To eat or not to eat, that is the question. Would you be satisfied if some day as you drive along the road the only things you see are buildings? No trees, hawks on telephone poles, a rabbit along the road, horses or cows in a field. It was not long ago as you left Hamilton on any of the major roads you saw farms and woodlands, but today, you see only a couple of small farms scattered between new houses, businesses and sites for more new homes. What does this mean? First, it means less habitat for God’s four legged animals. Second, it means a shortage of food in the near future. Soon the largest of the farmland will be sold off to contractors to build their new houses. Homes which only the wealthiest, upperclass can afford. Once it was a slow process, now new land for construction is sought after daily.
Have you noticed more dead animals on the edge of the road in the last five to ten years? This is due to the wild of this world being forced into a completely new habitat. A new habitat that seems wild, even to them. They are being forced across roads where they are plowed over by the growing population of automobiles. This is not just a threat to them, but also a threat to us homo-sapiens. Have you ever seen a car that has hit a deer? It is not pretty. In most cases both the deer and the car are totaled. Once upon a time, you had to be on a country road for this to happen; now it can happen anywhere. With wild animals being forced into residential areas, everyone is at risk. What do you think a young child would do if a coyote wondered into their neighborhood and came strolling up to them? More than likely, the child would try to pet it. What do you think the coyote would do? If it has just been pushed out of the wild, it is going to act on instinct and defend itself. By this, I mean it will growl, snarl, and if it feels it is really at risk, it will attack. Is this what you want to happen to your brother, sister, or someday your own child?
Science can do a lot of things. It cannot, however, produce food for our country and even the world without farms. Why is our country’s farmland rapidly being turned into zoned property? The answer is simple. Contractors will pay a fortune for land on which they can build. Say a contractor buys 500 acres of land. If he divided it up into one and a half acre sections, he could probably squeeze 175 lots plus roads and sidewalks onto that land. If he paid five million for the five hundred acres and built houses costing $500,000 and up, the total for the houses would be upward of $87,500,000. I am sure the building materials would not cost anywhere near what the homes sold for. This is no joke, farmers can practically ask any amount they want for their land and they will most often get it. But it is not usually the farmers who sell their land, it is usually their children or whomever the land is willed to when the farmer dies. If the children do not become farmers, they will have no need for farmland and they will see it as a nice retirement fund for themselves. The problem with people being able to sell the farmland for this much money is, there are farmers who might be interested in increasing the size of their farm and cannot afford to pay millions for the land.
What can you do to stop the destruction of the farms which your ancestors once farmed? Help fight for regulations on how much land can be destroyed in a century. Call or write your congressional representative and tell them you want them to vote for regulations on how much land can be destroyed. Fight to save your food supply and natures critters. Do it today, for tomorrow may be too late to save the land that produces the food you eat.