By Jim Van Der Pol, Kerkhoven, Minnesota — Joel has challenged me to begin to think and write about a better and more satisfying life on our farms and in our rural communities. So this and several columns to follow will assume that we all pretty much know the problems, that we as farmers, graziers and Americans live every day in the midst of the damage and could benefit from encouragement to talk together about another direction in our lives and businesses.

This encouragement I will attempt to provide, but there is an important caveat. We live and farm in a powerful national and nationalizing economy that will not take kindly to any kind of real change, and has immense power to block change. Much of this power inheres in the wants, desires, and thoughts of our own minds, so that we tend to enable this powerful economic structure while it sucks the wealth out of our communities and the satisfaction from our lives. Continue reading “Our hope lies with the ‘one degree deflection’”