Sunrise Memories Part Two

In 2016, I wrote a long post in response to a question from The Farmer's Daughter on Facebook. Her position is that genetic modification of agriculture is a mostly good thing that is getting a bad rap.

THE PROMPT

"Do you have a picture in your brain of what farming was like in the good old days? Were there deer and bunnies wandering around a cabbage patch? You’re picturing a Disney movie, not agriculture."

MY THOUGHTS ON GROWING UP IN THE COUNTRY

I wasn't very fond of it growing up, but I've come to recognize that there were some things to be grateful about from my parents' homesteading on the acre of land that they purchased in 1950. Today's authentic gratitude post was triggered by this article I have shared. I'd love to see your responses.

To answer the writer's question, I do have a picture in my mind of our little patch of Ohio. It includes a large flower garden, an orchard, a quarter-acre veggie and berry garden, compost piles, a chicken yard complete with freeish-range chickens that produced eggs as well as great natural fertilizer, and the occasional Bambi wandering in from the cornfield behind us. I remember my parents lovingly picking out varieties from the seed catalog and our family visiting local growers to get new species of berries, peonies, and lilies. I remember that all the produce, whether it was perfect or not, went into our bellies. I remember days and days of picking and preserving produce, and yes, I remember killing and plucking those chickens. I'm pretty sure there was some spraying of the orchard, and possibly some fertilizer in the rows of veg as we planted them. We bought our chicken feed from the feed store uptown, and it was probably not organic. :) We also had nasty sulfuric and mineral-filled well water, to which I attribute my good teeth (that's a story for another day).

My dad tried to recreate cool things he saw in museums, especially those that reflected our Bavarian heritage. This photo shows both our Christmas pyramid and his self-taught marquetry art on the way behind him.

I've called my dad the original Martha Stewart -- the good part of her when she first started out -- because he never met something he couldn't reuse, recycle, or recreate.  He and my mom read everything they could get their hands on about how to make their little farm keep our family as self-sufficient as possible. We didn't have much money and we needed to make it spread pretty widely across our life. I think my dad would be horrified by the thought that he inadvertently was poisoning us by using unsafe chemicals and seed, but who knew then?

I'm not opposed to science and its myriad uses to make crops better, and I try not to be a hypocrite. I'm sure that the berry plants my parents grew were modified for better yield. I use limited chemicals on my lawn and gardens to keep them from being overrun by critters. I'm not against monocrops that feed a growing world, as long as the manufacturer and the farmer growing them takes care of ensuring that the humans he or she is feeding are not going to be harmed by the yield. And let's be darn sure that whatever we are using is not also killing good insects.

I now live in the suburbs of Chicago and rarely get out to the country to buy at the one farm that I know is growing produce and animals in an organic manner. At the grocery store, I try not to buy berries and other produce that is on the "list" of stuff that harbors pesticides. I usually buy happy chickens, beef, and pork (think Portlandia), and we don't eat a lot of meat at home.

I'm lucky; I have enough money to pick and choose. There are a lot of people who don't have that choice, and I'm grateful that there is a conversation going on among thoughtful and conscientious people about how to feed a starving world while still retaining safe methods of producing its food.