More and more people retire to rural areas and "farm"–a hobby, an avocation. Occasionally a successful "niche" venture, like Alto Winery.
Farmers themselves are often diversifying, even as they increase in scale. Seeking niche crops, grown like the usual feed grains but contracted to specialty markets. Many of these crops are not apparent to even the relatively trained eye. Some few farmers, at least in Illinois, turn to organics.
In McLean County we were riveted by a river of tall grass that tossed and bent in the gathering storm. It was striking in its different appearance: the yard, the house, the crops, it broke a pattern that one quickly comes to recognize. Perhaps this farmer practiced organic farming.
(In other parts of the country, far more people farm organically and are developing alternative marketing systems. Illinois is, however, dominated by production agriculture. Those people doing organic farming have not yet, in Illinois, tipped a balancing point to be able to create new energy.)
The nature of the rural is being increasingly contested: around urban areas by the spread of suburbs, that swallow up farmland by the thousands of acres. In areas where farming has become increasingly tenuous, as technologies require ever more "perfect" lands, environmentalists and others seek to convert farmland to recreational and other non-agricultural uses based on "ecosystem services", one of the newest concept in the lexicon.
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Farmers themselves are often diversifying, even as they increase in scale. Seeking niche crops, grown like the usual feed grains but contracted to specialty markets. Many of these crops are not apparent to even the relatively trained eye. Some few farmers, at least in Illinois, turn to organics.
In McLean County we were riveted by a river of tall grass that tossed and bent in the gathering storm. It was striking in its different appearance: the yard, the house, the crops, it broke a pattern that one quickly comes to recognize. Perhaps this farmer practiced organic farming.
(In other parts of the country, far more people farm organically and are developing alternative marketing systems. Illinois is, however, dominated by production agriculture. Those people doing organic farming have not yet, in Illinois, tipped a balancing point to be able to create new energy.)
The nature of the rural is being increasingly contested: around urban areas by the spread of suburbs, that swallow up farmland by the thousands of acres. In areas where farming has become increasingly tenuous, as technologies require ever more "perfect" lands, environmentalists and others seek to convert farmland to recreational and other non-agricultural uses based on "ecosystem services", one of the newest concept in the lexicon.
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