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content/blog/2020-05-29_nativity/index.md

@@ -14,6 +14,8 @@ zenn_applause = true
 
   The loaf felt soft in his hand. Not soft and soggy like the stale bread crusts he had eaten all his life became when it rained—it was warm, and fresh. And the smell! It was the same smell that had made his stomach rumble every time he walked down the alley behind the tavern’s bakery—but now he experienced it a completely different way, knowing that the sweet smell was his, that he would sink his teeth into that warm, soft loaf. He looked behind him with a fearful grimace, but wild and delighted. No one in the busy street was looking at him. He reached up and over an edge in the wall, an edge he was too short to see but which his fingers knew perfectly—and he swung himself onto the tavern’s roof.
 
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   Below in the Halfway Tavern, the main room was hot, loud, and crowded. Serving girls carried wide trays stacked high with plates and mugs of steaming food and foaming beer. Dozens of people crowded around each small table, shouting, laughing, and playing at cards. The tavern was an old place. It got its name because it was halfway below ground—from the outside it looked like one would have to crawl once inside. The roof was five feet above the ground at the front of the tavern; in the back, however, a second story and attic rose to a height of twenty five feet, and a chimney rose another seven above that, making the building seem actually quite tall. The advantage to the unusual design of the first floor was that the main rooms kept very cool in the summer, attracting plenty of customers and preventing the stores of food from spoiling. In the winter, though, the tavern was the hottest place in town, with the exception of the blacksmith’s forge.
 
   The boy—for, standing well under the tavern’s five feet, that is certainly what he was, although his age was unknown—now crouched behind the chimney shivering in the cold air and tearing hungrily at the first fresh loaf of bread he had ever eaten. And underneath him, in the hot and crowded common room, a large middle aged woman with a red face was shouting at the barman.

content/blog/2020-12-02_cut-regulation-and-raise-food-prices/index.md

@@ -12,10 +12,10 @@ zenn_applause = true
 
 At my family’s small lowbush blueberry farm in late July and early August, the energy is festive. Over a thousand customers come from around the valley with their friends and small children each year to participate in harvesting the year’s blueberries, and most of them have a personal connection to the farm and the land, if not to my family directly. The blueberry sorting barn is filled with the roaring of fans and conveyor belts as the fruit is winnowed and packaged into boxes of five, ten, or twenty pounds and sold directly a few yards away; out in the picturesque fields, customers pick their own berries alongside local teenagers harvesting thousands of pounds of blueberries each day for what is often their very first job. The fruit is firm and sweet, easily surpassing in quality the conventionally grown lowbush blueberries, usually from Canada or Maine, found in the frozen section at supermarkets; and healthy-minded mothers excitedly discuss the antioxidant properties of the lowbush variety while tussling the blueberry-stained hair of their toddlers.
 
-Small farms like this one are good for society, as contributors to the community and as producers of sustenance. They are better for the environment, often using less energy from outside sources, employing sustainable agricultural methods like crop rotation, rotational grazing, minimal pesticide application, and providing humane conditions for healthy animals (Andrée 16) (Haspel). They are more likely to act as carbon sinks than as net emitters when compared to their larger counterparts (Andrée 16). Their food is usually fresher and healthier, and they usually grow diverse crops of fruits and vegetables instead of monocrops of corn and soy (Haspel). Additionally, as Tamar Haspel wrote for the Washington Post, “there’s value in having a place where people can take kids to pull a carrot out of the ground or come face to face with a pig,” and virtually everyone agrees with this.
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+Small farms like this one are good for society, as contributors to the community and as producers of sustenance. They are better for the environment, often using less energy from outside sources, employing sustainable agricultural methods like crop rotation, rotational grazing, minimal pesticide application, and providing humane conditions for healthy animals (Andrée 16) (Haspel). They are more likely to act as carbon sinks than as net emitters when compared to their larger counterparts (Andrée 16). Their food is usually fresher and healthier, and they usually grow diverse crops of fruits and vegetables instead of monocrops of corn and soy (Haspel). Additionally, as Tamar Haspel wrote for the Washington Post, “there’s value in having a place where people can take kids to pull a carrot out of the ground or come face to face with a pig,” and virtually everyone agrees with this.
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 These correlations between good farming practices and farm size aren’t just correlations; there is real cause and effect going on. On small farms, both consumers and farm owners have a more direct connection to the land, and their decisions will thus more closely reflect the best interests of the land and the earth instead of their financial situation. While large farms act as maximum efficiency crop producing engines, small farms are more often managed in ways that are best for the long term.
 
 As Haspel also writes, it is an accepted fact that small farms are struggling to survive. Because of the economy of scale, large farms are inherently more efficient, and when this plays out in the market, small farms’ share of food production falls: from 1991 to 2017, it was cut almost in half (Semuels). Farm debt is at an all-time high, and the majority of small farms don’t sell even $10,000 worth of food annually (Semuels) (Haspel). Over half the world’s hungry are small-scale agriculturalists, and if they can’t make enough to get by, many say, it seems highly dubious that small farms could come close to feeding the world (Andrée 16).