Giving Compass' Take:

• Margot Ford explains how her community comes together to support each other and resist corporate farms that are eating away at their way of life. 

• How can funders connect with these communities and support them? 

• Learn about funding rural communities. 

It’s mid-August, about 7:30 in the morning, and it’s going to be a hot one, probably in the mid-90s. It’s a good day to spend in a basement. A church basement, for example, where our rural neighborhood is gathering. This is tomato-canning day, and about 20 of us will pass in and out of the basement kitchen, “working up,” as we say in Missouri, tomatoes for the winter.

Canning day is not a church activity. Of the 20-or-so families taking part, only two are church members. For the rest of us, the church is simply the one center left for our community. We once had a school, a store, and two churches. But our neighborhood, existing on the border between prairie and woody hills, has been mostly industrialized by big farmers. The old homesteads, school, church, store were merely nuisances in the path of big tractors that speed over the land, treating 40 acres in a couple of hours. The buildings have been plowed under.

They call it “production agriculture,” and it’s not family farms.

Poultry factories were just the beginning. Producers in year-round summer climates such as California and Florida began raising and shipping strawberries, melons, tomatoes and lettuce. Then, about 10 years ago, consolidation in the hog market hastened the disappearance of the farm-raised hog—once called “the mortgage lifter” because farmers used hog money to pay mortgages and taxes.

Buying or trading with our neighbors creates a friendly tide, lifting all our ships. For our younger neighbors, this is a way to learn skills and become a little more self-sufficient. And it’s fun. The word spreads. As it turns out, we’ll have a bigger group of participants in October for applesauce season.

In fact, we have young people coming to our gathering because they want to live in our neighborhood, get to know us, and look for a place to buy. When a historic place came up for auction two years ago, two young women with plans for an organic lettuce farm won the bid against a guy who puts up huge hog buildings and manure lagoons. Needless to say, we were delighted. We helped them build their greenhouse and we eat their lettuce.

We neighbors have made a commitment to support small farmers, and we’re working it out in this kitchen. We are finding new ways to pass on the old food traditions. Two of our elderly neighbors have made their livings with chickens, selling eggs to people in town. Linda is learning from them, so the tradition will be passed on.

Read the full article about resiting corporate farming by Margot Ford McMillen at YES! Magazine.