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Farming’s thin line
THE LATE SPRING cold snap and the havoc it caused for Rappahannock’s apple growers is another dramatic reminder of what a thin line exists between success and failure for all types of agricultural endeavor.
Of all the variables that can attack any type of business, it is farming which can be most directly, and devastatingly affected by the weather. If it freezes too late, if it rains too much or not enough, there goes the farmer’s thin margin between profit and loss.
And when the farmer hurts, the entire farming community feels the pinch, too. The feed and seed dealers, equipment salesmen, fencing manufacturers, pesticide sellers—all of the hundreds of business and community activities dependent upon the well-being of the farmers—these suffer, too, when things go wrong. And at the end of the chain, there’s all the farm jobs that won’t be needed to tend tiie stunted orchards and the reduced crop.
SOMETIMES CITY FOLKS grumble about supposed easy touches that farmers have. They gripe about “subsidies” and support programs, and sometimes they even put political pressure on their state or national representatives to eliminate these programs, presumably in the name of aiding consumers.
Well, it’s consumers who’ll be the first to know it if the American farmer goes out of business. They’ll be hungry.
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