Farming runs deep in my family roots. My dad’s father was the first generation in my family that didn’t farm for a living, but he and my dad both worked for the Farm Bureau Co-Op, so they weren’t far from farming, even though they weren’t farmers.

Eat Close To Home Has a post about the gap between new organic farmers/gardeners and old guard farmers, people who have been doing it for generations like my extended family:

I do wonder there’s a huge shift in who’s farming in this country
happening; most new farmers aren’t the children of farmers. That will
be a huge loss of cultural memory – all that stuff we have to learn
from scratch – but it will also afford the opportunity to forget some
of the “common wisdom” that doesn’t actually work. For the record, I
don’t think new organic farmers are snotty know-it-alls, but I think we
sometimes forget that the world outside our compost piles is much
bigger and set in its ways than we think. And that world is made up of
real people, good folks, and it should be part of our goal to find ways
to bridge those gaps.

The loss of cultural memory is the part that interests me the most. While I agree that losing the "common wisdom" that doesn’t work is a good thing, there is a whole lot that does work. Part of my feeling toward this is the whole culture of the rural "old guard" farmer that I have grown up with. To me, there is something very comforting in the ways of the rural midwestern people. Of course, I grew up with that.

I’m interested to see the melding from old to new as time goes on.