Should We Save the Family Farm?
Moberg, David
The deep farm crisis of recent years has made the urban majority aware of anguish in the countryside, even if the world of modern farming—and even more of farm policy—is so remote that it is...
...The seeds of that panic were sown in the boom years of the 1970s...
...Although carried out in the name of American farmers, such a strategy would be of no benefit to most of them...
...However, even though it would scale cuts so that the big farmers would have to retrench more, it could still end up yielding windfalls for bigger farmers, who could then increase their landholdings...
...screamed the Farm Credit System ads in the Wall Street Journal, while Business Week advised its readers, hardly family farmers, that now was the time to buy their coveted forty acres (although the typical outside investor schemes run more to 4,000 or even 40,000 acres...
...This variation among farms has made it harder to define a family farm policy, and it has led many observers to conclude that the notion is antiquated...
...A family farm can be a small holding where the owner loses money on farm sales of $10,000 or less and makes all his or her income off the farm...
...The research efforts of universities and the government have been skewed toward technologies that will further concentrate land control and intensify the industrial-chemical approach to agriculture...
...Many of the smallest acreages probably shouldn't even be counted as farms...
...Although it was forced temporarily to abandon pursuit of the Republican grail of "getting government out of agriculture," the administration adamantly opposed a "populist" measure introduced by Iowa Democratic Senator Tom Harkin (joined in a later version by Representative Richard Gephardt...
...In other cases, the land is being sold more promptly but arbitrarily classified as "unsuitable" for small or beginning farmers...
...Without a change of heart in implementation, this new legislation could mean very little...
...The terms of sale have almost always favored either debt-free farmers or outside investors who can pay half or more of the price in cash...
...periodic food scarcity remains a threat despite current abundance, and no country wants such vulnerability...
...For example, FCS and FmHA lenders will have to restructure loans to financially stressed farmers if that would cost less than foreclosure (as is often the case...
...The farmers who have recently suffered the most had heavy debt loads...
...It would then cut back production to levels needed for domestic use and reliable export needs plus a reserve...
...While farm exports increased from many Third World countries, the diets of many of the poor shrank further...
...agriculture should be on this road to larger-scale industrialization and lower skills for many farm workers...
...Indeed, one major reason for the improved farm income in 1986 was reduction of those production costs (partly lower fuel prices, but also less use of fertilizers and more reliance on a fuel-efficient practice known as "minimum tillage...
...Mainly, they were just financially vulnerable...
...Neither farmers nor consumers benefited much from the export boom, but the half-dozen huge grain companies that dominate world trade profited handsomely, since they make money on volume of sales regardless of the price...
...Prices are further depressed, while farmers and peasants elsewhere in the world are squeezed, and hunger persists in "a world awash in grain...
...More accurately, family farmers have been caught up in a capitalist market that pressured them in the direction of bigness, technological dependency, and overproduction...
...Even more of the profit has shifted there, in part because many of those supply industries are very concentrated or parts of large, powerful, sometimes global corporations...
...Research universities and the SPRING • 1988 • 205 LAND OWNERSHIP Department of Agriculture Extension Service continued to skew their help to larger-scale, industrialized agriculture...
...and maintaining a flexible system of small owner-operators against the tendencies of capitalist agriculture to concentration and industrialization...
...They hope thereby to bring in enough dollars to repay their debts to U.S...
...Buy North Dakota...
...Shortly afterward he set in motion the private negotiations that led to the surprising nineteen million metric ton, $1.1 billion grain and soybean sale to the Soviet Union, which wanted to increase meat consumption despite poor harvests...
...The main benefits come from reducing the favorable treatment for capital gains, eliminating both the investment tax credit and the use of tax-exempt bonds by large corporate farms, and for the very biggest corporate farms eliminating cash accounting (which permits farms to write off all expenses in the year in which they occurred, a boon in simplicity for small farmers that is used by big operators to fuel ever-accelerating growth...
...Yet it continues to lure them toward the industrial model of agriculture...
...If the market price is lower than the loan price, they may also forfeit the grain to the Commodity Credit Corporation, a federal agency, in lieu of repaying the loan...
...Through mid-1987, buyers who would normally be ineligible to buy FmHA land bought more than four-fifths of farmland where FmHA was actively selling its inventory...
...But, as recounted by Joel Solkoff in The Politics of Food, he first needed to raise farm incomes to help Nixon's reelection by increasing commodity payments and restricting acreage at a time when there was a world grain shortage following two years of bad crops...
...Also, much land is "technically available for sale even though the 'for sale' sign has not been hung up," argues Center for Rural Affairs credit expert Gene Severens...
...For example, it is socially justifiable to guarantee farmers a reasonable return on their labor...
...But since the deficiency payment would be the same for all standard production units, farmers would have a market inducement to switch to higher-priced commodities...
...Tax policies gave an extra financial edge to the biggest, wealthiest farmers and encouraged outside investors...
...We would also join in condemnation of the kind of tenant arrangements that sparked the late nineteenth-century Populist movement or the abuse of migrant labor in the 1960s...
...That could be complemented by other SPRING • 1988 • 203 LAND OWNERSHIP arrangements: for example, holding a longterm right of use from a private not-for-profit or public land trust or cooperative...
...In theory such a program would maintain farm incomes with somewhat less government outlay for direct payments, raise market prices moderately, encourage diversification and shifts from overabundant crops, discourage land price inflation, and penalize overexpansion of large farms (and completely exclude investors who were not active farmers...
...That is "the opportunity stage, when there are bargains available and the question is who gets them...
...These changes are not universally evil, but they have often degraded consumers, farmers, and the environment...
...SPRING • 1988 • 209 LAND OWNERSHIP Instead, research should focus on different methods -of pest control, cultivation, land renewal, and farm diversification...
...As ownership and control become more remote, stewardship of the land often declines...
...So the issue buried in the defense of the "family farm" is something far greater...
...And the farmers suffering financial failure are disproportionately young and among the most productive...
...Last year plummeting land prices started to level off, farm income was up (but half the increase came from government price and income supports), and debt declined from an earlier peak greater than that of Brazil and Mexico combined...
...Few new farmers are filling their shoes...
...Sometimes it was because they were young people starting in farming (or parents taking on debt to help their sons or daughters start...
...This phase may be less noticeable than the depression of the early 1980s, with its heart-rending stories of farmers losing the land their families had tilled for generations, then hanging themselves from barn rafters in despair...
...It should also minimize reliance on "inputs" such a fuel, fertilizer, and chemicals that come from outside...
...The problem of world hunger was not lack of food, Frances Moore Lappe and Joseph Collins argued persuasively in works such as World Hunger: Twelve Myths...
...A few states have tried to regulate those sales, such as giving the foreclosed farmer the first right to try to reclaim his land, but it is quite likely the land will be bought by big investors and managed on their behalf...
...Under this go-for-broke production drive, soil erosion soared (and was an additional one-third higher on tenant-run farms compared to owner-operated farms in Iowa...
...Rather than become obsessed first of all with definition of the unit at issue, it may be more useful to define the kind of farm and food system that we want...
...Boom years are "the most damaging because they create false prosperity," Strange argues...
...Meanwhile, the glut of agricultural commodities on the world market grows...
...Sometimes they simply had a run of personal misfortune or bad weather...
...industry, it is ironic that American agriculture may be taking giant strides away from democracy...
...The first is to have a more systematic social refinancing of land, a deliberate, direct-loan program aimed at maintaining an efficient but equitable, ecologically sound farming system...
...The flood of tax-favored investment into cattle feedlots and large hog "confinement" buildings further industrialized livestock production, undercutting the raising of livestock by mediumsized, mixed-use farms...
...manufacturing strength lost ground to international competition and oil prices rose, government policymakers sought to redress the balance of trade with agricultural sales...
...What Congress giveth with one hand, it taketh away with the other...
...Such interventions in the market arose because of some distinctive features about agriculture...
...The United States is trying to win markets by selling for less than the cost of production, otherwise known as "dumping...
...During the 1950s, supply management, which had always struck conservatives and agribusiness interests as too Bolshevik, was largely dismantled...
...Researchers can develop technology that is ecologically harmless and can lead us to the kind of agriculture we want," he said...
...This was, in fact, the underlying concept of the family farm...
...The question is not whether farmers themselves are noble, decent, or deserving of special treatment...
...In part they were spurred to seek "food security" by the early 1970s specter of food shortages and disruptions...
...But at the other extreme there are huge family farm corporations with sales of half a million dollars a year or more from thousands of acres (around 2 percent of all farms...
...The organic farm yield was lower, but so were the input costs...
...can dominate the grain trade...
...But social structure is as important as the price of bread, milk, or Lean Cuisine frozen dinners—or reducing trade deficits exacerbated by flight of U.S...
...What Should Our Food System Be...
...It is also a crucial product...
...Even before budget cuts, the Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute (FAPRI) of Iowa State University and the University of Missouri projected sharply declining real income for farmers through the middle of the next decade...
...The United States remains the dominant force in the world grain trade, and our decisions on how much to export and at what price greatly affect the incomes of peasants and farmers and the agricultural strategies of governments elsewhere...
...Despite the mixed progress on tax and credit policies, other biases to bigness persist...
...Although many innocent people were hurt by the collapse, the prices should never have been so high, and farm policy should not try to push them back up...
...In my grandfather's day it was common for the farm operator and his family to supply all the factors of production— land, labor, capital, and management," former Assistant Secretary of Agriculture Don Paarlberg wrote recently...
...Such a strategy maintains some useful 210 • DISSENT LAND OWNERSHIP market functions, but it does not let the market override other important objectives: sound ecological standards, food security, small- to moderate-scaled farming by owner-operators...
...Chemical and fertilizer use doubled, and energy efficiency declined sharply...
...To understand that—and to understand why sustainable, decentralized, moderate-scale agriculture is not a nostalgic anachronism—it is worth briefly recounting some recent agricultural history...
...But that's not much different from being a tenant...
...agriculture...
...But demand is relatively inflexible: food prices can drop a lot and people will consume little more than they do already (and farm prices can drop a lot without food prices budging at all...
...Rather, there is an interrelated complex of questions—environmental, international, economic, and social—of importance to both farmers and the urban majority...
...Major insurance companies held the largest inventory (more than three million acres, worth around $2.3 billion), followed by two public agencies, the federally chartered Farm Credit System (FCS)— a quasi-public institution supposedly cooperatively run by farmer-investors—and the Farmers Home Administration, an agency directed by law to help small farmers...
...Yields have also increased for less chemical-intensive, ecologically sensitive farming...
...Prospects for Relief Farmer protest and organizing of recent years has won a few significant victories that may slow these trends to concentration, but much remains to be done...
...Agricultural exports continued to climb until 1981, but farm income peaked in 1973 and dropped steadily until a brief uptick at the end of the decade before the further decline of the 1980s...
...That would discourage overproduction of already glutted crops...
...In one not untypical case in northwestern Missouri, a well-respected, longtime farmer lost his land when Mutual Benefit Life Insurance refused to restructure his debt or even rent to him or his son so that the family could continue farming...
...Then you had to really know your land...
...Exports also began to decline...
...Any farmer participating in the government program would receive a requisition for a certain number of interchangeable "standard production units" based on market needs and his farm's potential...
...Conservatives want to preserve the family farm by redefining it...
...The "populist" approach favored by most farm groups (other than the agribusinessoriented American Farm Bureau Federation) would raise the supported price of basic commodities above the cost of production and then eliminate the need for separate income supports (the "target price" mechanism...
...At a time when there are widespread prescriptions for greater workplace democracy to rejuvenate U.S...
...The mutually reinforcing shifts towards large-scale fanning and exportdependent agriculture have been made possible by increasing reliance on big tractors and other machinery and by massive use of chemicals: pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers...
...The days when a large part of the population lived on the farms will not return, but it is possible—and desirable—to increase the number of farmers (or at least encourage a more even distribution of farmland and stop the steady decline of the farm population...
...Now farmers are much more different from each other...
...There were also provisions establishing borrowers' rights, facilitating mediation of debt disputes, and helping socially disadvantaged farmers (if current trends continue, the once-numerous black farmers will lose all their land within a few years...
...Price increases triggered domestic consumer protests, but the new prominence of a world grain trade dominated by the U.S...
...The second strategy, politically less likely but feasible as a complement, is to treat farmland as a public utility, effectively nationalizing part of the FCS and FmHA inventories and providing farmers long-term right of use...
...These small units represent 40 percent of all farms...
...It would have raised the price floor beneath the major commodities to at least the cost of production...
...Butz urged farmers to plant "fencerow to fencerow" in order to feed the world...
...Who Will Own the Land...
...U.S...
...When the debt crisis crystallized in the early 1980s, bank pressure intensified on countries like Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico to export wheat, soybeans, orange juice, tomatoes, and other products to earn hard currency...
...The government also intended to conserve the soil and preserve family farms...
...Time and again government and university studies have shown that nearly all efficiencies can be realized on the scale of a moderate-sized family farm (the actual size of which may vary according to crops and local geography...
...Sometimes it was because they were the "stompers," aggressively expanding in the boom 1970s...
...A class division among recipients of the twofactor returns is thereby avoided...
...And with that, lack of money and access to land for the peasantry...
...Topsoil loss reduced productivity, increased cultivation costs in the more difficult eroded soil, and created large off-farm cleanup costs...
...The cheering signs are still tentative and fragile...
...Ironically, the export boom and bust were having the same effect in the U.S., increasing class divisions among farmers, destabilizing agriculture and rural communities, and wreaking environmental havoc...
...grain sales had gone to feed livestock to boost meat consumption for the middle class, not to feed the very poor, who couldn't afford the grain even at bargain prices...
...From 1970 to 1981 production increased by half and cropland expanded by 20 percent...
...The requisition would be progressively scaled to favor smaller farmers...
...international agricultural policies are, in turn, intimately connected to the kinds of decisions we make about the structure and character of farms...
...And it should increase the power of both farmers and consumers vis-à-vis food processors...
...Many farmers have discovered during this recent crisis that cutting back on their agroindustrial inputs may reduce yields slightly but cut costs even faster...
...Many countries that had been importers of grain and other agricultural commodities had by now become exporters...
...Finally, there is the issue of price and income supports—the main thing most people think of when the issue of farm policy comes up...
...Even these inventory figures are understated...
...It is often summed up as SPRING • 1988 . 201 LAND OWNERSHIP a debate on preserving "the family farm," but that much-abused phrase does not capture the full implications of the situation...
...More seriously, raising the price of commodities high enough to cover current costs or more, as the Harkin-Gephardt bill does, threatens to renew the spiral of land price inflation, which generates grounds for raising prices yet again...
...Within those countries the export agriculture overwhelmingly benefited a rich elite and often led to environmentally destructive practices, such as clearing large stretches of tropical rain forest...
...The "family farm" has become increasingly difficult to define...
...But with industrialization of agriculture, farms have grown to such size and capital needs have become so great that the ordinary farm family cannot supply all these factors...
...A very large part of U.S...
...Current farm policy is sometimes sneeringly dismissed as social policy, an attempt to maintain a social structure—as if that were a softheaded, irresponsible goal...
...During the Great Depression the Roosevelt administration tried to deal with low farm incomes by supporting the prices of basic farm commodities and reducing the acreage planted...
...If someone proposed slavery as an efficient method of raising food and fiber, we would reject it as morally objectionable...
...To Marty Strange, for many years codirector of the remarkable Center for Rural Affairs in Walthill, Nebraska, the collapse of the past six years has been the "panic" and "chaos" stage of a longer-term crisis that resembles earlier crises in agriculture...
...In the 1980s, financial stresses are wedging landholding from land operating, and rental income from labor income...
...The Downside Slide Many farmers were locked into the new export mania...
...After the boom and its collapse into chaos comes the most critical stage, which the country is about to enter...
...capital overseas...
...That class division of rentier and worker, not any question of efficiency, is what threatens the future of the family farm...
...Prior to availability of herbicides, we had to cultivate crops," said Pennsylvania State University agricultural economist J. Patrick Madden...
...The Reagan administration had wanted to do away with any price and income supports, leading to a supposed free market and booming export sales...
...These trends are linked to an increasing specialization of farms and unrelenting monoculture—for example, growing corn or soybeans year after year rather than rotating a variety of crops as in the recent past...
...Nevertheless, some moderate-sized farmers have successfully resisted the temptations of the chemical feast and rampant growth...
...In the depression of the 1930s, nearly all farmers were severely hurt, and most farmers who owned their land were very much alike...
...It has profound economic consequences as well...
...In some cases mortgage-holders may have strung along some farmers, figuring that they had little to gain by repossessing land they would have to manage or sell at a loss...
...In recent years, the combined supports have not given most farmers even a minimally adequate return for their work...
...The victims were not necessarily less efficient or even "bad managers...
...Because of the inadequacy or secrecy of records on land sales, it is hard to know how much concentration is taking place...
...But the federal credit agencies have a very bad track record of living up to their legal requirements to help smaller farmers...
...Analysts of American industry, such as Michael Piore and Charles Sabel in their intriguing work The Second Industrial Divide are proposing just the opposite for manufacturing...
...Assault on Other Exporters Armed with various additional marketing subsidies and this low, already subsidized price, the U.S...
...As is so often the case, the "efficiency" of modern agriculture is in large part due to the fact that nobody in agribusiness is charged for these costs...
...204 • DISSENT LAND OWNERSHIP When Earl Butz became Nixon's Secretary of Agriculture in 1972, he wanted to destroy what remained of the farm programs...
...When there are many small producers with high fixed costs, there is an inherent and continued risk of overproduction...
...Shifts to large landholdings with farm laborers, and away from decentralized, smaller farms run by owner-operators, typically have led to a decline in civic life and local democracy, as anthropologist Walter Goldschmidt's classic study of two rural California communities showed...
...It was all an effort to reshape the land to appeal to an outside investor looking for a uniform piece of land that could be quickly farmed according to the big equipment-herbicide-monoculture strategy...
...If the market price is low, farmers are directly paid the difference between the lower price support rate and the target price...
...But the proportion of that food dollar going to the farmer also keeps declining...
...The problems have been compounded by deliberate policies of agencies like Farmers Home Administration...
...An implicit attribute if not explicit objective of traditional agriculture has been its melding of rent with labor income as a combined return to the family farmer," argued Harold F. Breimyer, professor emeritus at the University of Missouri, in a recent Challenge article...
...grain reserves nearly exhausted, the world grain shortage sparked fears about food shortages and sharp price increases...
...At issue are the structure and character of American agriculture...
...government has launched a major offensive against other grain exporters...
...And it does not require sacrifice of efficiency...
...Although U.S...
...In many states the agency is simply holding the land for three years, then classifying it as "surplus" so it can be sold to normally ineligible buyers, such as big farmers and outside investors...
...But since 1981 land prices in much of the Midwest have dropped by half or more, and there has been an aggregate loss of $300 billion in farm real estate value nationwide (somewhat less than the loss from the stock market crash from August through October of last year, but on a smaller base...
...Increasingly, many farms in the Midwest, South, and elsewhere turned to an intensive monoculture of corn, soybeans, or wheat...
...Contemporary issues of farm social structure may not seem as morally awesome, but the question is still the democratic organization of the economy...
...Many of the biggest, which produce a disproportionate share of farm income, are specialized operations with high-value crops or livestock (like California artichoke estates or huge cattle feedlots and poultry factories...
...We need a planning process that is a mixture of political, technological and ethical issues, but we don't have an institutional structure at present that can pull it off...
...At times the effort is patently ridiculous, unless the intent is so to ruin the agricultural export capacity of other countries that the U.S...
...Although FAPRI forecast that this plan would cut exports sharply, farm income would also increase dramatically...
...Although the price support level would be raised from what it is now, it would be less than under the Harkin-Gephardt legislation, though there would still be "deficiency payments" available to stabilize incomes...
...The farmers are usually not full tenants (the proportion of which is relatively stable at around 12 percent of all farm operators...
...The European Common Market is a special target: the Reagan administration hopes to drive up the cost of the European Community's farm program, eventually forcing it to dismantle its elaborate subsidy system...
...SPRING • 1988 . 207 LAND OWNERSHIP The big question as the third stage of the farm economy business cycle unfolds is who will get all the foreclosed land in lenders' inventories...
...The deep farm crisis of recent years has made the urban majority aware of anguish in the countryside, even if the world of modern farming—and even more of farm policy—is so remote that it is hard for outsiders to grasp...
...q SPRING • 1988 • 211...
...With U.S...
...Even if the gloomiest projections on income do not come true, the crisis that has gripped most of American agriculture may be entering a new phase...
...But the basic model of a moderate-sized farm that is owned and operated by a family with very little outside labor suits the aims of sustainable agriculture very well...
...After all, corporate farms in some strict sense—such as operations owned by a conglomerate like Tenneco or a global grain trader like Cargill—still represent a small although disproportionately influential fraction of U.S...
...Current trends in land investment make the old family farm unity of labor and capital creak with tension...
...Even the farm commodity programs and such lending agencies as the Farmers Home Administration (FmHA) that were intended to maintain the smaller family farm increasingly either abandoned that role or else perversely ended up benefiting larger farmers the most (in no small part due to a variety of legal circumventions...
...It is saving agriculture from subordination to the dictates of market prices...
...With this industrial-chemical regimen, one farmer can operate a larger farm, and yields have gone up...
...As a harbinger for the present, the volume of exports did increase, but farm revenue declined because of the drop in prices...
...But a Des Moines Register study of one Iowa county showed that 70 percent of the land there had been bought by investors during 1986 and early 1987, the reverse of the normal ratio...
...So the social contract of sustainable agriculture should wean farmers as much as possible from the industrial model, rationally reducing reliance on manufactured inputs...
...farm exports inched up about 8 percent last year, world farm prices plummeted 206 • DISSENT LAND OWNERSHIP by more than half from 1986 to 1987, according to Dennis Avery of the State Department...
...That is, it should not deplete natural resources or despoil the environment...
...Agriculture tax expert Chuck Hassebrook believes the 1986 tax reform legislation already may be having an effect in some areas, such as discouraging tax shelter investment in giant cattle feedlots...
...Yet when the quadrennial renewal of farm commodity legislation came up in 1985, concern over how to increase exports was at least as influential as desire to maintain farm income...
...There is a great deal of public support for farmers, not simply because of nostalgia, but because other Americans identify with the dream of having greater control over their work...
...Export of agricultural products should return to a secondary role and not be the dominating factor in the nation's agricultural strategy...
...Some countries could no longer afford to import as much in the depressed early 1980s, especially when the dollar was overvalued...
...Some big farms do have an edge with tax breaks, favorable financing, bulk purchase of supplies, or direct marketing of products, but rarely in terms of operational efficiency of labor or capital...
...At the other end, the processors of farm products— themselves increasingly concentrated and consequently often able to push grain and livestock prices downward—take an increasing share of the consumer dollar...
...Even disregarding the damage to natural resources and farm life, this current assault makes little sense...
...The big division was between owners and tenants, who made up two-fifths of all farmers, but even tenants and owners suffered similarly...
...led to fantasies of "food power" as a diplomatic weapon...
...They did...
...As James Wessel of the Institute for Food and Development Policy reported in Trading the Future, the increased energy use (at higher prices) and greater inefficiency effectively meant that the energy bill for the export boom erased 70 percent of the agricultural trade surplus...
...It may have equally serious long-term consequences...
...Also, overuse of pesticides and herbicides has not only poisoned land and water but also reduced the effectiveness of those chemicals...
...In fact, it is important here for the sake of Third World countries and farmers elsewhere in the world...
...208 • DISSENT LAND OWNERSHIP The shift toward more concentrated land ownership is likely to exacerbate chemically intensive, ecologically insensitive agriculture...
...The central question is: Who will own the land, or what kind of distribution of property does the nation want...
...The federal agencies and some commercial banks have been so hard hit by loan losses that last year some began selling off inventories despite the low prices...
...Ecological Disturbances The structure of farming also affects our relations with nature...
...These, in turn, would be sustained by a social network that encourages both innovation and competition but prohibits predatory behavior...
...But the land wasn't suited for that, and the soil washed away, was leveled again, then eroded even more...
...Marty Strange has devised an ingenious, but complex, plan that avoids some of the problems of the Harkin-Gephardt approach...
...Farms continue to be lost near the recent annual rate of 50,000 or more a year...
...But there has been an environmental price: rapid loss of topsoil, depletion of remaining soil and underground aquifers, toxic pollution of underground and surface water, destruction of wildlife and natural plant variety, and health risks for farmers, farm laborers, and consumers...
...One-fourth of U.S...
...subsidized rice...
...They have exacerbated tendencies already underway, and they remain one of the main traps that make it hard for farmers or the country to abandon the industrial model for a more sustainable agriculture...
...That has implications for our notions of political democracy and the social character of rural and small-town life...
...Likewise the $4 billion bailout of the Farm Credit System approved in December last year included some small-farm protections...
...So family farmers have been the agents of this unwholesome transformation that begins to threaten their very survival...
...Although the stated goal of government policy has usually been to preserve the family farm and promote conservation, the actual policies and their implementation have often undermined those goals and reinforced the market pressures...
...They are part-owners, part-renters...
...Madden said his study of land grant university agriculture technology research and regenerative (sometimes called organic) agriculture "led me to question the whole premise of the technology delivery system...
...Land Reform, Research, Supports Two approaches are possible for dealing with the growing inventory of land...
...In part their farmers responded to a variety of new incentives and took advantage of new seeds and technologies...
...They argue that much manufacturing should move in the direction of smaller, flexible units built on skilled workers and democratic organization...
...The bubble burst as interest rates soared, commodity prices dropped and land prices began a precipitous slide, undercutting the collateral for the $225 billion accumulated debt...
...The divisions are growing more apparent...
...Vast stretches of land taken out of cultivation, or for good reason never before plowed, were intensively cultivated...
...Americans pay a smaller portion of their incomes for food than do people in any other industrial country, dropping recently to an average of less than 15 percent of personal income...
...But projections by the FAPRI university group showed farm income dropping sharply with such a plan, since even if the sales volume could be achieved, prices would be so low that overall income would collapse—along with many farmers, banks, small businesses, and other institutions already flattened to the wall...
...And it is likely to rely more heavily on skilled labor...
...But it is too early to get out the party hats and celebrate recovery...
...grain export earnings tripled between 1972 and 1974...
...It is still a very risky business dependent on the weather...
...As U.S...
...Touted as a way of injecting new money into farming (which is not the real problem in any case), this secondary market will benefit most the richer blue-chip buyers...
...It was really skilled work that required a real artisan...
...This has depressed farm income in agricultural export countries...
...But the phenomenon is disturbing when seen as part of a trend toward larger farms, more control by management firms, and more solicitation of outside investor capital...
...By encouraging the richer farmers to leave the Farm Credit System, where they must buy stock in order to get loans, this new secondary market will weaken the Farm Credit System itself further...
...In the end, the farm bill set very low floors under commodity prices but maintained a higher "target price" (although many would argue it is still below the average cost of production...
...Commercial banks are the fourth major mortgage holder...
...Prices fell...
...Researchers comparing two adjacent farms in Oregon—one farmed organically, the other in contemporary "high-tech" fashion—recently reported in Nature that topsoil erosion was four times greater on the high-tech farm...
...Being a "family farmer" doesn't make 202 • DISSENT WIND OWNERSHIP someone automatically virtuous, democratic, ecological, and sensitive to the needs of the Third World...
...It operates within its own quite different constraints set by the corporate giants of agribusiness supply and processing, the multinational grain traders, and banking institutions...
...The export-boom mentality helped spur the 1970s inflation of land prices...
...treating land as something other than money...
...To simply pursue technology that enhances short-term profits leads us down the road to conditions we can't live with...
...They bought bigger tractors, irrigation equipment and more land, with speculators helping to drive up the price...
...But most observers expect that they will try to sell off the bulk of their inventory when prices start to rise...
...But that means farmers must enter a social contract that requires them to treat the land as a long-term social resource, not an object of speculation...
...In addition, farmers are increasingly losing their independence as agriculture becomes more vertically integrated from field to processing or marketing under direct or indirect control of corporate giants...
...It would be good to eliminate remaining depreciation tax breaks that subsidize capital, encourage overproduction, and favor the wealthy (for example, favorable treatment of single-purpose structures, such as hog confinement buildings) and to establish a progressive inheritance tax to protect moderate-scale family farming and discourage the current trends to accumulated wealth...
...Also, the bill set up a new secondary farm mortgage market (like the already existing secondary market in which banks package and resell home mortgages to institutional investors...
...Even though a tiny proportion of Americans (around 2 percent) actually farm, land reform is as important here as in Central America or the Philippines...
...The nominal wealth in land was a dangerous illusion...
...For Paarlberg the family farm now means a farm in which the family supplies most of the labor and management...
...A History of Manipulation Exports are in many ways a key to the current crisis...
...And these are precisely the farmers who have been hit the hardest by the recent slump in farm prices...
...Land, labor, capital, and management are now being split up and supplied by different entities, much as is the case in factory production...
...It should above all be oriented toward reliable food supplies for domestic use, now and in the future...
...It must minimize the financial advantages of concentrations of wealth and land...
...Agricultural economists warn of a "second wave" income crunch that could severely hurt the roughly one-third of farmers who are still financially vulnerable...
...Also, in a demonstration project FmHA is supposed to guarantee 90 percent of loans from private lenders and subsidize a write-down of 4 percent on interest rates for qualified family farm buyers of FCS inventory land...
...It is tragic that U.S...
...Too often federal tax, credit, research, and even federal price-support programs have strengthened the big and powerful...
...To oversimplify, federal agencies would assess the "agronomic potential" of farms, assuming sound conservation techniques...
...There is the possibility that more insurance companies may follow the route tested by a few firms in recent decades and become active farmland investors...
...Already almost half of all farmland is cultivated through some kind of tenant arrangement...
...Fnally, sustainable agriculture must yield enough income for farmers to sustain themselves and must provide a healthy, affordable, varied diet to sustain consumers...
...Even export earnings would rise...
...Following a producer referendum, there would be mandatory production controls limiting production of the basic commodities...
...Farm policy choices must recognize that...
...An End to Speculation Above all, farmland and other natural resources, like water, must be removed from the cycles of speculation, and the costs of depletion or damage to nature must be fully reflected in the market...
...Instead, they sent in bulldozers that plowed out trees and fences, filling streams and ponds, eliminating terraces on the hilly, fragile land...
...farm economy shows a few signs of recovery...
...Some are, others aren't, just as some are politically progressive and others, especially under the current pressures, have turned to the extreme right...
...For example, the Reagan administration's efforts to increase exports and drive down prices encourage many Third World countries to expand greatly their export agriculture...
...Banks urged buyers on by lending money against the inflated value of the land rather than its ability to earn income from farming...
...But sustainable agriculture also is likely to be flexible agriculture that can easily adapt to changing conditions...
...In many cases younger farmers have been sheltered from some of the worst adversities of the 1980s by renting...
...David Ostendorf, director of Prairiefire, the Iowa farm advocacy group, estimates that within a few years land management companies will oversee onefourth of the nation's cropland on behalf of absentee owners, up by half from the current level...
...Agriculture can best be sustained for the long haul when those skilled workers have a long-term stake in the farm, preferably as owners...
...Some livestock prices that boosted income for midwestern farmers in 1987 were already plunging downward late in the year as a result of overproduction...
...Abundance can seem as daunting as scarcity, though far preferable...
...agriculture is now vertically integrated in some way, Breimyer estimates...
...Many potential FmHA foreclosures have been delayed by court battles...
...But there would have to be a real commitment to develop an alternative to industrialized, concentrated agribusiness...
...The bigger the boom, the worse the following two stages...
...The small-to-moderate-scale family farmer is both a worker and a business owner, a craftsman for whom the land is a tool of the trade, and a recipient of rent and capital gains...
...The price- and income-support programs have worked poorly in recent decades, disproportionately rewarding the richer farmers (despite limits on some payments) and probably encouraging overproduction of some commodities...
...It's not as if the direction were inevitable...
...It's more popular to go with profit...
...Meanwhile the farm was poorly tended by distant, changing renters who had little knowledge of the land and little time to care...
...Beyond the variations in size and specialization, the biggest difference has been debt and age...
...At the end of summer 1987 that totaled approximately seven to ten million acres, roughly equal to one-third of all Iowa farmland...
...It was lack of democracy...
...The organic farm's soil held moisture better to reduce both runoff and the vulnerability of crops to drought...
...Minnesota Department of Agriculture analyst Mark Ritchie cited a case of spending $17.50 in subsidies per hundred pounds to export rice worth only $3.50 —and in the process undermining Thailand's main export and creating dependency on imported food in central African countries that buy U.S...
...To be sustainable in these terms, agriculture needs to minimize debt and ease the entry of new farmers...
...But the farms that come closest to popular imagery of the family farm are the full-time commercial farmers with sales of $40,000 to $250,000 (30 percent of farms...
...Thus, low market prices have accounted for the very large government payouts to meet "target prices...
...It would not be oriented to ever-expanding exports at the expense of farmers and peasants in other countries...
...American farming, with its established framework of extension services, local soil conservation boards, quasi-public and cooperatively run credit agencies, and numerous skilled farmers, could easily follow their prescription...
...Thus more than the entire increase in farm income in nearly five decades has gone to farm suppliers and banks...
...Now, after spending nearly the entire past decade in the deepest slump since the Great Depression, the U.S...
...and other banks, counting on a larger volume of sales despite the falling price...
...And the best answer to most of these is a farming system that is sustainable, ecologically sound, moderate in scale, and democratic in ownership and control...
...The "free market" approach to agriculture is hardly free...
...Enter herbicides: you can go like a bat out of hell and hire somebody who knows nothing about the soil...
...At the same time, people have become more vividly conscious of continuing hunger in a world glutted with food...
...Industrialization of agriculture has meant that much of the agriculture sector has been shifted to chemical, equipment, seed, oil, and other supplier companies and to a variety of marketing, financing, and consulting institutions...
...But there are at least two more legs of any sound farming policy: research and price or income supports...
...Ultimately agriculture has to be saved from domination by this price system...
...Moreover, the industrialchemical regime is becoming less efficient...
...First, agriculture should be sustainable, to use an increasingly popular concept...
...That made a mockery of the "bushels for barrels" rhetoric of the time...
...Federal budget pressures are predictably nibbling away at the farm support programs, which cost nearly $50 billion over the past two years...
...Yet very few people are taking that contrasting approach...
...But also there was increasing international development and banking pressure to develop export agriculture...
...Gross real income of the farming sector has doubled since 1940, observes Food First director Frances Moore Lapp6, but net real income has fallen 10 percent...
...One man could handle only so many acres like that without going bonkers...
Vol. 35 • April 1988 • No. 2
