I can’t help but wonder where Ballot Question 3 proponents think the average person is going to get their eggs if proponents win the issue and close down the Diemand family egg farm in Wendell.
Perhaps they think everyone has the luxury of time, income and transportation to travel up to farms like my family’s and buy homegrown, specially-raised, specially-fed, specially-priced eggs from their small flocks and the various small farms who sell through them.
It would be nice if that were so, but unfortunately it’s not. The low-wage, working single mom commuting long distances, the housebound, fixed-income senior, the late-shift factory worker who just wants to make sure there’s some eggs in the fridge — they mostly go to the chain supermarket or convenience store.
Where at least now they can find Diemand Eggs — fresh, safe, local, reasonably-priced, reliable — from a multi-generational family farm right here in the county, employing local people and staffed relatively humanely but practically by people who have been giving back to this community for decades.
But after Question 3 passes, the only choice those shoppers will have are cartons and cartons of weeks-old eggs from large-scale, mid-western, not so-humane factory farms — the very farms that Question 3 proponents are supposedly against.
And apparently Question 3 means the average person won’t even have that choice for long. Not everyone’s life circumstances and income afford them the privilege of eating every egg fresh from a lovingly-maintained personal flock. If people really want to support “sustainable” farming, they should consider access issues, and they should also support the ability to run a sustainable business — fairly, locally and honestly, as the Diemands have done for years.
Patricia Hatch Crosby
Gill