you, then check out Farm Aid website and donate here...

I'm going with one of the founders of Farm Aid to bring you today's Advent present song. It's John 'Cougar' Mellencamp with his 1987 rendition of I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus. 

Enjoy!