David Bly on the "Big Picture" of Minnesota Ag and Outdoors

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Monday May 04, 2015 · 7:28 PM PDT

2015/05/04 · 19:28

Minnesota State Representative David Bly, D-20B (Northfield), is a longtime champion of sensible agricultural practices that benefit everyone and everything. Chief among them: the preservation of family farmers, especially small family farmers, who are on the whole far better stewards of our land (and our topsoil) than the large-scale industrial farming operations whose real owners often reside far away from these farms.

Here's him making his "Looking at the Big Picture" speech, one that deserves to go down as a classic in the annals of the State of Minnesota:

Most enjoyable to me were his pokes at State Senator Julie ("small farms aren't 'Real Ag' farms") Rosen, a lady so dedicated to the rural life that her official residence is a recently-purchased 816-square-foot cottage in rural Vernon Center, though she spends her legislative session and other time in a 5,784-square-foot mansion in the Saint Paul inner-ring suburb of Mendota.

Spread this one far and wide, folks. Transcript samples below.

At the beginning:

I want to start my comments with something one of our young future farmer leaders from my district said when he was here visiting the capital.
He said, "You know, there's good and bad in everything. Many of the changes in agriculture over the last two years have been praised as advances and improvements, but when we look at the big picture, we also see a shadow with those changes. Investor-like agriculture, which is a part of our agriculture, has pushed many small and medium-sized farmers out of farming last year. Four hundred small farms were lost; our streams lakes and waterways are filling up with chemicals and sediment; people are leaving the land; and farming is becoming more and more dangerous..."

Near the middle:

One farmer talked about how difficult it was to compete with huge farms and sad to see what they did to the landscape. He wanted me to know how what was efficient for the corporations was not necessarily efficient for the farmer.
Another wanted to talk about buffers [between roads and fields] and how to make them work, and the problems tiling caused because the landscape wasn't suited for corn and soy. He said farmers needed to know how to work with their land and that each landscape was different. Another said that he wished we'd never gotten started with all these chemicals: "There's really no need for it - I can get just as good a yield with my organic corn as any of the [non-organic farmers] and they're killing their soil."

I remembered a farmer showing me the difference between chemically treated soil and organic soil. The nitrated soil blew away like dust; the organic soil was loose but moist and plump with organic material.

There's more, much more. Check it out.

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