Many people reacted to last night’s Super Bowl ad with dismay at how the industrial model of agriculture, which is harming our environment and the health of our citizens, was being romanticized, and how it misrepresented the reality of farming in the U.S. today.
An article posted today on Grist comments on the ad:
American farm worker conditions are likened to “modern slavery,” where a precarious force of 50 to 80 percent undocumented workers picks the vast majority of our produce by hand, earning, on average, about $10,000 each year, though the majority of these workers are also parents supporting children. The numbers vary from state to state, but a large proportion of that workforce that spends each day picking food has to pay for their own sustenance with food stamps. The cheapest Dodge Ram pickup costs more than two years of their salary
via Dodge made ‘God made a farmer’ Super Bowl ad, and I made an angry face | Grist.
Another article reworked the words of the ad and totally mocked them:
God said, “I need somebody willing to get up before dawn and call his state senator to complain about expensive new slurry pit legislation, spend all day with his ag lobby board strategizing about more laws against private raw milk sales, take that state senator out for steak and wine at dinner, and then go to town and stay past midnight at a meeting of the school board at the school he wants to eliminate with a voucher program.” So God made a farmer.
Certainly there are still people today who don’t know how farming has changed in the U.S. and may still believe those images from the ad. In that sense, the add just perpetuates the idea that “all is well on the farm”.
“You know, farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil, and you’re a thousand miles from the corn field.”
President Eisenhower, Address at Bradley University, Peoria, Illinois, 9/25/56