I meant to blog about this last week, but I was busy dealing with the fact that I knocked the remaining side view mirror off my car (I knocked the first one off 2 months ago with the tractor) with a horse. In spite of my best MacGyver repair attempts, I just have to accept that getting them fixed means 160 dollars that won't be going into the farm fund. But at least I'm not these people:
There was a story on Marketplace last week about a project in Iowa called the "New Farm Family Project" which encouraged dairy farmers from other countries to come to America a try to make money where American farmers have been failing for a generation. The project required the new farmers to invest 500k in the farm (and subsequently the dairy economy) and create jobs (to benefit the rural economy). The farms would get (fee based) help from Iowa State and a Dutch company called Atlantic Business Development.
Guess how that worked out for them.
If you guessed that a quarter of the farmers and counting have returned home broke and broken, you win a packet of Roundup Ready corn seed.
Trust me, Iowa State, the problem is not that American farmers are too lazy to make a profit. It's that a generation of farm policies have favored chemical soaked production methods over natural ones and unsustainable economies of scale over farms that benefit the land instead of hurt it.
You can read or listen to the original story here http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2011/03/23/pm-program-to-lure-dutch-dairy-farmers-to-us-turns-sour/
And here's a 2006 story from Iowa Farmer Today about a Dutch family that moved to Iowa. http://iowafarmertoday.com/articles/2006/10/12/top_stories/13dutchdairy.txt The story mentions the horrors of the quota system and the strict environmental regulations in the Netherlands. I wonder how they're doing today.
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