| Playing the ‘Blame The Farmer’ game |
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The blame game is the new American pastime. Rather than looking for answers, or giving more than a few seconds thought to why something happened, people just blame someone. Most times that person has little or nothing to do with the situation. For example, just hours after the Virginia Tech tragedy, there were press reports of people blaming George Bush. Sometimes the blame game defies logical reason or scientific fact. For example, our unusually cold and wet spring weather has been blamed on, of all things, global warming. The blame game can be habit forming.
Not only is it an easy way to avoid personal responsibility, but it can become a convenient excuse to explain away a whole host of difficult issues or problems we don’t want to face. Not everything has a simple explanation and, in fact, not everything has an answer. But it is easier to just lay the blame on someone or something and forget it.
Agriculture and American farmers have been on the receiving end of the blame game a lot lately. In early April after several two inch rain storms, several communities in Indianapolis experienced serious flooding. Instead of blaming the cities antiquated storm water draining system, disgruntled residents started blaming farmers. Here is how the line went: farmers sold their land to developers who built housing developments without proper drainage causing flooding. So, of course, the farmers are to blame.
The builders who constructed the vinyl villages on prime farmland and city leaders who let the sewer system fall into disrepair somehow escaped criticism. Blaming farmers is not new. When Indiana was debating the move to daylight savings time (DST), proponents of DST blamed the farmers for being against it.
Now that Indiana has DST, every time Hoosiers have to spring ahead or fall back, they grumble at the farmers who invented DST. The fact that farmers did not invent DST or have anything to do its implementation has not prevented them from getting blamed for it.
Blaming farmers has also been a favorite game of environmentalists. When growers started using chemical fertilizers and crop protection products, they blamed us for polluting the soil. When producers adopted biotechnology and started using fewer chemicals, we were blamed for endangering plant diversity. Yet, some environmentalists have discovered that farmers can be the solution not the problem.
Legislation currently before the U.S. Congress would provide income tax credits to landowners who create habitats for animal species listed as endangered. The Endangered Species Act has long been a flash point for farmers and environmentalists. David
Krause, with the American Farm Bureau, says this new approach works for both landowners and those who support endangered species.
Farmers and landowners would have an incentive to do the very thing environmentalists have been trying to force them to do through government regulation.
Should this program actually become reality, it would be one less thing for which farmers could be blamed. Don’t panic, however, there are still world hunger, bad smells, junk food, too much rain, too little rain, high gasoline prices, high food prices, and dust for which farmers are being blamed.
This farm news was published in the April 25, 2007 issue of Farm World, serving Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Kentucky, Michigan and Tennessee. |
| 4/25/2007 |
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