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Driftless

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David Rhodes

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“there are no winners here. The farming businesses who rule these fields have got so big they are entirely reliant on one or two monopolistic buyers who screw them on prices and can bankrupt them at will. The money flows off the land to the banks that finance the debt on which it is all built, to the engineering companies selling the tractors and machinery, the synthetic fertilizer and pesticide corporations, the seed companies and the insurance agents. And yet, judged solely as productive businesses, focussing on efficiency and productivity (and ignoring fossil fuel input and ecological degradation), these new farmers are amazing - the best farmers that have ever lived. In the year 2000 the average American farmer produced twelve times as much per hour as his grandfather did in 1950. And this amazing efficiency means the end for most farmers. In the UK, the number of dairy farmers has more than halved from more than 30,000 in 1995 to about 12,000 today. In turn, the number of dairy cows in Britain has halved in the past twenty years. The amazing productivity of the remaining farmers and super-cows in demonstrated in the simple fact that milk production has remained more or less stable.”

ProductivityEfficiencyFarmingAgribusinessDairy CowsDairy FarmersMilk Production
Book:Pastoral Song: A Farmer’s Journey
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“Eunan was against anything without set purpose and complete predictability and a human tended to fail on these requirements… He mocked anything frivolous: placemats, dessert, having a lie-in, suffering from your nerves. 'Get away out of that!' he'd shout at cream cakes and people with hay fever. To him harsh words weren't a bad thing, they were just a little sandpaper, giving a person a hard-wearing exterior. 'I was often spoken to harshly and it's done me no harm, he'd say and no one dared disagree.”

IrelandIrishCurmudgeon
Book:The Boy from the Sea
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“Here's the crazy thing about light. It can be flat and dull, casting nothing into shadow and throwing little into relief. Everything is illuminated exactly the same; nothing to entice or call you forward. Any photographer knows that you can take a million technically perfect photos in light like that—perfect but lacking magic. But all it takes is one tiny, almost imperceptible shift, and suddenly everything dances and turns into prisms of color and lines that beckon and move and sing. You don’t have to travel an inch. No doing or undoing. Just the slightest shift (of position, of perspective, of power) and everything is transformed. Light like that asks us to remember that it’s all magic, one way or another, isn’t it? We just have to be willing to spin until we catch it, hold it as long as it wishes to be held, and then release and watch it dance away. And then we shift and shift and shift again. We can’t hold anything, not really, only learn to dance with it while it is ours to have and know. But there is one thing I know in this life, I’ll never stop chasing the shift. I’ll never stop looking for new ways to see. I’ll never stop seeking the light.”

Perspective ShiftEmbracing ImpermanenceChasing The LightDance With LifeFinding Beauty In Small ShiftsIllumination And ChangeMagic Of LightSeeing DifferentlySeeking New PerspectivesTransformative Moments
Author:Jeanette LeBlanc
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