"Farmers feed us"

I told a woman who was complaining about the price of beans in our local supermarket.

She looked at me in disgust and said, "That doesn't justify the price."

I moved on and left her discontentedly picking over the beans. At $35 a kilo I was not going to buy them but that was because I cannot afford fresh beans at that price. I also know that the grower would not be getting very much at all. Someone else will be making the money. 

If I wanted beans I would be going to get a packet from the frozen food section. The farmer gets about the same amount there for the effort of growing them if you buy the "local" brands.

Perhaps I am a bit more conscious of the sources of our food. I spent most of my childhood living in rural and remote areas. My parents always made sure we knew that the field of wheat we were passing was where our next loaf of bread came from. (In my case this was literally true at one time because there was a mill just outside the town in one place.) 

I knew about vegetables from a very young age too. I knew because the Senior Cat grew them in the back garden. Without his efforts we would not have eaten nearly as well as we did. Even when he was teaching and studying for his degree part time he was growing some of our food. Mum would remind us of the "market gardeners" to the north of the city too. 

Out in rural areas we were also made aware of the problems farmers and market gardeners faced. We knew about "good weather" and "bad weather" about the "wool cheque" and the "wheat cheque" - the payments made to farmers for their efforts.  When some young fool who was speeding crashed into a stand of full milk churns waiting to be collected our concern was not just for the young fool but for the dairy farmer who had lost the milk. (There was no refrigerated vehicle back then. The churns were simply loaded on to a lorry and taken to the nearby dairy for processing.) We understood the need to get the harvest in before an impending storm, something which could drastically reduce the value of the crop.  If the older boys were not at school for a week then that just had to be accepted. The rest of us knew it was about feeding us.

As I grew older I became more and more aware of the stresses of being a farmer. It is far from being any idyllic life and it was even worse in my childhood. There were no air conditioned cabins on tractors and other farm vehicles. Shearing was still being done with old fashioned shears in some places. There were arguments about the use of wider combs and more.

The woman who complained about the price of the beans and how much she believed farmers were getting will almost certainly never read this. I hope though that I never prowl through the supermarket and forget that the food in there is the result of hard work by someone somewhere.