Hey Big Ag Supporters, Why So Threatened?

Honestly, I'm asking: Why are folks who support the conventional way of growing crops and meat so very threatened by a relatively small cadre of people who want to buy food that's grown a different way?

I ask these questions in reaction to one specific Big Ag supporter, Richard Keller, editor of AgProfessional, which Keller describes as "a magazine dedicated to serving ag retailers, crop consultants, and farm managers." Keller recently published an essay on the CattleNetwork site in which he calls local food advocates "today's hippies." His prose drips with so much disdain for locavores that you could sop it up with a biscuit.

Keller sneers at "upper-class individuals" who hire gardener-entrepreneurs to turn their yards into food gardens, a practice he calls "having the lowly servants feed their masters." Next, he sets his sights on crop mobs, those groups of volunteers that do farm work for a day to help small farmers who have trouble affording enough labor, expressing his objection to the fact that this work is "often done as a party." I know, Keller. Crop mobsters are no better than those pesky seven dwarfs who "whistle while they work."

Finally he makes sure to save some vitriol for "city dwellers who are doing some type of communal gardens, rooftop gardens, patio gardens, etc., who weren’t growing any of their food a few years ago. Now, it’s a way to impress your friends and be hip." Here I was thinking my lack of designer duds and swanky apartment was limiting my hipness factor. I guess if I just grow a few more rooftop tomatoes, my popularity is sure to spike.

Poor Keller really seems to be worked up over some of his fellow citizens saying that they want to have more control over the food they eat. I just don't understand why this is so threatening to denizens of the conventional food establishment, since that establishment is so unbelievably powerful it practically owns our government. Come on, Big Ag bullies, can't you share one tiny corner of the agricultural playing field with these scrawny little Local Food kids, the ones over there standing knee-deep in organic radishes, their glasses smudged with soil and their knock-knees covered with mosquito bites?

"I’m positive that many of these new generation hippies will soon realize growing natural/organic food is no picnic," writes Keller. "They will continue to demand natural food; but they will stop breaking their backs raising it. These new hippies will still brag about eating natural and more healthy than the peons of the world."

Last time I checked, consumers who demand a product and are willing to pay others to make it are considered the bulwarks of free-market capitalism. And I thought capitalism was something all those Big Ag advocates were in favor of. Or has too many years of corporate welfare from government grain subsidies made them forget what a free market really looks like?

Image: janpeder via stock.xchng