{"id":277,"date":"2011-05-28T08:12:23","date_gmt":"2011-05-28T12:12:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/2011\/05\/small-farms-increasing.html"},"modified":"2011-05-28T08:12:23","modified_gmt":"2011-05-28T12:12:23","slug":"small-farms-increasing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/2011\/05\/small-farms-increasing.html","title":{"rendered":"Small farms increasing"},"content":{"rendered":"For the first time in many decades, small farms are increasing.\n<p>\nChristopher Wanjek\nwrote in LiveScience\n10 February 2009,\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.livescience.com\/3308-small-farms-sprout-economic-drought.html\">\nSmall Farms Sprout in Economic Drought<\/a>:\n<blockquote>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.livescience.com\/3308-small-farms-sprout-economic-drought.html\">\n<img decoding=\"async\" align=\"right\" border=0 src=\"http:\/\/i.livescience.com\/images\/i\/2214\/i02\/cwanjek-headshot-02.jpg\"><\/a>\nWhen the economy gets tough, it seems that the tough get farming. Tens\nof thousands of small farms were created since 2002, according to new\ndata from the Census of Agriculture.\n<p>\nThe farming forecast isn&#8217;t entirely sunny. But packed with a cornucopia of\nsurprise findings \u2014 such as large increases in the number and percentage\nof Asian, Hispanic, Black and female farmers, and a coup staged by the\nfrigid state of Wisconsin to become the second-leading vegetable producer,\nbehind California \u2014 the census brings promising news to those interested\nin reducing obesity and improving the environment.\n<p>\nWhat&#8217;s the connection? More small farms brings greater diversity of crops,\nmore fresh and local foods, less dependency on chemical fertilizers,\nless concentration of manure, and less emphasis on cheap corn to make\nunhealthy, industrially produced beef, pork and chicken.\n<\/blockquote>\nWe know this works elsewhere:\n<blockquote>\nIn Japan, were obesity is negligible and the population lives on\naverage about five years longer than Americans do, most cities and\ntheir surroundings are filled with small farms. Farmers south of Tokyo,\nwhich has a climate similar to Washington, work year round, planting\nwinter crops such as broccoli and hearty greens, which are then picked\nand delivered to local stores within a day or two. The system is called\nchisan, chishou, &#8220;produce local, consume local.&#8221;\n<\/blockquote>\nUnfortunately, big farms also increased during the same period,\nand mid-sized farms decreased.\nBasically, mid-sized farms can&#8217;t compete in the pesticide game,\nand are being absorbed by huge corporate farms while being\na grass-roots movement of small farms is coming up from the bottom.\n<p>\nRather than massive Monsanto farms, I choose chisan, chishou.\n<p>\n-jsq\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For the first time in many decades, small farms are increasing. Christopher Wanjek wrote in LiveScience 10 February 2009, Small Farms Sprout in Economic Drought: When the economy gets tough, it seems that the tough get farming. Tens of thousands of small farms were created since 2002, according to new data from the Census of [&hellip;]","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[7,8,10],"tags":[2761,828,829,827,831,600,832,2764,830,15,173,833],"class_list":["post-277","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-agriculture","category-agrochemicals","category-history","tag-agriculture","tag-chisan","tag-chishou","tag-data","tag-diverse","tag-farm","tag-healthy","tag-history","tag-local-food","tag-monsanto","tag-organic","tag-tasty"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4Gj0O-4t","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=277"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=277"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=277"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=277"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}