The Sin of Birth Control and The Death of The Family Farm

The notion that "labor saving devices" are a blessing is largely accepted today. The notion that that large families are a curse (in deed if not in words) is also accepted by many. As a farmer, I must challenge this mindset. I have been a lover of old barns for most of my life. Today they are hated by the progressive farmers as inefficient and old fashion. Remnants of a time when farmers were ignorant folks. I often have wondered how the old timers did it all. The barns are neat but require a lot of labor to get the work done. The crops were put up by hand and they milked almost as many cows as I do. When I was a boy I would ask the old guys how they got it all done. "We had a large family" they would say. It was easy to get the work done because many hands make for light work. The work was more enjoyable as well. 6 or 8 family members working together on a job, talking and joking around. Sure beats sitting in a lonely tractor cab for 10 hours cultivating beans or corn the modern way. The way I see it, none of the labor saving devices that have made us lonely, poor, overproducers and killers of the soil would have ever come about if we hadn't made the decision to limit children. The sin of birth control has killed the family farm. Our judgment for hating our own fertility has been the end of our farms fertility. The idea that the old timers were ignorant fools for having large families is pagan to the core. "That stupid mountain woman's got 10 kids." The moderns figure she's to stupid to realize that having sex will make you pregnant. We must remember that obeying God will always look foolish to the world. Somehow I think even in the 1700s people knew how babies were made and could probably figure out creative ways to prevent it. Lets not buy the lie that they were stupid underevolved creatures......a little Darwinistic ain't it. Only the moderns could look back to a time when farms were happy and profitable and call it bad. Then turn around and say a bunch of debt ridden, unhappy, childless farms are "God's gift to the world".