It is becoming more and more apparent that the gap between farmer and consumer is widening. Not so much in the sense that the consumer doesn't know "where milk comes from" but that they have opinions on how you should run your farm.
The quantity, quality and affordability of produce has bred a level of complacency almost to the point where farming in Australia is seen as a mistake, unless it is organic produce, sold via farmers markets after being pushed there by wheelbarrow. The wheelbarrow is an exaggeration, but you get my drift.
Maybe it's only the vocal minority, maybe I'm too precious, but somewhere in our existence we have to accept that 7 billion people will have an unavoidable impact on the environment that we are part of. Whether having 7 billion plus people is sustainable or not is not the issue I'm tackling, we're all here now and have to manage. What I am sure is that we wouldn't all survive without agriculture, or the transport sysytems used to distribute it's production.
A current catchcry is for sustainability in farming, when the very thing that makes farming unsustainable in the natural sense is the concentration and consequent disposal of nutrients by cities. Even a low yield organic model of production exports nutrients.
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