Petal Fall

   Well, let's see- we have had frost, rain and thirty mile an hour winds this week. Today was so beautiful it was hard to remember how rough the weather was this week. We lost nearly twenty trees in the wind on Tuesday. It breaks my heart to see those trees down. It's not just the loss income or the holes in the orchard. The loss just grieves my heart.

   As you can see from the photo, the leaves are pushing out. We call this petal fall. There are still plenty of flowers, but we are past peak bloom.

   Elsewhere on the farm we have been cultivating cotton beds. The wheat got sprayed for weeds. In the orchard we have irrigated and pruned the young trees that were planted late week.

Here's the view while walking the dogs the other morning.

My boss at KYNO likes it when I let my inner curmudgeon out. Here's the script for one of my upcoming radio bits.

Farmers and the Social Contract
By Paul  H.  Betancourt
Copyright February, 2012

                I teach business ethics at the University of Phoenix here in town. One of the issues we talk about in class is the Social Contract. The idea of a social contract goes back at least as far as Kant and Rousseau. The basic questions in the Social Contract are

“What is the responsibility of society to the individual?”

 And

 “What is the responsibility of the individual to society?” 

                Two great questions and you can imagine the class discussions we have.

More specific questions would be-

“What is the responsibility of farmers to society?”

And

“What  is society’s responsibility to our farmers?”

                We do not normally think of things this way. As a farmer I accept that farmers have a responsibility to grow safe food. The good news is we do that well. Society adds other responsibilities and we comply. Agrarian Wendell Berry suggests that, therefore society should support farmers. And, here is where this particular social  contract breaks down.

                We live in an open economy, meaning we import and export at will. The social contract with farmers breaks down when farmers accept the higher costs of society’s demands, in the form of regulations, and then consumers buy their food from some where else because it is cheaper.

                Please trust me, I understand the importance of a bargain. But, can you see how insisting one side hold up their end of the social contract and the other side free to break the social contract is fundamentally unfair?

                If we are serious about maintaining a social contract-

                If we are serious about clean air and clean water-

Then we need farmers to support the farmers who grow their food and maintain their end of the social contract.

OK, I can only get so grumpy.

I hope Y'all have a great week.

P