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For most Americans, the Occupy Wall Street movement has been largely an urban phenomenon, but last Sunday, December 4th, farmers and rural activists flocked to New York City to join the Occupy Wall Street Farmers’ March in a show of solidarity with their urban allies.

While the mainstream media has tried to paint Occupy Wall Street as a bunch of wild eyed-hippies, for many of us who live in small towns in rural America and fight to reform food and agriculture, we know better. Which is why many of us traveled from as far as Colorado, Iowa, Wisconsin, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Maine to join with OWS to occupy food, farms and the land.

Family Farmers are the 99%!

It’s not for nothing that one Hudson Valley farmer carried a sign (one of my favorites) that said: “Civilization was built on Agriculture, not a Trading Floor!”

Unfortunately, due the rampant collusion between Republicans, Democrats and Wall Street, civilization may end on the trading floor if things continue as business as usual in our economic and political capitals.

Even though it took the massive mortgage crisis and economic collapse to wake the American people up to the vast harms caused by unchecked corporate power, farmers have been acutely aware of these issues for decades, if not centuries; one only has to remember that our nation was founded by an alliance between urban rebels in Boston and Virginia farmers.

In the tradition of uniting urban and rural, the Farmers March was planned as “a celebration of community power to regain control over the most basic element to human well-being: food. The food system has been taken over by multinational corporations to the detriment of communities, ecosystems, local economies, and soil all over the world,” said Paula Winograd and Seth Wulsin, members of the Occupy Wall Street Food Justice group.