About the Future
Blue Mountain Farm, and other small-scale, local farms like it face an uncertain future. Climate change poses a serious, immediate and long-term danger to their survival.
While large, corporate agricultural producers face similar conditions, they have the size and resources to rebuild after catastrophic floods, droughts, heat waves, blizzards, tornadoes and sudden derechos strike. Factory farms have the financial assets to develop technologies now that will allow them to be prepared for a hostile climate. Small farms, in contrast, lack those resources. They don’t have the deep pockets to recover from disasters or re-engineer their infrastructure to withstand repeated episodes of weather damage in the future.
We believe it’s important to strengthen the financial underpinnings of small farms now to help them become more flexible, more inventive and more diversified in the ways local farmers serve their communities with locally-chosen foods. If we don't, some of them won't survive. Others who would like to farm will decide the risk is too great.
Without a network of healthy small farms all across the nation, control of the American food supply will fall into the hands of fewer and fewer large producers, distributors and retailers. Food availability and choice will be determined by a handful of corporations whose first priority is profit, not nutrition or community.
New technologies will be designed to support them and their systems, and not to enable the production and distribution of good and healthy food to the people at large.
Development of high-tech vertical farming, in huge warehouses and tall skyscrapers in or near metropolitan population centers, is already happening, as close to us as Baltimore. The most profitable crops, such as salad greens, strawberries and tomatoes, are the “low-hanging fruit” these facilities will provide.
It's hard to grow a pumpkin on a trellis or a potato on a floating raft in a tank of water. So foods that don’t lend themselves to artificial nutrient growing will not be so profitable, and will be left for others to try to produce at greater environmental risk, or to import from countries with fewer technological tools and poorer populations. Or they may become “specialty” items in supermarkets, or disappear from grocery shelves altogether.
The preservation of small farms is the best way to avoid this future, or at least to mitigate its effects and provide an alternative to its shortcomings. Small farms are already here, and are trying to adapt. They have the determination to survive, and perhaps even thrive. But they need your support.