01-05-2025, 09:00 AM
![[Image: modern-farm.jpg]](https://www.newenglishreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/modern-farm.jpg)
The Modern Farm (James McCracken, 1930s)
Farmers across the West are going through financial hell, especially small farmers, many of whom are leaving the profession that was once a noble vocation carried out by hard-working families.
I used to work as an agricultural correspondent and editor of a farming magazine some 20 years ago and things were bad back then throughout the West. But now the cow dung has really hit the fan, especially aggressively in the UK and EU.
The war on farming in the past was less obvious, but it goes back a long time to late-1950s/early ’60s, when new expensive machinery led to bigger intense farming and less farm employees, amongst other socioeconomic factors.
Currently, with AI technologies, some farms are already hosting robotic ‘workers’ toiling away on the land, from dusk to dawn. These tend to the livestock’s needs, but there are also plans to have them watch over crops, while other agri-robots hoe weeds and spray pests. Experts claim that self-guiding machines will soon revolutionize farming and perhaps redraw some of our landscapes. And there is the danger that future generations of large farming animals will become unfamiliar with human contact and aggressive/territorial when approached by a person.
Even in the field of entertainment, negative views on farming were often portrayed in drama. This subtle push to get rid of farms was active in TV soap operas (more like psy-operas), and not just through taxation and Green red-tape, anti-farming initiatives.
In 1965, a dark paradigm shift in world social history prefacing the Sexual Revolution and attack on the Nuclear Family exploded, when TVs went mainstream in every home throughout the West, although many American homes had TVs some years prior to the 1960s. This powerful machine can be used as a Trojan Horse devise, as it is one of the most effective mind-controlling tools of propaganda to influence mainly weak-willed, Normie couch potatoes, especially those lacking in spiritual/social/political discernment.
The year after 1965, when Vatican 2 closed to the sound of singing nuns and trendy priests, the opening of the Church of Satan in San Francisco occurred. Its founder, Anton LaVey, referred to a TV as a “Satanic altar in a room.”
It was also the year an American TV sitcom called Green Acres broadcast its first episode. This hilarious comedy was about a wealthy New York City attorney, fulfilling his dream to become a farmer, with his pretty, high-maintenance wife, uprooted against her will from her Manhattan luxury apartment to a run-down farm in a place called Hooterville. The childless couple’s domestic pet in their farm house was a pig called Arnold, an animal that they treated like a fellow human.
During the same year (coincidence?), across the Atlantic Ocean, another well-made TV drama began, coinciding with the broadcast of Green Acres. Called The Riordans, this well-produced drama was about a farming family in Ireland, screened by the State broadcaster, RTE.
In its early episodes, it was the first soap opera to film exterior scenes, in gritty black and white under dark grey clouds, punctuated by interior studio ones of the bland ‘kitchen sink’ variety.
Both dramas, when viewed by a semiotic/psychological perspective, seem to subliminally ridicule rural life and family wholesome traditions, especially farming. But to a regular ‘Joe’ or ‘Karen,’ they look innocuous and quite entertaining.
In Green Acres, the townsfolk fellow farmers, store owners, and other workers were physically unattractive bumpkins. Similarly, The Riordans, depicted a rural village of plain-looking, curtain-twitching yokels, who were dull, gossipy, and mostly Catholics.
In one scene, broadcasted around suppertime, the young goofy protagonist, Benji, had his arm up a cow’s rectum (part of an artificial insemination process). In another scene, Benji’s parents, looking more like his grandparents, are having tea in the kitchen when the ceiling caves in on them.
The name Benji subsequently became slang for something smelly, as in, “there’s a smell of Benji off you.” One can imagine young boys viewing such scenes as something to be avoided when pondering on their future careers; or young women thinking, “I don’t want to marry a farmer. All that drudgery, muck, and hard labour.”
These women in Western countries during the 1970s would also have viewed The Mary Tyler Moore Show: A sexy sitcom on the joys of a young woman being carefree, beautiful, single, and working as a journalist.
When Moore died in 2017, Newsweek wrote: “It would be an understatement to say The Mary Tyler Moore Show was an important moment in the women’s rights movement in the 1970s.” But the MTM show was a lot tamer than what followed some 25 years later in the hit TV series, Sex and the City: The story of four single young attractive women with top-class professions.
Some of these women are depicted more sexually overt compared to the MTM character. In such a decadent “exciting world,” who needs motherhood and family? Yes, the family-destroying Feminist project was in full flight in tandem with the MTM show and, later, SATC, influencing tens of millions of young Feminists who craved “Girl power” and “freedom.”
Aside from the the television programmes, fast-forward to recent times: In 2023, Irish farmers were pressured to cull up to 200,000 cows to meet climate goals. Most farmers did not go along with this, as dairy farmers, whose herds allegedly produce much of Ireland’s emissions, said large-scale culling was not the answer.
In England, the main political parties were recently up in arms regarding a row about farming finances. During the last Budget, Labour’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, was slammed for “destroying the family farm” by imposing inheritance tax on agricultural land.
According to Daily Mail, TV presenter Kirstie Allsopp accused Chancellor Rachel Reeves of leaving all farmers “f****d,” following her inheritance tax raid during an explosive broadside online.
Reeves dropped a £40bn tax bomb, and was accused of destroying the traditional family farm. The result is that, for all farms worth more than £1 million (this includes expensive equipment), the ‘death tax’ will apply with a 50% relief at an effective rate of 20% from April 2026. The UK Spectator reported some constituents warned they would “have to now consider selling up.” A popular TV star called Jeremy Clarkson, who owns a 1,000-acre farm in Oxfordshire, posted on X that farmers had been “shafted” by Labour’s inheritance tax hike.
Eva Vlaardingerbroek is a Dutch common-sense politician and farmers’ activist. She said there is a global war on farming going on under the guise of ‘saving’ our ‘greatest global good’: The planet. In a recently published policy paper called Powering Up Britain, ‘The Net Zero Growth Plan,’ the UK government announced that it has a plan to tackle cows’ seemingly deadly burps and farts.
Speaking on BBC Radio 5 Live recently, a potato farmer called Mark said he was left fearing for his livelihood. He told host Nicky Campbell: “It was a sleepless night last night. I started farming 27 years ago … and I have no idea where to go now.
“I’m a third-generation farmer. My next-door neighbour calls us a window-box farmer; we’re just under 500 acres … I’ve worked out I will have £2 million to pay. I have no idea what I’ve got to do other than it will be sold and I will be the last generation which will farm it, which will be a sad state of affairs.”
As for America, farm debt is at an all-time high and thousands of farmers have given up farming. In 2019, Time magazine wrote: “Suicides in farm communities are happening with alarming frequency. Farmers aren’t the only workers in the American economy being displaced by technology, but when they lose their jobs, they are also ejected from their homes and the land that’s been in their family for generations.”
Despite the doom and gloom, we should never lose hope. As we begin our journey at the dawn of 2025, things might get better, as there are many signs of a regime change. History shows us that these (circa) 50-year paradigm shifts come in cycles. Ultimately, God is in charge.
"So let us be confident, let us not be unprepared, let us not be outflanked, let us be wise, vigilant, fighting against those who are trying to tear the faith out of our souls and morality out of our hearts, so that we may remain Catholics, remain united to the Blessed Virgin Mary, remain united to the Roman Catholic Church, remain faithful children of the Church."- Abp. Lefebvre
