{"id":1543,"date":"2016-04-30T20:32:35","date_gmt":"2016-04-30T20:32:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/?p=1543"},"modified":"2016-04-30T20:32:35","modified_gmt":"2016-04-30T20:32:35","slug":"crop-sustainability-nixing-tractors-amish-smallness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/?p=1543","title":{"rendered":"crop sustainability; nixing tractors; Amish “smallness”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jimmy Carter and Dr. Norman Borluag, who helped bring a “Green Revolution<\/em>” to India and Pakistan in the early 1970s by increasing their rice and other food grain production, began a similar grassroots movement among small farmers in Africa.\u00a0 The men inspired the governments of a number of African countries to provide small loans for fertilizer and better seed.\u00a0 [These farmers were able to repay the loans easily through their increased crop yields.]\u00a0 What’s more, Carter and Borluag didn’t encourage the use of costly and difficult to maintain equipment like tractors.\u00a0 But rather these farmers primarily used hoes and other hand tools, Carter writes in his book: Talking Peace<\/em>.\u00a0 Note:<\/strong>\u00a0 This has decidedly been a major problem in American farming.\u00a0 That is, first it was small tractors and small combines.\u00a0 Then they were bigger, then bigger…\u00a0 This meant farmers could farm bigger tracts of land — buying some some small family farmers out, then more small family farmers out…\u00a0 In turn, less and less youth were being raised on the land and the once backbone of our country started going away incrementally.\u00a0 This was all billed as: “progress.”\u00a0 But was it?\u00a0 The Amish, for instance, intentionally don’t use tractors or combines.\u00a0 They stay small, don’t buy each other out, and are tremendously<\/em> good environmental stewards with their land.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jimmy Carter and Dr. Norman Borluag, who helped bring a “Green Revolution” to India and Pakistan in the early 1970s by increasing their rice and other food grain production, began a similar grassroots movement among small farmers in Africa.\u00a0 The …<\/span> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1543","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1543","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1543"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1543\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1544,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1543\/revisions\/1544"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1543"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1543"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1543"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}