Blogging on bureaucracy, organizations, USDA, agriculture programs, American history, the food movement, and other interests. Often contrarian, usually optimistic, sometimes didactic, occasionally funny, rarely wrong, always a nitpicker.
This kind of goes back to your County Committee post as well, but the other day I was thinking out loud about the lawsuits and wondering why they were only attributed to farmers. The government has been involved in credit in many areas for a long time and yet it has only been accused of discrimination towards individuals attempting to farm? The government has been doing housing loans, small business loans probably in greater numbers and yet no word on discrimination in those areas. Was it because of different systems in place to process loans? Is it just political? Is it because it is agriculture? There seems to be more emotion in ag lending. Or maybe its because a group of people got together and forced the issue and they happened to be farmers. Anyway it was an interesting discussion but we didn't have any answers.
Good question. Don't have an answer, but in my desire to be a know-it-all I'll offer a partial one: Maybe because it's land, and denial of credit can mean loss of the land, land which as in Boyd's case has been in the family for generations. Some state(s) has a "heritage farm" program to celebrate farms in the same family for 100 years. Denial of credit to buy a house, to start a business, doesn't rob you of the same emotional value.
So the emotion can provide the energy to create an organization to protest. Once you have a seed, our society offers feedback mechanisms which will amplify it. See Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, etc.etc.
2 comments:
This kind of goes back to your County Committee post as well, but the other day I was thinking out loud about the lawsuits and wondering why they were only attributed to farmers. The government has been involved in credit in many areas for a long time and yet it has only been accused of discrimination towards individuals attempting to farm? The government has been doing housing loans, small business loans probably in greater numbers and yet no word on discrimination in those areas. Was it because of different systems in place to process loans? Is it just political? Is it because it is agriculture? There seems to be more emotion in ag lending. Or maybe its because a group of people got together and forced the issue and they happened to be farmers. Anyway it was an interesting discussion but we didn't have any answers.
Good question. Don't have an answer, but in my desire to be a know-it-all I'll offer a partial one:
Maybe because it's land, and denial of credit can mean loss of the land, land which as in Boyd's case has been in the family for generations. Some state(s) has a "heritage farm" program to celebrate farms in the same family for 100 years. Denial of credit to buy a house, to start a business, doesn't rob you of the same emotional value.
So the emotion can provide the energy to create an organization to protest. Once you have a seed, our society offers feedback mechanisms which will amplify it. See Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, etc.etc.
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