Since 1994, real consumer food prices have increased by 2.8 percent while family farmer prices have fallen by 35.7 percent and major food corporations’ profits have soared."
— Roger Allison, executive director of the Missouri Rural Crisis Center
The family farm is in deep trouble. Couched within reams of statistics, government rhetoric, and the self-congratulations of giant agribusiness corporations is a story of occupational extermination. According to John Kinsman, a Wisconsin dairyman and founding member of Family Farm Defenders, "Family farms are being discriminated against [in a way that is] tantamount to an ethnic cleansing. Political and economic forces have joined together in this and collaboratively work to develop unfair pricing structures and tax breaks that favor large-scale farms, as well as delivering grants and legal advantages to agribusiness-scale corporate entities."
The result? A loss of more than 300,000 U.S. farms between 1979 and 1998 — a loss that is again accelerating, after a brief hiatus following the farm crisis of the mid- to late-1980s.
This agrarian "genocide" mirrors the descent of much of America’s rural country into economic serfdom. The route to this destruction of a once-strong farm economy? Contract farming, vertical integration, and agribusiness consolidation, aided and abetted by government policies that pander to the parasitic inclinations of corporate greed.
In 1920, more than 30 percent of Illinois’ population lived on farms. In forty years — by 1960 — the percentage dropped to 7.5 percent. By 1990, that percentage shrank to 1.6 percent and, in the last ten years or so, has fallen below 1 percent. Simply put, in 1920 we viewed ourselves as largely rural people. More than 30 percent of us actually lived on farms; another significant percentage of us lived in small towns. Most who lived in big cities had relatives — parents or grandparents, aunts or uncles — who lived on farms. Our relationships, our stories, were somehow woven of connections to the land and to raising food. Today, most of us lack even rudimentary ties to the land or to farming.
Because so many of us have lost our rural connections and, with these connections, our personal rural history, we do not or cannot relate to an advancing rural crisis. The implications of this crisis seem abstract, maybe too distant to be real. Hidden under the abstractions, however, are stories of suffering, courage, and creativity — stories we can understand. Deeper than this understanding is identification: Our nation’s continuing loss of family farms parallels the loss of small businesses and local ownership at all levels of American society. And deeper than identification lies the vital importance of food. The loss of the family farm is significant in its implications for our food, our health, and the health of our children.
The last two decades have brought pain to many American farmers, forced off their land by falling prices and an industrial food system that values land, animals, and human beings not at all. Industrial agriculture mimics the industrial model of factories and businesses, whose only concern is creating immense, short-term profits, even at the expense of long-term economic and environmental liabilities.
Since the end of World War II, farmers have been caught between traditional values replete with the knowledge that the land provides (well in good times, poorly in bad) and an industrial model girded with an arsenal of chemical and mechanical tools to force production at all costs. After adapting the tools of war, the chemicals and machines, for agriculture, universities and government agencies alike raised the cry, "We have to feed the world!"
Bemired within this laudable goal and a desire to modernize — to be perceived as professionals rather than laborers — farmers swallowed the bait offered by bankers and government farm credit agencies in the 1970s. These entities offered large loans for expansion of farming operations, based on perceived increases in farmland values. After this credit debacle collapsed, thousands of farmers, many of whom were guilty of nothing more than a deliberately contrived devaluation of their farmland, lost their farms. Those who survived the farm crisis of the 1980s were exhorted to compete against their remaining neighbors in a winnowing process that forced them to "get bigger or get out."
To qualify for government payments, farmers were compelled to follow government mandates on what could be planted and how. The highest government payments went to those farmers who planted commodity crops like corn and soybeans "fencerow to fencerow," while ignoring issues of sustainability such as water pollution or the loss of soil tilth. Those who played the game well were the farmers who could outbid their neighbors for rental land or actually buy out their neighbors’ farms. More land, and bigger government payments, went to the biggest and to those with the least sense of community responsibility. More production; fewer farmers.
This treadmill escalated; rural communities disintegrated while fewer farmers farmed larger farms. Their use of bigger machinery and more chemicals resulted in increasing production costs. The reward? Overproduction, falling commodity prices and a world glut, which changed the agricultural battle cry from "we have to feed the world!" to "we have to be globally competitive!" Leading this contemporary battle cry is an ever expanding industrial complex that now seeks vertical integration.
Tyson and Smithfield already have adopted vertical integration as their operating model. The farmers they work with retain their mortgages — along with the capital risk of buildings, land, and machinery — and are responsible for environmental liability. But the corporations own the food processing plants and the means of distribution, and they dictate to their farmer/contractors how farm products are to be raised. In fact, it has become commonplace for food processing corporations to own, through contract production, the entire farm product, from seed or conception to retail delivery. In short, they own the farmer, not the farm. Those farmers who rebel often find themselves out in the cold; the food processing industry uses its huge profits to buy out competition, which limits market alternatives.
Gayle Goold, a family farmer from Paxton, Illinois, who served on the board of directors for the Illinois Stewardship Alliance for many years, summed it up this way: "Industrial agriculture does not need or want independent family farmers. They want contract labor without the capital or environmental risks of owning the farms themselves." Tightly squeezed farmers, attempting desperately to retain their farms, have little recourse but to comply.
So the farm crisis in which we find ourselves today is not an acute fever but a chronic illness. Quieter, less overtly bloody than the crisis of the 1970s, it nonetheless takes its toll in human lives and social degradation. A documented rise in farm "accidents" masks but does not erase the despair of a farmer forced to sell land settled by his great-grandparents. The rise in farmer suicides also is documented by rural health care and social agencies; witness the neighbor of one farm activist, who swallowed a bottle of Tylenol one Christmas Eve when the rest of the family members were at work.
The stress and the losses have not been limited to individual farm families, however. Rural communities in some areas have become all but ghost towns. Monies that once circulated locally, supporting vital rural functions such as schools, churches, and local stores now flow only to suppliers of bulk inputs such as fertilizers and herbicides, often based out of state.
Statistics from a non-profit Washington think tank, the Rural Policy Research Institute (RUPRI), detail the damage done to rural families and communities by this loss of structure. According to a 2001 RUPRI presentation, the proportion of rural eighth-graders who take drugs is much higher than that of urban counterparts. Rural eighth-graders were 32 percent more likely to use marijuana, 52 percent more likely to use cocaine, 75 percent more likely to have used crack cocaine and 104 percent more likely to use amphetamines than urban kids. Rural poverty is increasing more rapidly than urban poverty, and wages in rural areas remain lower.
The social costs of agricultural industrialization extend beyond rural America, as well. They are the source of increasing human health risks. Industrial livestock production is responsible for mutating pathogens such as Listeria and Salmonella, and the devastating spread of BSE (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, or Mad Cow Disease). Think briefly upon the fact that McDonalds deliberately mixes ground meat from hundreds if not thousands of beef carcasses to standardize the taste of its hamburger patties. Dwell for a moment on the possibility of one contaminated animal being mixed with this vast quantity of meat and you begin to see the connection between an industrial food system and imperiled health.
A Route to Recovery?
So, how do we tally the total loss caused by the demise of our family farms? How do we correct the substitution of industrial-sized factory farms and contract labor for farms whose owners cared deeply about their land, their animals and their communities? To whom do we turn to demand justice within this industrial system?
Back in 1997, the United States Department of Agriculture convened a National Commission on Small Farms. This commission determined that the common belief that larger farms were more efficient than small farms was in fact a myth. Following a year of testimony and research, the Commission made more than a hundred recommendations for changes to correct many of the discriminatory government policies that have adversely affected smaller family farms. To date, little has been done to implement these changes.
Of course, we must look to ourselves. And rays of hope are appearing in the form of rural and urban movements attempting to reverse the course of industrialization. Strategies and tactics are emerging to provide alternatives to factory food. Many family farmers are leaving the treadmill of commodity production and re-establishing traditional relationships between themselves, their farm products, and their customers. For the vanguard, food is losing its status as a faceless commodity and is becoming an emblem of pride for the farmer who sells it and the consumer who knows its worth.
Most commonly, farm-fresh eggs, grass-fed meats, organic produce, freshly ground flours and meals, farmstead cheeses and artisan breads are finding their way into farmers markets. Illinois now has more than 140 farmers markets in different parts of the state, although state or county regulations here still place barriers in some locations to many farmers who want to sell their products at these kinds of markets.
In addition to a revival of interest in farmers markets, the demand for organically produced foods has grown by a rate of more than 20 percent every year for the last decade. This market growth exemplifies the desire on the part of the American public for food that does not come off a chemically driven assembly line. It proves that many of us are looking for saner food, food we can count on to be good for us rather than bad. More and more, we are curious about the origins of our food and we are concerned about its safety and quality. Buying organic and buying directly from family farmers, many of whom adopt organic production systems as they decouple from the conventional commodity farm system, makes sense.
People who seek out healthful, organic food and a connection with the land it comes from also are discovering community-supported agriculture, or CSA. This arrangement between farmers and customers who pay ahead of time for a season’s worth of farm products goes well beyond marketing. CSA also offers a connection: rural ties that offer a sense of the land while feeding our families with locally raised food. CSA is more common in other states such as Wisconsin, than in Illinois, but Illinois boasts Angelic Organics — the nation’s largest CSA — as well as several new CSAs, such as Jeff Ulig’s Buff Rock Farm. These options show that we do not need to wait for the slowly grinding wheels of government to bring justice to family farmers. We can take action ourselves, by asking about the sources of food available to us in grocery stores, finding food grown locally, and asking for a face and a name to go with our meal.
This is our route to recovery. We need to remember that we thrive or decline according to the health of our rural communities, our family farms, and the health of our food. We need to remember that we are necessarily connected with our farmers, even if that connection has grown distant, and wan. We need to repair and strengthen the bonds between ourselves and our farmers, our food, and the land. As Roger Allison put it at a rally for Mobilization for Global Justice, April 2000, in Washington, D.C.: "We as family farmers know that...the rest of society cannot achieve justice without family farmers providing high quality, healthy, and affordable food for all people."
And then, as if to remind us of other, successful calls for justice, he continued: "Ain’t no power like the power of the people and the power of the people don’t stop."
Resources
Family Farm Defenders, 608-260-0900 or e-mail rsimpson@terracom.net
Illinois Stewardship Alliance, 217-498-9707
Via Campesina, a global advocacy organization for peasants and indigenous farmers
Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy
Worldwatch Institute, 800-555-2028
CSAs
Angelic Organics, 815-389-2746
Avalanche Organics, 608-629-5296
Jeff Ulig’s Buff Rock Farm, 630-653-4351, 815-384-5002
Sweet Earth Organics, 608-875-6026