No Farms... No Food

This is a threat to our national security!

So I’m out here in America’s Dairyland, where the cows outnumber the residents, the fields of gold stretch for miles and miles, the iconic badger and his “W” can be seen on t-shirts and flags pretty much everywhere, and even the youngest of toddlers knows to say the Packers are the best football team on the planet. Good old Wisconsin.

No, I haven’t traded New York’s skyrocketing crime and booming sanctuary state full of countless illegals (thanks to the uni-party of socialists running the Big Apple) for the red barns, towering silos and endless corn stalks. Well, not yet at least. Instead, I’m out here in the dairy capital of our country visiting relatives and taking a break from the non-stop, fast-paced battles I wage back home in New York. Though the sky is bluer, and the air is fresher, I must say this midwestern dairy stronghold has some very serious battles of its own it’s waging.

I’ve been coming out here for about 20 years now, and I have to say, each time I come I notice the undeniable changes taking shape in this farming state. The fields of corn and hay very obviously shrink more and more as the years go by. The urban sprawl grows. As we drive down a street we’ve driven down countless times before, I suddenly gasp aloud. One of my children asks, “What’s wrong, mom?!” And I explain that the street to the right there never used to exist. But now there it sits with about a dozen new houses built-up all around it. They ask, “What’s wrong with that?” I explain, that all used to be corn fields! I further explained to them that this is a huge problem because most of the corn that is grown here is used as feed for the farm animals, it’s not the sweet corn that humans eat. So, if we cannot feed our farm animals, then we are in big trouble indeed.

The housing developments continue, while the farmers struggle more than ever to make their quotas to just break even on the hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt they incur each season to bring their goods to harvest, with no certainty that they will recoup that money by harvest’s end. Farming is how they feed their families, clothe their children, pay their bills. If they go under, we go under. No farms = no food.