With Spring right around the corner, our nations farmers are extremely busy preparing their crops.  In the past decade, US farming has experienced the beginning of a significant overhaul for the better!

In the past, our farming system was set up to promote large-scale farms in designated regions of the country, which were responsible for supplying the vast majority of our nation’s agriculture.

Problematically, our system encouraged farming operations to monopolize land and obtain corporate farming practices.  Large farms are sizable investments, which from a business perspective are vulnerable assets.  As a result, “factory farms” harbor the heavy use of pesticides and unnatural fertilizers.  Additionally, since factory farms are located in a single region of the country all of their agricultural products must be shipped across the county.

For these reasons, local farming has become a popular movement in the U.S..  Local farms are much easier to organically sustain, while they only distribute their products to nearby grocers and farmer’s markets, thus saving hundreds-of-thousands of gallons of fuel yearly.  From an economic perspective, local farms provide more job opportunities compared to “factory farms,” which are heavily dependent on large farming machinery to grow and harvest crops.

For more information about local farming, feel free to read a couple of excellent articles I found regarding the topic.

Small Scale Farming NYTimes

Economic Benefits of Buying Local (TIME)

All the Best,

Dominic

(Photo Courtesy: NYTimes)