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To the editor: You recently wrote about the local farmers who are buying the Front Royal Livestock Market being different from the “lawyers, doctors, airline pilots or other professionals looking for a tax write-off." That reminds me of the old joke that if you want a farm you have to marry one, inherit one, or study medicine. I think it is great that these farmers are buying the livestock market. But one of the reasons I’m sure, is that it is so difficult, almost impossible, to be a straight farmer these days. Those that are making it at farming find that they have to moonlight some way or other, whether by working at Southern States, selling real estate, direct marketing, food processing, or by being a doctor or lawyer. It is ironic that farming, that is, family farming, the very backbone of our economy and our democracy, does not offer the opportunity to young people that they seem to find more easily in other fields. But this is hopefully changing.
Meanwhile, if it takes inherited wealth, doctors, lawyers and other professionals looking for a tax write-off to keep land in farming, so be it. (Incidentally, there are lots easier ways to get a tax writeoff if that is all these people really wanted.) The land needs all the help it can get until such time as farming once more becomes a profession.
As Thomas Jefferson said in 1803, trying to persuade students to go into agriculture rather than other studies:
In every college and university, a professorship of agriculture, and the class of its students, might be honored as the first. Young men closing their academical education with this, as the crown of all other sciences, fascinated with its solid charms, and at a time when they are to choose an occupation, instead of crowding the other classes, would return ta the farms of their fathers, their own, or those of others, and replenish and invigorate a calling now languishing under contempt and oppression.
MIRIAM S. HARRIS Huntly
(Editor’s note: We agree that the land needs all the
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