Farms

Hello happy friends

I want to tell you about this experience.

After my last class at Institute of Integrative Nutrition we the honor of listening to Howard Lyman. He was a fourth-generation family farmer in Montana for almost 40 years. He speaks from a background of personal experience and he say that chemically based agricultural production methods today are unsustainable, and therefore ecologically disastrous. His experiences range from working in a large organic dairy to raising registered beef cattle to owning a large factory feedlot. He have farmed thousands of acres of grain and reproduced a herd of over one thousand commercial beef cows. In addition to raising cows, he have raised chickens, pigs, and turkeys.

HE was involved in agriculture at a time when the call dictated getting bigger and better or getting out. He was educated in modern agriculture, and he can tell you from firsthand experience -- it is not sustainable. He followed all the modern advice and turned a small organic family farm into a large corporate chemical farm with a thousand range cows, five thousand head of cattle in a factory feedlot, thousands of acres of crops, and as many as thirty employees. He saw the organic soil go from a living, productive base to a sterile, chemical-saturated, mono-cultural ground produced by his so-called modern methods.

In 1979, he got tumor on my spinal cord caused him to be paralyzed from the waist down. That changed his life forever. He promised himself that, whatever the outcome of the surgery, he would dedicate the rest of his life to doing what he believed to be right -- no matter what changes that necessitated.

The period before and after the surgery gave him much time to think about the changes resulting form his methods of farming. Convinced that we were going the wrong way, he decided to become a voice for the family farmer and the land. In 1983, he sold most of his farm and started working for farmers in financial trouble. This led to his working for the Montana Farmers Union and from there to Washington, D.C. as a lobbyist for the National Farmers Union.

His story was so amazing and I had tears in my eyes. 1 man can change everything.
This is his words:

"The question we must ask ourselves as a culture is whether we want to embrace the change that must come, or resist it. Are we so attached to the dietary fallacies with which we were raised, so afraid to counter the arbitrary laws of eating taught to us in childhood by our misinformed parents, that we cannot alter the course they set us on, even if it leads to our own ruin? Does the prospect of standing apart or encounttering ridicule scare us even from saving ourselves?

That prospect intimidated me once, and I can only wonder now what I was frightened of. It's hard to imagine, now that I'm a hundred thirty pounds lighter, infinitely healthier, more full of life and energy, much happier. Now that I have vegetarian friends wherever I go, and feel part of a movement that is not so much political as it is a march of the human heart. Now that I understand how much is at stake. Now that I've come to relish shaking people up.

I would love to see the meat industry and the pesticide industry shaken up, too. I would love to see feedlots close and factory farming end. I would love to see more families return to the land, grow crops for our own species, and raise them organically. I would love to see farm communities revive. I would love to know that I've wandered into my nation's heartland by the sweet smell of grain and not the forbidding smell of excrement.

When you can't take it with you, all that really matters is what you leave behind."*

Howard F. Lyman, LL.D