NYFarmer

Female dairy farmer (4th generation), assistant to veterinarian, lawyer by day dedicated to defending family farms of the NY Foodshed, cheesemaker

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Between 1930 and 1933 the Soviet state ordered the Kazakh nomads to stop moving, took their animals for the state's meat quota, and drove the herds to collection points where there was nothing for them to eat, and a people that had lived on milk and meat for three thousand years lost nine animals in ten and four people in ten.

The Kazakhs were not farmers. They were herders of the steppe, moving with the seasons between pastures with their sheep, horses, camels and cattle, living on kumis, mutton and the dried curd of the summer milk, with their wealth on four legs and their houses on carts. Moscow's man in Alma-Ata, Filipp Goloshchekin, who had organised the shooting of the Tsar's family in a cellar, called them backward and announced a Little October: the nomads would be settled on collective farms, their herds would be pooled, and the meat procurement quotas of the five-year plan would come from the animals.

The brigades came and counted the livestock and took it. Herds were driven hundreds of miles to railheads and state farms that had no fodder for them, and died there in heaps, of hunger and the winter, uneaten. Families were ordered to stop in one place on a steppe where staying in one place kills every animal by the end of the season. The quotas were set on paper and enforced with guns, and a Kazakh who slaughtered his own sheep to feed his children was prosecuted for destroying state property. The numbers are the whole story: forty million head of livestock in Kazakhstan in 1929, four million by 1933. Sheep from nineteen million to under two. Camels, the animal that had carried the nation, from a million to seventy thousand.

With the animals gone the people had nothing, because the people were the animals. They walked. More than a million fled, into China, into Siberia, into the towns where they died at the stations, and a million and a half stayed and died on the steppe, something like forty percent of all the Kazakhs alive, the highest death rate of any people in the Soviet famine. Whole clans vanished. The party in Alma-Ata reported that collectivisation was proceeding.

Goloshchekin was shot by his own side in 1941.

A nation built on milk and meat was converted by decree into a nation of grain farmers on land that grows no grain, and the state's ledger had the herds on it as a quota to be delivered, by the ton, dead or alive. The animals had been feeding the Kazakhs for three millennia. The state fed them for three years.

[ruralroute2 @RuralRouteUSA]

https://t.co/3lA0ZIFmMY

[Into The Forest Dark @ElliottBlackwe3]

An Autumn Path by Mark A. Pearce

[NYFarmer @NYFarmer]

Wild farm hills.

[Elisabeth Olson 🍁🍂 @Elisabethmngirl]

There's an eagle sitting on a tree right off the back porch this morning

[Farm Boy @HemmerleinLee]

I don't get to show off the latest tech, but look at this cute little guy. You need more cows in your timeline.

[NYFarmer @NYFarmer]

Time to begin the fall candle rush. Pure beeswax….

[Ambrosian Candle Co. @ambrosian_co]

Passing of the fall equinox = the candle rush begins.

[Ambrosian Candle Co. @ambrosian_co]

Good Frosty Morning from the Adirondacks . 🍁

[NYFarmer @NYFarmer]

Media gate keeping and shutting out rural voices. https://t.co/oeZG7GtVMN

[NYFarmer @NYFarmer]

Northern harrier hawk

[NYFarmer @NYFarmer]

@KendallCRE It was a very pretty ride to get there

[NYFarmer @NYFarmer]

At the Wampsville court

[Roro @rorotrader]

@alex_fasulo @johnrich Impressive speech from the heart!

@NYFarmer @njcoast_protect

[NYFarmer @NYFarmer]

Sunrise means milk trucks are on the move.

[Jusper Machogu @JusperMachogu]

Life in rural Kisii is like this. Take a break and visit. Stay with us. Dance with us. Farm with us. Cook with us. Hike with us. Learn our ways- customs and traditions- because why not?
You can just visit or pick my Sustainable internship program.

[Barns Wallis @BarnsWallisMD]

Posting a barn every day of 2026

[NYFarmer @NYFarmer]

@Lovetogarden1 Fortunately there are dense woods adjoining golf course. He disappeared into the forest.

[NYFarmer @NYFarmer]

Moose on country club greens down the road from our farm in NY.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

The free bottle of milk on every British school desk was put there by a 4ft 10 redhead from a Manchester slum, who was dead within 6 months of doing it.

Ellen Wilkinson grew up in Ardwick in the 1890s, in a house with no bath, and caught every illness going. She got out on scholarships. By 1935 she was MP for Jarrow, a shipbuilding town where the yard had shut and 7 men in 10 had no work.

She had seen what that did to the children. They were small, bow-legged and grey. In 1936 she walked with 200 of their fathers from Jarrow to London, nearly 300 miles, to hand in a petition. The Prime Minister would not see them.

In 1945 she was made Minister of Education. She had one thing she wanted above the rest. The Treasury told her the country was bankrupt and it could not be afforded.

In August 1946 a third of a pint of full cream milk became free for every schoolchild in Britain, every day, whatever their parents earned.

That winter was the worst of the century. Her ministry had no coal. She worked in her overcoat with bronchitis, and on 6 February 1947 she was found dead in her flat, aged 55.

She never saw a single class of those children grow up. They turned out the tallest and straightest generation the country had ever produced.

If you drank it, warm, through a paper straw, you were her life's work.

[NYFarmer @NYFarmer]

@JTDSR79 This one moved on into our dense woods so will be safe.