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The foot and mouth outbreaks came from where? Which lab?? Yeah ok, moving on: the government tells us they'll help the farmers who must now kill their lambs in mass quantities because the sheep market has crashed. And now? Hmmm "No sorry we aren 't going to help." A local sheep breeder sold his top ram for one TENTH of the usual cost - 1,600 gines (I can't spell that word) when last year it was 16,000 of the gine things! (Is that the same as pounds?!) Anyway, big business is making an absolute KILLING off of this foot and mouth crisis because they know A) Farmers are desparate to sell off their sheep and cattle before they starve and B) Therefore we HAVE to accept their sickeningly low prices or else we have to slaughter our stock because we don't want to watch them starve. How many more farmers are going to be ruined? Farming is dying a death and yet...we can stop it if we acctually tried.

How? Easy: Responsible Consumerism. I'll get to this in a moment...first I have to make a few points. And yeah, this is not a carefully composed essay - this is me blithering away:

Now that I am a small business living in a rural community I've been slapped across the face by a harsh dose of reality: we are a dying breed that is circling the drain. Erlend and I were discussing the future of our beloved farm and we came to the horrible reality that there is no future. Once we retire and sell the farm we'll watch it get bulldozed into over-priced houses that only rich incomers can afford to buy.

Why won't our future kids take over the farm, you ask? Because the Single Farm Payment that helps pay our bills (it's not free money that goes into our pockets thank you kindly) is not transferrable to our children. So even if they are dying to farm they won't be able to because they can't afford to.

Here we are working until nearly midnight every day, weekends and holidays included, as we attempt to provide British lamb and beef only to be ripped off by the big businesses that then sell our produce to the consumer for insane prices. If our lamb weighs over 24kg we are not paid for any of that extra wight - but the consumer sure is! The markets demand lean meaty lamb and the only way you can get that is to cross with big rams like Texels and Suffolks. So we get fleeced, you get fleeced and big buisiness rakes in the 拢拢.

Speaking of fleeces! What did we get for our wool? Less then fifty pence a fleece. How much do you pay for wool rugs and sweaters?? Exactly. We are literally paying to sell our fleeces and you are paying out the nose to buy wool. I know there are producting and processing costs but give me a break - less then fifty pence a fleece for me and how much do you pay for the end product?? How is that justifiable? I don't sell my fleece - I pay to sell it. We made no profit what-so-ever and instead we had to pay out of our own pocket to have the fleeces shorn, shipped, processed and sold.

Here we are living the rural dream life and it is a dead end. Local Orcadians cannot afford to buy a tiny one-room house and so they are forced to move south and work at big businesses while the wealthy come up here and drive the locals out. Meanwhile, big business after big business arrives and kills off the locally-owned small shops that once did brisk trade. And why? Because we are so obsessed with buying as cheaply as possible without carefully considering all of the stuff involved with our purchase.

How to save our small businesses and rural communities? RESPONSIBLE CONSUMERISM ladies and gents. Don't read any further if you are a Politically Correct type that can't handle someone stating their opinion without being warm and fuzzy...

The only way to win this battle is if we, the consumer, stop trying to get as much as we can for as little as possible. First of all, we don't need as much variety as we think we do and so if we simplified our menues and our wardrobes we would not "need" to shop so cheap for sweatshop goods and imported produce. It's a sad fact of irresponsible consumerism that we automatically head for what's cheap without thinking about our communities and local producers - let alone, "Who made this and under what conditions?" When you reach for something on the store shelf are you asking, "Was this produced by a child in a sweat shop?" or "Will buying this cause us to become more dependent on the imports from other countries?" How many times does that thought enter our heads? Hardly ever. Instead we are saying, "This costs 拢1.20 and that costs 拢3.45 so I'll buy the first item and save and then I can get even more variety for less!"

And thus another five year old child and his pregnant mom toil away for 16 hours in some sweatshop without water or food - and another British farmer or producer folds under and looses their business.

THINK, PEOPLE! It's not enough to save a bit of 拢拢 - we have a moral responsibility towards the rest of humanity, to the animal kingdom and to our environment.

And if you don't care about the sweat shop kids at least think about animal welfare - what conditions is that meat being prouduced under? How are the animals being fed, housed - and handled! Here in Orkney a farmer gets convicted for striking a beast and rendering it dead. How many beasts are rendered dead through beatings on farms overseas where we buy their meat because it's cheaper then the meat produced locally under the watchful eye of animal welfare regulations? Do you want to eat a hen that spent its life stuck in a tiny cage vs. a local free range hen because you can save a few pounds? THINK!

And think about our environment! How as this item produced? What materials went into the making of it and where did the waste go? Are you really saving if you buy cheap and pollute the world??

It's not enough to stop thinking at this point. We also need to start thinking in a more communal sense rather then in an individual sense because we are the ones who inhabit our communities - and we make or break our communities based on our actions as consumers, farmers, producers etc. We destory ourselves or we save ourselves but if we don't wake up and smell the coffee we can kiss our happy rural small-business lives goodbye and have no one to blame but ourselves. Don't wait for "someone else" to help - get cracking and help yourselves!

Until we can allow ourselves to pay more for locally produced foods and products and we let go of the idea that we "need" such variety in food and goods, we'll never get out from under the community-destroying crush of the Big Businesses. It's interesting to me how our society claims to be so independent and "I'm such a unique individual!" but we are led around by the nose through our irresponsible consumerism. The big companies that sell cheap say, "Shop here!" and we obey. The advertisements on TV and in our media say, "You need to have this!" and we obey. But honestly, do we need? Or is it just greed and good old fashioned, "I want"? Can we take the time to assess our real wants and or actual needs - and act acordingly? Or shall we continue tearing down our own communities by our "money saving" actions and our "need" for the latest hot popular thing? (Fill in blank: clothing, food item, car...whatever the advertisers have convinced us we have to have...)

See the picture of the bull with the ring in his nose? That's us. The Big Businesses tug on our rings with their low prices and slick advertisements and we plod along to their bidding. "It's cheap!" and "I've got to have it!" are the stones that pave the way to farms and small businesses dying a death right under our noses while we wring our hands and wonder why our communities are being turned into expensive playgrounds for the rich where locals can't even afford a tiny flat. Well hello! The answer is right before our eyes and *we* - not "someone else" like the government - are the only ones that can fix the problem through responsible consumerism. If you act like a sheep you can't complain when you follow the flock over the edge of a cliff after being given plenty of warnings...

(And that's not to mention world poverty and how irrisponsible consumerism keeps entire nations locked into crushing poverty. Hmmm! And if pictures of starving kids with flies walking around their eyeballs doesn't move you, think of the starving animals wandering the same muddy streets and the eccological devistation visited upon their lands...)

As a farmer I have a major bone to pick with the big businesses that destroy small communities without a second thought - and the irrisponsible consumers that destroy their childrens' future in order to save a pound. There's nothing worse then watching a family lose their business/farm and then they have to go and work for donkey's wages for the big business that ruined them! And then their kids have to leave town and go find work far away because there is nothing for them except working at a low-paying job that keeps them living at home with their parents until they give up and move sooth because, hey, if they get married and have kids they'll never afford even a small house with no land here in the small rural communities! Look what happens when the local economy collapses: property prices rise through the roof and the locals are driven away to live in cities and towns while their beautiful rural homes become only for the rich. I'm watching this happen right before my eyes - and if I am blessed with children I'll end up having to move sooth in my retirement in order to be near them because they won't be able to live here in Orkney - who can afford the prices! Oh but did you hear the great news?! Another big chain supermarket is rolling into town...We'll save so much money when we go shopping!!

As a society we have become so incredibly pathetically spoiled. We want our cake cheap, we want to eat it too - and we want it now. We don't care what the act of satisfying our demands does to our neighbors and our communities - as long as we, as individuals, get it cheap and fast, who cares! We lack foresight and discernment. We don't care about sweatshops and animal welfare in other countries - all that matters is we save a few pounds shopping at the big places and those little stores, hey! It's their fault they carry all that Fair Trade and locally produced stuff that costs twice as much!

The big businesses offer cheap prices for products yes - but at what cost to us as persons and communities?! Like I keep saying, we can't sit around whining for the government to bail us out - the answer lies in our hands and unless we get up and DO something we'll continue to wring our hands and moan as we watch this ship sink right under our feet. Sure, Britain will have lots of animal, human and environmental welfare regulations - but what about the rest of the world that provides us such cheap savings on their imported goods? What are they doing to protect people, animals and the environment?

Even if you think I'm an opinionated wind-bag I hope that this post causes you to pause and think the next time you walk past the small shop selling local and fair trade and reach for something cheap on a big buisness shelf.

Responsible Consumerism...