Farmin’ ain’t what it used to be, honey.

A farmer friend of mine and I had a long chat last week. He is alarmed by the pesticides, the herbicides, the GMOs and the declining quality of food from overstressed soil. He maintains a special patch of his farm that he grows “clean” to feed his family and donate to local food charities. The rest of his acreage is Monsanto corn. He hates Monsanto, but echoing Luke’s frustration with the Empire in Star Wars, feels there’s nothing he can do about it right now.

He’s in delicate physical condition. Years of exposure to chemicals long banned have taken a huge toll on him. Seeing what he’s seen, knowing what he knows, but being in a bind to both pay the mortgage and feed his family healthy food has drained him emotionally.

He describes the confused anger of church groups who come to harvest crops he has grown especially for them. They see the straight, clean perfectly-formed corn as he leads them to a smaller, less prolific, shorter patch for their harvest. They all point to the “pretty” corn and want that. “No,” he says, “that corn ain’t fit for eatin’. Barely fit for puttin’ in your gas tank.”

He teaches his children at home, cooks from scratch and helps his kids understand the exaggerations and lies in food advertising. He’s considered farming organically, but between the medical bills and the government subsidy he receives for growing inedible corn, he couldn’t survive for the length of time necessary to convert from conventional. He’s getting good yields of GMO corn. The trick, he says, is to pick the right seed. There’s dozens of varieties, one for drought, one for wet conditions, one for this type of bug tolerance, another for that. Once he figured out the specific needs combined with the specific combination of chemicals, he started doing “okay.” A lot of it, he says, is a roll of the dice: will it be a wet year, a drought year, when will the frost come? But now he is concerned that the pollen from the GMO corn is tainting the small patch of farm his family eats from. “Don’t know just what to do ’bout that. Sure don’t want the kids eatin’ that stuff.”

Education, he says, is our only shot at changing the future of food. “The courts sure ain’t gonna do it, not with the big corporations lawyerin’ up with all their money. All we can do is the best we can, and share what we know to whoever will listen.”