Does urban farmers' virtue differentiate them from rural ones?
I know the association of urban ag/slow food/organic/locavore movement with all things virtuous has been going on for some time, but just because the movement has proved so self-congratulatory (and mostly bourgeois) didn't necessarily make rural farmers the "bad guys." I figured that, more than anything, the slow/local/urban ag craze was, at worst, implying (if only to those too myopic to look beyond their own food needs) that large-scale farmers (and, by extension, rural communities and populations) were (becoming) obsolete. But a story in the New York Times a few days ago left me wondering if the urban ag trend (the fruits of which I admit to regularly indulging from my suburban home in greater Sacramento, where many posh farmers markets surround me) also makes rural farmers look less virtuous, even a bit like "the enemy." Kirk Johnson's story focused on what he called a new business model of farming, one marked by smaller-scale f...