Chickens coming home to roost

Agriculture headed in two different directions are highlighted in the NYT this morning.  In Oregon, city dwellers with small flocks of urban chickens are planning for their hen's golden years.  They are putting post laying chickens out to pasture in sanctuaries.  For those of us who have raised chickens for meat and eggs, this would seem to border on the absurd, but thinking about computer programmers and other urban cowboys who grew up in the city, you realize they think of these chickens as pets, not producers of ag commodities.  As the population continues its divorce from productive agriculture, these types of vignettes will become common.  The pool of people who grew up on farms continues to drop, and even the farm population is increasingly out of touch with the reality of the cycle of life and death on which we all depend.   Speaking of the disconnect between farming and life, consider the clamor of farmers for the approval of 2-4D resistant corn and soybeans.  Having selected for a wide variety of roundup resisting weeds, they now want to engender new strains of super weeds which will laugh at herbicides, much as antibiotic immune bacteria are turning America's hospitals into death traps for the unwary.  Instead of using multiple sustainable strategies for controlling weeds and disease, we look for the magic bullet to solve our problems.  No till corn and soybeans are one of the chief causes of obesity in America, so perhaps the coming weed crisis will have the unintended consequence of releasing us from the bondage of high fructose corn syrup.