Editor:
The Farm and Dairy advertised a November auction of one of the largest truck farm operations in northeastern Ohio. The sale of 28 tractors and much of its equipment sold for scrape prices. Although I did not attend to acquire a tractor, I should have. If I was the owner, it would not have been an absolute auction.
But here’s my question: Why would a collection of nearly five generations of truck farming equipment, in a huge market proximity, on land of the correct soil type, and with employees who had decades of training, be liquidated?
The answer: This highly productive farm was shutting down because of the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2011, with its 600+ pages of regulation.
The near total control by government of the fruit and vegetable production, with its compliance, fines and implied liability, is the reason why small farm operations are being bankrupted.
The corporate international giants will soon monopolize the fruit and vegetable markets, as they do now with milk, meat and grain. The consumer, in the meantime, is being fed the propaganda line of food safety labeling, environmentalism, sustainability and the virtues of organic. American farms are being collectivized into Soviet-style cooperatives, controlled by the new Politburo.
This year was the 80th anniversary of the Ukrainian famine. Four million farmers died of starvation in the breadbasket of Russia. Why? Because of the total control of agriculture by government.
A man who questions opinion is wise, but a man who questions facts is a fool. Will the American farmer become a serf, a peasant or a coolie of the new world order?
It is time to write, call and contact with a visit your elected representatives to repeal the so-called food safety legislation, and return food production to America’s farmers.
John R. Beveridge
Hermitage, Pa.
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