Sunday 2 April 2017

The floods in New South Wales and

Queensland are now being blamed on "global warming". It seems that global warming gets blamed for every significant weather event these days.
I have no idea whether the floods are caused by global warming or not but they are messy, dangerous, destructive, and expensive. They will also make other things more expensive - such as the types of food grown in those areas.
I can't imagine how people must feel to see everything they have worked for destroyed by water or wind or fire - or a combination of those things. It can take years to rebuild. There is no guarantee the same thing, or something different and equally devastating, won't happen again. 
Farming or food production seems to me to be one long gamble, a gamble on the weather and disease and all the other things that can go wrong. I remember a shortage of tomatoes - because there was a strike somewhere and the goods had been held up and gone rotten in the heat. The waste of food made me angry at the time. It still makes me angry when I think of it. 
The Senior Cat likes to garden. These days his gardening is limited to his many pots which he now has at waist height. Those pots have produced tomatoes, capsicum, cucumber, beans, carrots and other vegetables.
I receive them gratefully and use them in our meals. (I also rescue some he fails to see.) Today I will pick as many plums as I can reach and we will have stewed plums too. Over the  years we have been "lucky" - lucky that the Senior Cat has spent hours in the garden. I know that gardening is work. 
But ours is done on a small scale, and for the pleasure of doing it. I also know that doing it on a large scale is much harder work. It involves long hours. There isn't any "taking time off" when something needs to be done. Holidays, particularly for dairy farmers, simply don't happen without arranging for other people to do the work.
The rest of us walk into the supermarket or the greengrocer and just take something from the display, put it into the trolley, queue at the checkout, pay for it, take it home and use it.
We really need to think about it as well.

1 comment:

Jodiebodie said...

Thank goodness that there are people out there who are willing to gamble their security on farming and food production. Feeding the nation is important work!