Garden Me Out of a Job

Farming in previously unused spaces. Plant it Forward is a cool organization in Houston, Texas helping refugees become economically self-sufficient by growing food for a cooperative CSA.

The wealth gap is a power gap. Companies worth trillions of dollars buying up housing, CEOs making billions every year, a political system that cares less for its countrymen than the dollar. At this rate, many will continue to be left behind in ghettos across the nation. 

Hearing stories from the devastation in Maui highlight the extreme ends of struggles people are facing throughout our country. Land sharks looking to scoop up cheap property, water diverted from locals to irrigate five star hotels, no alarm system, keeping family away from helping. Clearly, the government and local officials have forced a wedge into a community in the hopes of breaking them.

Hawaii, one of the most fertile places in the world, imports most of its food. This is a microcosm of most of our country. In the past food had to be local. Outsourcing production of crops and ancestral foods creates a paradigm that pulls wealth from the hands of many into the wallets of a few and is a determent to physical health.

I would love to be gardened out of a job. Imagine if people produced their vegetables, leaving farmers and ranchers to larger swaths of no-till grains and rotational grazing proteins. Our 2 acre farm might even become obsolete.