The Farmer: Most Vital and Least Appreciated Profession of Our Time

In May I will be celebrating my 5 year anniversary of drastically changing my life forever. Back then I was a Clinical Psychology Research Assistant at Columbia University. After completing my Masters in Adult Psychopathology, I was working towards my PhD, living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and living a life that was only a dream just 10 years before that. But 5 years ago something woke up inside of me while visiting Friends and Family in Upstate New York something that laid dormant since I was a child and I remember the exact moment it happened. I was taking a casual ride through the rural farm towns of Albany and Schoharie County with my longtime friend Libby and all at once a flood of childhood memories came into my consciousness. I remembered watching The Walton’s, Little House on the Prairie, Daniel Boone. Lassie and countless Disney movies that centered around living on a farm. As we passed rural farms more and more of those memories came to light and before that ride was over new dreams started to emerge. After a short visit and driving back to NYC I realized that the dream of living on a farm was not going away and the dreams of becoming a Clinical Psychologist were being replaced with dreams of becoming a Farmer. As the days and weeks past I realized I could not keep this secret love affair to myself and started sharing my dream with my friends. It was in those first conversations that I began to see that this profession that I admired my entire life was not even considered as a profession to most of the people who were in my life at the time. In fact many thought I was simply giving up on my ambitions of becoming a Clinical Psychologist and “going out to pasture” away from any ambitions because to them Farmers are like janitors or trash collectors and no one would dream of having that profession. But rather than taking the advice of my family and friends I chose to pursue this lifelong dream and now I am living that dream which sadly so many of my friends back in NYC still do not understand. But more and more I am understanding their view and realizing that this view of the most vital and least appreciated profession of our time needs to change and it’s not just because it is now my life ambition.

Few seem to realize that Farmers play the most important role in every human life on this planet and it doesn’t matter if you live on a Farm, in a suburb or big city, if you are rich or poor, if you eat only farm fresh products or fast-food and it doesn’t matter if you are vegetarian, vegan, carnivore or omnivore. Farming is the only profession that serves everyone. Yet if the question is asked "What is the most important profession?” few if any would give “Farmer" as the answer. This is true even if we focus on the food we love. Our appreciation for that food stops at the manufacturer for that food. In the US we are all about loving labels and marketing of food products, we fall in love with brand names and the tasty products they produce but completely ignore that fact that they only exist because of farmers. The cheese maker is useless without milk and yet only about 5% of his overall profit goes to the dairy farmer while over 90% of the overall work to get that cheese is done by the farmer alone. What’s even more shocking to non-farmers is that fact that cow dairy farms are the most regulated industry which includes a mandated cap on the price of milk regardless of where that milk is going. It doesn’t matter if that milk is to be sold cheaply at a supermarket or made into the most expensive cheese on the planet. That dairy farmer must sell his milk for the same price.

To Be Continued…..