The importance of philosophy or a world view in a society is so often overlooked. America is free because our Founding Fathers believed that freedom was something worth dying to obtain. They believed this for several reasons. For one, being mostly devout Christians they understood the importance of morality, responsibility and duty. While the Bible taught them to obey the King, it also showed them that there comes a time when that obedience became wrong: when the King's laws or actions opposed Godly morality, as it had in the late 1700s.

But another factor weighed heavily on their individualistic world-view—most of them were farmers.

City dwellers have always existed depending on others for many thing but also having others depend on them.  Rural dwellers, namely farmers, on the other hand, existed fairly independently, often not needing others for anything. Therefore farmers have always been the core of individualism in any society. That so many Americans were farmers in the 1700s (as much as 95% of the population by some estimates) instilled an individualism that fueled the eventual rebellion against abuses by the British crown.

Over the years, though, more and more of our population shifted from farming to other sources of income. The 20th century brought the agribusinesses or mega-farms, that manipulated prices to drive more and more small farmers out of business. With the help of nearsighted (or possibly corrupt) politicians, agricultural subsidies were introduced that crippled the small farmers even more. While promoted as a way of helping the family farmers, subsidies went almost exclusively to the large farmer who didn't need them, and who used them to push more and more small farmers out of business. Price caps reduced the profits so that the small farmers struggled to survive. Mega farms had such large crops that price caps actually helped them, by expanding their market share as even more small farmers could no longer afford to stay in business.

Why has there been such an unmerciful war waged against the small farmer? Profit is really only a side benefit. Power is the real motive.

When the depression hit most farmers suffered greatly not just from the depression itself, but from the droughts that had helped bring about the Depression. But amidst that chaos was a factor rarely mentioned. Many Black farmers escaped much of the hardship of the depression, because due to prevailing racism, they were unable to get loans to help expand their farms prior to the Depression, so when it hit, they had no loans to repay, and were able to keep their farms while most white farmers watched bankers take theirs. Their independence, forced as it may have been, saved them.

But that core of independence was a threat to those who wanted to drive America to a more socialistic society. The individual family farms had to go.

Today we still have family farmers who stubbornly struggle to continue the traditions brought down to them from our Founding Fathers. They are an admirable lot, and a thorn in the side of those who work to quash the American spirit of Rugged Individualism. But their value to America as a whole goes well beyond what food they provide. They remain a symbol of what America is really about.

If the family farms are totally replaced by corporate agribusinesses, we've not only handed our food production over to entities known for focusing on money more than ethics, we also have allowed to vanish a part of our population that helped remind us of who we are, and where we came from. Regardless of your ethnicity or heritage, there were farmers there that defined the better part of what that heritage stood for. We can't afford to lose that.