Agribusiness vs Agriculture

As I continue on this small scale farming venture that I have come to love, one thing I have noticed that I find it hard to justify are the laws for Agribusiness vs Agricultural Farming.

Now some might ask what's the difference between agribusiness and agriculture? Well agribusiness is large scale and the government says that large scale is a business that makes more then $250,000 (net, not gross) a year from the production of agricultural products (ie, vegetables, fruit, dairy, meat, etc...). Personally I feel that this is a bad way to determine small scale vs large scale farming. Reason being is that if a farm makes all its money from one product I feel like they are simply in the agribusiness farm and not an agricultural farm.

At the turn of the "Green Revolution" agribusiness was created, farms had to grow more, they were told to use chemicals and to specialize in one crop or animal to raise to make a living and so local sales began to grow thin. We then got our food from a grocery store and not our own gardens or local farmers, food started being transported all over the world in mass quantity. Farms no longer had a diversity of crops and animals on the land. Agriculture as it had been for thousands of years changed in what is now agribusiness.

For the sake of what I am writing here agriculture is the growing of a diversity of food both plants and animals, working together in a farm ecosystem. Agriculture is also the cultivation of land where the products of that land are sold or traded with the local community. Where agribusiness grows one crop and then sells it to a corporation that is shipped hundreds and/or thousands of miles away. Both methods are farming but their needs to be new definitions for laws and regulations for these two different types of approaches to farming.

"60% of the Farm Bill subsidies go to 10% of the largest corporate farms." -Cascade Foothills Farmland Association. My question then is how much is going to the other 90% of the large corporations? The other 40%? It is no wonder why small farms are dying off and getting eaten by large corporate agribusiness. They get all our tax dollars and the small farmer get no help. Yet at the same time, somehow the same laws that apply to large scale corporations apply to a small scale farmer who might only have three cows for milking and a couple local neighbors want to support this farmer by buying their milk but if they don't have a specialized milking parlor with a license to produce and process that milk then they can be fined and sent to jail. So then the small scale farmer who makes less then $30,000 a year from farming has to spend at minimum $3,000 and that is if they already have a room with running water and drainage out of it, otherwise it can cost near $10,000 - 20,000 to build this certified milking parlor to make maybe a $1,000 dollars a year at most from milking. So now they have to take out a loan to make very little money and then they get charged interest on top of that just so some local neighbors who have made their own choice and discussion to drink raw milk from their neighbor has been striped away by some agribusiness laws, all in the sake of food safety.

One of the greatest crimes against man and nature is the development of genetically altered plants. I am not talking about plants that were breed through year after year of trial and error to get a hybrid or a cross breed plant; what I am talking about is how a company like Monsanto can go into the DNA of a seed and use a virus to splice out a piece of the DNA sequence and replace it with another DNA sequence from another plant that would never have been able to breed with more or less get that particular trait. Then they patient the seed which can cross pollinate with other plants of the same family. Not to mention if you get caught with seed you might have saved that got happened to of gotten cross pollinated with their patient gene you can be sued for growing it.

Another question becomes is this environmentally safe to do this kind of alterations to plants and is it safe to eat or consume these plants? What short term and long term effects can this cause on to that species of food. It is scary that we are allowing agribusiness the right to tamper with food in such a way. That our government is allowing the right to pantient life in such a way. I find these laws a crime in and of themselves.

It is because of these reason that we need to redefine agriculture vs agribusiness and have separate laws that can be clearly defined so that farmers are either subject to agribusiness laws or agricultural laws.

I would love to hear your opinion, points of view, or ideas on the above subject so please email me. Thanks for reading!