agriculture

The Big Look Task Force is meeting tomorrow, Friday Sept. 26 at 6:30 pm in Lane Community College's Center for Meeting and Learning.

And just what is the Big Look anyway? 1000 Friends of Oregon is calling it "significant threat to our land use" and say that it could weaken Oregon's land use planning.

The Big Look task force is bipartisan task force of individuals appointed by the governor and the legislature to review Oregon's statewide land use program. They will give their land-use planning system recommendations to the Legislature in 2009.

The task force is soliciting public opinion through a series of public meetings and through an online opinion survey that focuses on "farm, forest, and natural areas; livable communities; and coordination and participation," according the task force's web site.

Interested in protecting Oregon's forest, farms and natural areas? Show up tomorrow at LCC.

I once had a group of students in my rhetoric class at the University of Iowa who wrote and presented about the problems with hog lot farming.

Now you may think, "This has nothing to do with me! I'm a vegetarian!" or "Hunh, I live in a city, yokels in Iowa mean less than nothing," or something like that.

Oh, my friend, my friend, farming — the ways of big agriculture — they affect us all. From the desire of farmers in the Klamath Basin to irrigate their crops — thus destroying the fishing industry and salmon runs up and down the West Coast — to the nitrogen-based fertilizers that farmers, at the whims of a greedy corporation, put on their crops (crops that are grown for hogs, for cows and for biofuel, not to mention for tofu, for tempeh, for soy isolates easily stuck into almost anything from tennis shoes to "protein bars," which means this does affect and involve you), those ways are the ways that ruin our planet.

But. Though I'm not a fan of more hybrids or more modified food, here is some good news about one possible development that may save the Mississippi River, the Gulf of Mexico and the wheat farmers.

Huzzah, I say. (I like the direct-sow idea, but I know that large-scale farmers will want something less labor-intensive.) Huzzah, and let's please figure out something to help corn not be so evil as well.