Remember when Steve Pearce's office ran monthly pieces in the Defensor Chieftain and other small New Mexico newpapers and included in them, word-for-word national propaganda from Heritage Foundation, a Republican think tank? (There was an AP news report regarding Pearce's plagiarism at that time.)
Similarly, the Defensor Chieftain now publishes the National Farm Bureau's pieces, believing correctly that agricultural news is of interest to small ranching communities like ours.
However, you can't really call those articles news--nor are they even opinion--because they are the product of a large, national organization--even though the author purported to be a farm girl herself (disingenuously). That makes them propaganda.
In the most recent one of Nov. 14, the author says that "Buying local is trendy and that's great, but we owe some respect to the farm families who raise the staples, as well. We should all be thankful that somewhere on the high plains and rolling hills that may be thousands of miles from our homes, a farmer is working — probably late into the evening — against the odds presented by uncooperative weather, markets and governments — raising the grains, oilseeds, meats, dairy products and fruits and vegetables that round out our abundant and diverse food supply...it takes a whole country to put a meal on the table."
That doesn't gel with what I've been hearing everywhere about the takeover of the medium-sized farmer by mega-agribusiness. There's also the fact that those guys use petroleum fertilizer to feed plants rather than re-building the topsoil. So we might need them right now, but it's not sustainable.
Jan Deininger
Socorro
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