Blake Hurst, a farmer from Missouri, attended the NYT Food for Tomorrow conference a couple months ago. His entertaining take on the event is the subject of this article in The Weekly Standard. A few snippets:
“I may be walking around, but I’m actually dead. I’m a zombie farmer.
I came to this conclusion after spending a couple of days at the Food for Tomorrow conference last November, held at the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, a farm, restaurant, and conference center a few miles north of New York City. Stone Barns is surrounded by a “working” farm, a self-described showplace for the “sustainable agriculture” that more than one speaker at the gathering referred to in reverential tones. The farm was built by the Rockefeller family and is now a sort of Potemkin village with geese. The first and most important rule of sustainable farming is to be sustained by one of the world’s largest charitable foundations. ”
He turns the tables with the following jest:
“Recently, the New York Times announced another 100 layoffs. The New Republic has essentially committed public suicide. Rolling Stone is enduring a rough patch. Subscription and advertising revenues are crashing all across journalism.
Perhaps those of us in agriculture could help out. Maybe convene a conference on the future of journalism? We could ask a few nutrition professors, a biochemist or two, maybe a plant breeder, some cattle feeders, a pig farmer, and, as our token journalist, the guy who gives the cattle markets four times a day on the radio. Our conference could call journalists names, damn everything they’ve done for the past 50 years as corrosive of the health of our culture, and recommend that the New York Times go back to using typewriters in a recreated newsroom from The Front Page.”