Family Farms Being Plowed Under
People who lack vision perish. People who lack food perish more quickly.
Every government on Earth - until the 104th Congress - has acknowledged the need for national farm policies. This year, Republican majorities in both houses claim to be getting the government out of agriculture. But both bills forget the very problems that led to agricultural policy in the first place: Small producers like myself - a Wisconsin dairy farmer with 30 cows on 250 acres - need protection from the likes of Archer Daniels Midland, the king of agribusiness.
Farmers, more than anybody, want to see farm policy reformed. Many of our national farm policies were conceived by grain traders like Cargill, and have benefited corporate agribusiness, not small farmers. As a result, farmers have been forced to either produce their neighbors out of business or perish themselves.
Since 1930, farm numbers have steadily fallen from 6 million full-time farms to fewer than 1 million in 1994. Farm income has fallen with respect to other businesses, farm debt has risen, and farming has replaced mining as the nation’s most hazardous occupation.
Why protect family farms? Since the beginning of history, humankind’s primary social structure and economic endeavor has been the family farm. The overwhelming majority of our ancestors were small farmers. Family farms have nurtured us physically, emotionally, spiritually and economically.
Communities and villages were possible only because of the enduring stability of family farms. Democratic governments grew directly out of the agrarian values of patience, cooperation and shared responsibility. In short, civilization (certainly American civilization) is literally a family farming success story. The current presumption that as a society we can safely abandon our vital connection to family farms and rural communities is hubris.
Land is the Earth’s only truly renewable resource. If our land becomes depleted, oil, gas and precious metals will be worthless. The information highway will lead us nowhere. If our water becomes too polluted to drink, and our air too polluted to breathe, we cannot switch brands.
Compared with corporate, factory-style farming, the traditional family farm is more friendly to the natural environment. Family farmers have a vested interest in food, land, water and air quality because they actually live on the land they own, breathe the air, eat the food, drink the water and depend on continued soil productivity for future generations. Turning these responsibilities over to underpaid employees of company farms managed by absentee owners is a national mistake.
And yet, three companies in the United States now process more than 80 percent of our beef, four companies control 50 percent of hogs, and four companies control 95 percent of chicken production. Four corporations control 90 percent of the grain traded on world markets.
Economists claim that the large-scale efficiencies of agribusiness are good for consumers, but low farm prices do not directly translate into lower retail prices. Beef eaters, for example, are probably unaware that beef farmers have not received more than 75 cents per pound since December 1993, and have gotten less than 66 cents per pound since last May. But the meat packers haven’t passed this price on to consumers, resulting in unprecedented profits.
Prices paid to farmers for raw milk have also fallen 15 percent since 1980, even as retail prices have risen 15 percent. The dairy industry has used the extra profits to intensify its market presence through mergers and leveraged buyouts. Depressed prices, meanwhile, forced more than half of dairy farmers out of business between 1980 and 1995.
Family farmers have virtually no history of withholding production to exact higher prices. They have, instead, naively trusted the government and the market to maintain fair farm prices. We cannot hope for such complacency from concentrated agribusiness.
We need to ask ourselves, as a nation: How do we want our land used, who do we want producing our food and how do we want it produced? A society that believes it can ignore food, water and land policy is fooling itself, and a people that leave these matters to the few, the loud and the special interests will go hungry.
xxxx