When We Farm
A number of years ago, a farmer in Indiana told me that you can talk a farmer into doing pretty nearly anything once.
In Bad Land, Jonathon Raban tells how the promise of dryland farming lured countless hopeful people from the east, from the cities and, most of all, from foreign countries to the arid open plains of Montana and other Western states:
...Campbell's Soil Culture Manual [on dryland farming] was an inspirational work. Hardy Campbell was an evangelist in the cause of Science, Progress, and the American Way...Anyone could be excited by Campbell's figures. On his own farm, he had reaped 54 bushels of wheat to the acre. Using the Campbell method, Mr. L. L. Mulligan had gotten 75 bushels of barley...with crops like these, grown on land once named a desert, Campbell's drumrolling on behalf of his own system did not seem immodest.
Of course, how it worked in the long term was not exactly inspiring:
Most people were baffled and frightened by the disastrous turn in the weather. They had been assured--by the government, by scientists, by the railroad literature--that this couldn't happen, that (in Campbell's words) "the semi-arid region is destined to be in a few years the richest portion of the United States." Now, as grasshoppers swarmed over the ruined crop, and farmland turned to desert, it seemed that there might be an ominous significance in the embossed gilt camel on the cover of the Soil Culture Manual.
In the 1970s, Earl Butz, Secretary of Agriculture, told farmers to 'get big or get out.' And, like dry land farming, that too, seemed, at the least, a possible idea, and at best, a path to greater success. Agricultural colleges in the 70s taught future farmers to be hard-headed and technology-minded. Bigger was better, bigger was, in fact the only choice for a 'good' farmer, who would then enjoy economies of scale and efficiencies that could only be achieved through automationand expansion. A farmer in New Hampshire in 1979 leveled his farm, spending thousands of dollars to turn it from rocky, rolling New England countryside into plowable land for big equipment, slicing off a hill here and filling in a valley there. In 1976, a Cornell University professor described a system where dairy cows would live their lives in transportable stalls, which could be hooked together like a cattle train and moved from milk house to feed center to overnight shelter without the inefficiencies of actually getting living creatures from place to place. It was all about production. We were the 'breadbasket to the world' and all things seemed possible to farmers who were sharp and forward-thinking and innovative.
The 1970s were a heady time of rapidly rising farm income and skyrocketing land values, and few questioned the notion that the good times would roll on forever. Banks urged farmers to take out larger and larger loans to modernize and to expand operations. One Iowa farm family applied for $12,000 in 1979 only to find their check made out for $25,000. When they called their loan officer about the mistake, he just laughed. "Don't be foolish," he chided them. "Go ahead and use the extra money for whatever you want. You’re good for it."But they weren't really....
In Broken Heartland: The rise of America's Rural Ghetto, Osha Gray Davidson describes the farm crisis of the 1980s and its long--and still ongoing--aftermath.
In 1971, farm debt stood at $54 billion. By 1985, that amount had swelled to $212 billion--a figure greater than the combined debt of Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina. American agriculture had become the most capital-intensive system of food production in the world.
Farming is all about hope in the face of disaster. Despite science and technology, farmers can't control the weather and in farming it's important when it rains and when it freezes and where the twisters touch down. And it is a far more precarious living than most people ever imagine:
From 1981 to 1987, 26,000 Iowa farmers--about 20% of the total went out of business. But the family farm--never the robust institution of popular mythology--has been in serious, and many say fatal, trouble for decades. Our farm population has plummeted from 30 million down to 5 million since the 1940s, while the average farm size has more than doubled during the same period.
In addition to the farms themselves and the people who live and work on them, farming knits together the fabric of rural communities in ways that aren't always visible or easy for people not living in those communities to understand:
As farms began to fold [in the 1980s], so did the many businesses that had grown up to service them. Between 1976 and 1986, Iowa's small towns suffered the following losses: the number of gas stations fell almost 41%, grocery stores 27%, building material stores 21%, variety stores 37%, men's clothing stores 38%. Bankrupticies among Iowa businesses rose 46% in 1985, the largest one-year jump since records were first kept 25 years earlier.
Farmers who lose their farm don't just lose a paycheck and it is not, for most of them, a simple matter of shrugging their shoulders and moving on. Sometimes the land has been in the family for generations; it is where they make their home. When farmers lose their farms, they lose their land, their history, their families, their place in the world, and their lives, sometimes even literally.
In 1987, the number of suicides in Iowa climbed to 398, the highest number since the Depression. (One hundred and ninety-five Iowans shot themselves; 74 used poisonous gas or vapors; 66 hanged or suffocated themselves; 35 took poison; and 28 died of a variety of other methods.) The suicide rate among farmers in Iowa was 46 per 100,000 in 1983. The national rate for all adult men is about 29 per 100,000....
For all the outer changes that have taken place in rural America over the past decade, it is the change occurring inside the hearts and minds of rural people that is the least recognized and perhaps most important. The constant downward ratcheting of expectations, the grinding, dailly battle against largely unknown but seemingly invincible enemies, the dissolution of families, communities, and dreams are taking a toll on rural people that will last for decades.
Why should we care about any of this? Because small and medium-sized farmers on their own land are free economic citizens who can be good for the environment and are key players in building healthy communities nearby. Independent farmers, independent small business owners, and other individuals who are free citizens both socially and economically are absolutely critical to a functioning democracy.
It is fashionable to dismiss Thomas Jefferson's agrarian society as an outdated utopia which was, in any case, restricted to white men. But while there is much to criticize in Jefferson's original vision and in how sparingly it was actually implemented, the democratic principle central to Jefferson's ideal--the commitment to community assured by the yeoman farmer--remains our passport to the future. The challenge is to adapt that eighteenth-century conception of society to fit the realities of the twenty-first century. If we can meet that challenge, then the golden age of rural America will lie not in our past--as our myths have it--but in our future.
Broken Heartland was written over a decade ago (though there is a small updated section from the 1996 edition). Since that time, farming has continued to change in Iowa and other midwestern states. It isn't quite as bleak as it was in 1990, though one thing definitely remains constant--the total number of farmers keeps right on shrinking.