On media—and a correction, dang it!

January 14, 2017 Yesterday’s post drew some comments from rural friends about the lack of media in rural areas. One commenter said, “systematic disenfranchisement of rural communities. No newspapers, radio, TV (cable only), no internet, cell phones and in recent years disappearance of many local post offices. Almost unbelievable in 2017. Almost. “My mother is in a care center in a small town. Never, ever has there been cell service available for miles in those surrounding areas. Some internet with super slow DSL is available but pretty awful.” Another said, “it seems to me that the organizations that once provided collective political power for rural areas have either been preempted by corporate power or disappeared. Farm Bureau and Grange come to mind...” Those comments reminded me of conversations in the last years with fellow farmers and members of National Family Farm Coalition. One Ohio friend told me they were fighting in the legislature for the right to keep phone lines in rural Ohio. A bill had been proposed to allow phone companies to quit delivering phone service. Another friend, from Wisconsin, had been ruminating over co-operatives, which were once essential to the dairy industry. With a co-operative, farmers could buy tanker trucks to stop at each farm for milk, then take it to a central processor. But as time went on, the farmers handed the bookwork over to clever fellows from business schools and those clever fellows eliminated farmer services as too expensive. It was cheaper to service fewer farms or create fewer products...all about fattening the bottom line. So now the system is all about bottom line and not about the farmers. In fact, prices paid to dairy farmers have gotten so low they can hardly pay their feed bills. So they’re going out of business. And industry’s answer is to import MPCs, milk protein concentrate. So, guess what, we don’t know where the raw materials for cheese, ice cream, sour cream and so forth come from. What a crock! And here’s the correction part: one alert friend corrected my statement in "Jefferson City Trippin'", that the Clean Water Commission votes of 3-3 and 2-2 didn’t mean that the CAFO issues are dead. The issues have been tabled until there’s a full complement of 7 members in attendance...so the can is kicked down the road. And in the case of FORAG, next stop is the court of appeals…