The death of family farms touches us all

Once again, mad cow disease has struck the cattle of Canada. Now it’s not whether the disease will cross the Canadian-American border, but when. The disease is a malady of industrialized agriculture, a symptom of the dreadful consequences of doing away with family farming for agribusiness.

The violence unleashed in rural America and the rest of the world by industrialized farming is reminiscent of the Dust Bowl curse of the 1930s. The wreckage of that dangerous system of food production is everywhere in rural America. That other United States is littered with animal factories, abandoned farmhouses, deserted land, impoverished farm towns and massive plantations.

Walter Goldschmidt, a U.S. Department of Agriculture anthropologist, brought to light in the early 1940s the undoing of rural America by agribusiness.

Despite feeble attempts in the Senate in the mid-1970s to put a brake in the path of the agribusiness colossus, government policy never ceased lavishing America’s large farmers with gold. In 1983, researcher Dean MacCannell, professor of rural sociology at the University of California, Davis, issued a severe warning that complemented the warning of Goldschmidt: The size of farms matters in agriculture. Large farms destroy rural America.

Agribusiness policies “cut against the grain of traditional American values,” MacCannell has said. His studies showed that giant farmers were becoming America’s “neo-feudal” lords who, with government assistance, were converting rural America into a Third World land.

The most lasting effects of agribusiness include the suppression of the middle class and the decline of democracy, toxins in water and food, high rates of debilitating disease and often death from poisoning, incidence of monstrous malformations of the newborn in or near factory farms, higher rates of cancer among farmers and others living close to farmers and the drastic decline of the small white family farmers and the near disappearance of the black family farmers.

The Agriculture Department wrecked the lives of the family farmers, telling them to get big or get out. Its advice was wrong most of the time. Its science was not science but a technology of conquest, which it gold-plated with lavish subsidies, research and policies disdainful of democracy, nature and human culture. Sowing pro-agribusiness seeds in rural America brought forth the desired harvest – 29,862 farmer millionaires in 2002, while 35 percent of America’s farmers earned less than $2,500. There are about 2.1 million farmers in America.

So rural America is drained of the democratic family farmers, their lands now under the dominion of corporations planting the countryside with bad food and poverty.

Meanwhile, the Agriculture Department, with the collaboration of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, is putting lipstick on the land grant universities that are now agribusiness schools, the sod-busted prairies, the poisoned rivers, the food loaded with toxins, the stinking hog factories, the boarded main streets and the contaminated land. The Agriculture Department is proud that half of American farmers have Internet access while 39 percent use a computer for their business.

The only positive trend in American agriculture is the steady growth of organic or biological family farmers blending traditional knowledge with ecology. The rest of the farmers either disappear into the urban labyrinth or become “hobby” farmers, or, worse yet, “contract” workers to meat factories, earning about $10,000 per year, essentially accepting the status of serfs.

Mad cow disease is the product of these meat factories because industrialized farming treats cattle no differently than it treats any other manufactured product. Cattle no longer graze in the field; they are kept confined and fed, among other food, animal tissues, which exposes them to mad cow disease. Mad cow disease never was a disease in the family system of farming.

If we value democracy, nature, good food and a healthy and prosperous rural America, we need to stop buying the products of agribusiness, bringing mad cow to an end. Eat the food of organic and small family farmers. Subscribe to their seasonal fruit and vegetables, supporting them to increase their numbers to millions. This way, the country can return to its family farming, which is the only food and agricultural system that is democratic, secure and ecological.