Zachary Branco
Professor Santos
ENGL 102-042
3-2-18

Blog Post

This week in class, we had the opportunity to watch an Amazon documentary on farming. Yes, the description already seems just as boring as watching pain dry. But there were some pretty cool and interesting things that I learned from the video. In the documentary, one of the farmers is a young lady who does practically everything by herself (which is actually insane if you think about it). This woman would be considered more of your "small local friendly" farmer. She would have a bit of a variety to sell but nothing overwhelming like a corporate farm. Trying to start up a farm by yourself is hard enough but the part that really blew my mind away was that the tractors she uses is anywhere from 1930's-1950's. If something were to break down, I don't think there would be stores that sell the parts needed to repair a tractor that is over 70 years old. So she has to have the knowledge and will power to repair the tractor to keep the pace of product that she is producing. Now in farms that are larger and corporate owned, they don't have that issue at all. Their equipment and machinery are in good shape and more highly technically advanced than what the "One Woman Farm" had to work with. If they had a setback it was usually a technical difficulty which had to do with the software program used with the machinery. So say if they had a mandatory update, they would not be allowed to operate any of the tractors or machinery until the software system was complete. Which is kind of min blowing to think, especially how most people consider farming to be more of older and non-technicological profession. In the documentary, I had noticed that the larger farms had an enormous amount of living compartments for animals such as chicken. In the video, one of the farmers stated that one chicken house holds nearly 25,000 chickens and they had 18 of these chicken houses which means that the maximum amount of chickens they can hold is approximately 450,000. That statistic really blew me away because that's a lot of chicken to take care of. One of the controversial points in the video came down to labeling. One of the farmers went on a discussion saying how that the labeling process is all the government and the company you are selling to. The farmers have no say about what type of product is being labeled. This started a big issue between what is Natural and Organic, and which of them is actually better for you. One of the farmers said that this all started a while back ago when companies decided to put "naturally grown" and "no hormones used" just to make a quick buck. Farmers don't always put hormones in their chickens but it never said that on the label but since then, it has practically become a bidding war in local grocery stores and super markets for getting the "Best Buy". Which is pretty insane and to me furthers my belief that government is corrupted because who in their right state of mind would give the community such a controversial issue to deal with just to make extra earnings, that the farmers most likely don't get.