I've mentioned this first bit before, but Hillary Clinton didn't win her seat in the US Senate in spite of the voters in rural, conservative upstate New York state. She won with the help of people in those counties. They voted for her despite controversy during her husband's presidency, despite agruments about whether she was enough of a New Yorker to run, despite some people's utter hatred of her. They did it, at least in part, because she was the candidate who came there and talked to them about economic hard times and lost opportunities as if what they experienced actually existed. Those votes were there for a Democrat to take--even a controversial, much reviled candidate--because she listened.
As I visit various left-leaning blogs, I see contempt, condescension, and dismissal of people in the 'Red' states. They're usually throw-away comments, sometimes made in the blog itself, sometimes made by visitors. And it bothers me, because it dismisses people who I think could be on our side.
I posted the following comments over at MaxSpeak in response to discussion generated by this post (about the tobacco farmer who drove his tractor into a pond in Washington, DC) and thought I'd repost them here (for the five or six people who come here occasionally):
You know, no one likes to be treated with contempt. And I can't figure out for the life of me why there's so much contempt for farmers in liberal circles. It bothers me quite a lot.I agree strongly with Max that we need more ways for people to be free economic citizens. We need more ways to promote independence (for all of us, not just farmers). Whether we have economic freedom has a lot to do with whether we feel as if we can speak out on important issues. When you're most worried about getting a dime for your next meal, you're not going to criticize your employer for having the worst safety record in the business or increasing your hours without paying overtime.
Farms and farmers are failing not because we pay too much in subsidies (I mean, think about it) but because we pay them as little mind as necessary, because we promote agribusiness consolidation, which severely restricts their access to markets, and because we fail to add the value (and there is significant value) of stewardship of the land, returns to the environment, and economic stability.
Medium-sized farms support small towns. Large corporate farms do not. Medium-sized farmers buy locally. Large corporate farmers may not even buy in-state. When those medium-sized farms fail they take four or five other businesses with them. Poverty in rural areas is pervasive and deep and largely invisible to most people.
Hard-working, reasonably intelligent people have been forced, through bad advice, bad government programs, lack of power, and their own decisions into desperation and poverty and suicide. There's huge opportunity for creating influential progressive voters in rural communities...but it's not going to happen if we'd rather spend our time being snarky and superior.
...and this...
Two things:A few years ago at the National Pork Congress, I was thinking about factory hog farms and pollution and production vs shoved-over-to-the-side-and-ignored 'alternative' agriculture and why people inssited on doing what, to me, seemed just willfully ignorant and destructive. And I had a revelation: all these people on the convention floor were just doing the best they could with what they had. It didn't make what they were doing less destructive or even less ignorant. But, basically, these were people who loved farming (even many of the agribusiness folks) and it was dying on them and they honestly didn't (and don't) know what to do about it. We can yell at them about what they're doing or we can invite them in, find common cause, and proceed together in areas like civil liberties and government regulation and promoting economic fairness. Most farmers want what we want--to make a living, to raise their families, to live in freedom. But they're not going to walk with us just so we can say--my god, you're ignorant aren't you.
A lot of farmers and rural dwellers are conservative, but a lot of them are 'old-style' conservatives, not Federalist society conservatives. There's a guy I know who lives well north of me in a very rural area with whom I've had political conversations for 10 years and we've never agreed on a single thing--taxes, government, women, nothing. And he told me the other day that he's pissed about the economy, worried about the PATRIOT act and has no faith at all in the Bush administration.
We need numbers and people and voices. We won't agree on everything, but the things we will agree on can use all of us to support them.
Farmers aren't more noble or purer or simpler than the rest of us. Neither are they stupider or more out of touch. They want, as I said above, what we all want. And they care a lot about individual freedoms and civil liberties. Their support often goes to Republicans because that's who they feel is listening to them and understanding what they're dealing with. You know, we can listen, too.
I have added a 'Farming' category at the right so all my posts on farming and rural life can be together instead of under 'General' (which is a stupid category which I wouldn't use at all if I weren't so right-brained).
I am not currently a farmer, in case anyone's wondering, though I've farmed, worked in agribusiness, been an agricultural researcher, live in 'flyover country' and care about what I eat and how we take care of the land.
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.
1776 to 1799
1776
Continental Congress offered land grants for service in the Continental Army
1790
Total population: 3,929,214
Farmers made up about 90% of labor force
1796
Public Land Act of 1796 authorized Federal land sales to the public in minimum 640-acre plots at $2 per acre of credit
1980, 1990
Total population: 227,020,000 and 246,081,000
Farm population: 6,051,00 and 4,591,000
Farmers made up 3.4% and 2.6% of labor force
Number of farms: 2,439,510 and 2,143,150
Average acres: 426 and 461
Irrigated acres: 50,350,000 (1978) and 46,386,000 (1987)
1980's
For the first time since the 19th century, foreigners (Europeans and Japanese primarily) began to purchase significant acreages of farmland and ranchland
1987
Farmland values bottomed out after a 6-year decline, signalling both a turnaround in the farm economy and increased competition with other countries' exports
1988
One of the worst droughts in the Nation's history hit midwestern
John Ikerd, Professor Emeritus at the University of Missouri has written a number of highly interesting papers on the state of American farmers and sustainable agriculture.
In one of these papers (they're all pretty good) he talks about The Case for Common Sense:
American farmers have been told they must specialize, mechanize, and manage their farms like a business – it’s the logical, reasonable thing to do. But, this logic and reason has led to fewer farms, larger farms, and increasingly, to corporate control of farming. Being logical and reasonable has brought the demise of family farms and now threatens the food security of the nation. Maybe it’s time to try something else. Maybe it’s time for farmers to rely on their common sense....
Our common sense today tells us something is fundamentally wrong in American agriculture. We are told we shouldn’t be concerned about the current farm financial situation. The current crisis is just a normal economic adjustment, and the free-market ultimately works for the good of all, so they say. We are told we shouldn’t be concerned about the natural environment, that we have no proof we are damaging the natural ecosystem, and after all, we can find a technological fix for any ecological problem. We are told we shouldn’t be concerned about what is happening to family farms and rural communities, that rural people want the same things urban people want, and thus, they must give up their rural ways of life. But, our common sense tells us that something is fundamentally wrong in rural America – economically, ecologically, and socially.
I once had a major revelation at the annual Pork Congress. Specifically, that, mostly, there are no villians, that everyone (or nearly everyone) is trying their hardest to Do Good, to make an honest living, to help others when they can, to leave their mark in the world. And when you look at things that way--that everyone is doing the best they can--it doesn't necessarily change where you want to go, but it may change the means you use to get there and who you enlist as your allies.
Just like black people don't need white liberals (or worse, white conservatives) telling them what they can and cannot care about, farmers don't need 'city folk' telling them what they can and cannot do with their land. What we (all of us) need instead are to find ways to work together, to understand each other, to honor one another's values, and to make a difference for everyone. Small farmers are getting hammered in the new industrial, global landscape. Environmentalists, people concerned about the food supply, and even just folks who like a good tasty meal should be allies, if not friends, of farmers and other rural citizens in working against corporatization, conglomeration, and industrialization.
I haven't had a chance to write the essay I'd like to write to go with this, but I've decided to start blogging more rural/farming/outside the cities and suburbs stuff because as I read more weblogs and more opinions on what we do and who we are and what's progressive, I'm seeing a great deal of misunderstanding and downright dismissal of those of us in 'flyover country'.
People in rural states can be conservative about some things and downright suspicious of 'big city' doings at times, but don't forget that Harkin is from Iowa, Wellstone was from Minnesota, Hilary Clinton got a lot of votes from rural upstate New York counties (no, she didn't 'win' a lot of those counties, but she gathered 40% of the vote in some places that have been staunchly conservative and Republican for many many years)
Totally unrelated to that, but the thing this blog entry was originally supposed to be about, the Sustainable Agriculture Network has a book onThe New American Farmer who is not surprise, surprise a corporate farmer.
Among the farmers described areDick and Sharon Thompson :
Looking at a 12-year average, Thompson says, his neighbors lose about $33 per acre — before taking government payments into account. By contrast, he generates a profit of $104 per acre. The Thompsons have not received government subsidies for years, yet their diverse farm still supports two families without off-farm employment and without organic premiums.
...provide a living, protect and care for the land, enrich the community and a whole host of other things that we keep pretending aren't important.
Here are the results of a study conducted by Drs. Rick Welsh and Thomas Lyson:
The results of the analysis indicate that, in general, agriculture dependent counties in states with anti-corporate farming laws fared better (less families in poverty, lower unemployment and higher percentages of farms realizing cash gains) than agriculture dependent counties in states without such laws...We conclude that diversity in agricultural structural forms at the county level appears to have positive impacts on rural communities as measured by poverty, unemployment and farm cash returns. Counties appear to require some agricultural industrialization to prosper but suffer when this type of agriculture crowds out less industrialized forms.
Diversity is better. Better than 200,000 hogs a year. Better than compacted soil. Better than biotech for everyone. Other studies show that medium-sized farms are more profitable and that small dairy farms generally benefit not only the farmer who runs them, but the local environment and community as well.