FARMS WITHOUT FARMERS

...That situation is getting worse...

...FCS officials recently revealed that 26 per cent of the Iowa sales were to nonproducers who bought the land as an investment...

...He is writing a book about the crisis in rural America...

...farmland...

...The outlook for black farmers, neglected and openly discriminated against by the U.S...

...According to a 1986 study by the Land Stewardship Project, insurance companies owned $2.4 billion worth of farmland, double the amount they had held the previous year...

...Government, is bleak...

...Even in the South, the stronghold of black farmers, the farm crisis has hurt blacks disproportionately...

...The FCS ran ads in national periodicals under the headline 'Buy Minnesota,' says Daniel Levitas, research director of the family-farm advocacy group Prairie-fire...

...Foreign investors are also beginning to buy up U.S...

...Government itself has played a major part in the black farm crisis...

...This change could have serious implications for U.S...

...O.D...

...Only 2 per cent of that foreclosed property was returned to the original owners...

...Not for the consumer...

...As Iowa Senator Tom Harkin recently told a farmers' rally, "The question facing us right now is: Who is going to control the land in America...

...The largest holder of inventory farmland is the quasi-governmental Farm Credit System (FCS), which is itself financially strapped...

...What we're seeing is an emerging form of industrial organization on the farm," says Marty Strange, co-director of the Center for Rural Affairs...

...In 1920, there were 926,000 black-operated farms in the United States, most in the Southern states of Mississippi, North and South Carolina, and Texas...

...While only 5 per cent of inventory land is listed as surplus in Iowa, in Georgia the proportion reaches 81 per cent...

...Farm-management companies, who often hire bankrupt farmers to work the land they once owned for hourly wages, have increased their control over agricultural land by 36 per cent since 1979 and now farm 62.6 million acres...

...It's eroding because the giant corporations don't take care of it—why should they as long as they're making a quick profit...

...Over the past several years, Government agencies, commercial lenders, and insurance companies have accuOsha Davidson is a free-lance writer in Mechanicsville, Iowa...

...farmland, equal to the combined sizes of Vermont and Delaware, are in the process of changing hands...

...What little gains black farmers made during the early years of this century have been steadily eroding over the past sixty years...

...This could signal the coup de grace for family farming in this country...

...Not for the land...

...At least seven million acres of prime U.S...

...Taken together, these shifts in ownership may do in the family farm...

...The USDA's Extension Service, in particular, has for decades discriminated against blacks by under-funding programs to black colleges and black 4-H groups and by ignoring the needs of black farmers...

...I predict that they'll be looking more and more at farmland...

...We had always liked that farm," says twenty-five-year-old Jodi Kay...

...Today, white farmers outnumber blacks in every county in the United States...

...The question is, who are they more efficient for...

...There is, however, one bright spot in the impending sale of so much farmland: Congress could institute an "affirmative-action" program to ensure that middle-sized family-farmers end up with most of the land...

...We saw hungry people and we saw malnourished children," said Dr...

...And they offered the land at 4.9 per cent to buyers who could pay 40 per cent of the asking-price in cash...

...Not to take advantage of the opportunity would be a serious mistake...

...The families just simply don't have adequate food to feed the children...

...When you separate ownership from management, people make expedient decisions routinely, decisions that are environmentally unsound," Strange says...

...The trend toward fewer and larger investor-owned farms is decimating rural communities which depend on the family-farm structure for their survival...

...In the entire country there are only 185 black farm owners under the age of twenty-five...

...If current trends continue, these companies will control one-fourth of the nation's cropland by 1991...

...All rural Nebraska communities with a present population of under 900 will disappear by 1995 if current trends continue, according to a study by economist Larry Swanson, former director of the Great Plains Office of Policy Studies at the University of Nebraska...

...Thirty years ago, most black farmers were landless sharecroppers who paid rent by turning over a large portion of the crops they grew to the white landowner...

...The U.S...

...Nationally, 35 per cent of FmHA's 5,011 inventory farms had been classified as "surplus" as of last December...

...This worries Jerry Pennick, who notes that the black farm crisis drew attention only after white farmers also began to surfer...

...After making a fact-finding tour of Iowa last April, the head of the Physician Task Force on Hunger in America said he was shocked by the level of poverty and need he witnessed in America's breadbasket...

...When we read in the paper that it was for sale, we were pretty excited...

...The burgeoning farm-subsidy program, which cost American taxpayers $25.3 billion last year, is accelerating the shift toward giant farms...

...They're buying the prime farmland, the best available," Johnson said...

...Robert Johnson, executive director of the International Real Estate Institute in Scottsdale, Arizona, recently told the Des Moines Register that Japanese investors are moving their money out of hotels and offices and into farmland...

...So we pay more and more to keep them afloat, even though they're terribly inefficient...

...I don't know about all their rules and everything, but there is something wrong about this...

...agriculture...

...I am apprehensive that once the crisis is solved for white farmers, they'll say to hell with the blacks...

...The proportion of land actually sold by the FmHA during the first quarter of 1987 is even more heavily surplus—rising to 71 per cent...

...We thought we were the kind of family FmHA was designed to help," says Jodi Kay...

...In the first three months of this year, the system's two Midwestern district offices sold more than half a million acres of farmland...

...At least one insurance giant, Prudential, thinks land prices have finally bottomed out...

...Only the largest farms have that kind of money now...

...According to a survey conducted by the American Bankers Association, the number of farms lost during 1986 (a time of economic recovery, according to Iowa's Branstad and many others) ran as high as 41,000—representing a 50 per cent increase over the previous year...

...There is the potential that if things don't change, the Midwest could become another Appalachia, from an economic Lean Years for Black Farmers The farm crisis began for black farmers when blacks began farming," says Jerry Pennick, director of the Land Assistance Fund of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives in Atlanta, Georgia...

...The Farmers Home Administration has a plan for its 1.5 million acres of inventory land that is even more controversial...

...During the Great Depression, insurance companies accounted for two-thirds of the farm foreclosures, and they ended up with 15 per cent of America's farmland," says Ron Kroese, director of the Land Stewardship Project...

...Black farmers have always had a hard time obtaining loans from Government lending agencies...

...That's outrageous...

...If that land doesn't return to family-sized farmers, the whole game is just about lost," says Dixon Terry, head of the Farm Unity Coalition...

...The company now owns about 800,000 acres in eighteen states, making it the largest landholder in the insurance industry...

...For the first time, we are seeing children experiencing growth failure...

...Worse, only 58 per cent of American farmland sold in 1986 was bought by farmers...

...Farms WITHOUT FARMERS BY OSHA DAVIDSON Duane and Jodi Kay thought they had found the ideal starter farm: a forty-acre spread with an old house and several outbuildings, just two miles down the road from the farm that had been in Duane's family for three generations...

...It's just gotten worse during the general farm crisis...

...Now, that may technically be a family farm, but is that what we want in the United States...

...The total amount of land owned by black farmers dropped from fifteen million acres in 1920 to only three million acres in 1982...

...It's easy to say that they're more efficient," says Tom Willey, a vegetable farmer with thirty-five acres in Fresno County, California...

...They're footing the bill for huge subsidies to these superfarms...

...If the land has not been sold in that time, it can be sold to the general public as "surplus" property...

...The Kays' situation is not unique, and it points to a problem of growing concern to farm activists...

...We're paying higher prices for lower quality produce...

...By 1982, the total number of black farmers had dropped to 33,250...

...But in clear contravention of Congressional intent, the FmHA has classified a large number of inventory farms as "surplus" and has offered them to the highest bidder...

...Since the bulk of these payments go to the largest producers, they are the ones that benefit the most...

...In 1964, there were fifty-eight Southern counties in which black farmers were the majority...

...Despite Iowa Governor Terry Branstad's recent declaration that the farm crisis is over, it may actually be entering a new and far more ominous stage...

...The Reverend Norman White, an Iowa rural advocate, summed up those sentiments recently when he exhorted family farmers to continue fighting for their way of life: "They say we'll always have family farms, and in a way that's true...

...If we continue as we're going now, we'll have a system like Central America, where huge tracts of land are owned by one family...

...Department of Agriculture lent some $1.3 billion to 15,874 farmers to buy land in 1984 and 1985...

...In Iowa alone, the FCS sold almost 100,000 acres worth $73.7 million—an increase of $59 million over sales for all of the previous year...

...The FCS recently began an aggressive campaign to unload much of its two-million-acre holding...

...J. Larry Brown...

...We have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to stop this concentration of land ownership," says Hansen...

...That was also the watershed period where we saw the number of farms decrease and the average farm size increase dramatically...

...Formed during the Great Depression, the FmHA was designed to help family farmers obtain credit, and the Kays seemed ideally suited for FmHA financing...

...It doesn't take a lot of driving around to see that there is more plywood than glass in the downtown areas of these small towns," says Michael Jacobsen, professor of social work at the University of Iowa...

...The insurance industry is a major— and surprising—player in the land-inventory crisis...

...The records of other government agencies are no better...

...That's our concern today...

...When landowners mechanized, many sharecroppers were forced to leave...

...As a result, the amount of land reclassified varies dramatically from state to state...

...That's pretty much the situation in American agriculture: There is a handful of superfarms— the top 4 per cent produce one half our food—and we can't afford to let them fail...

...Strange calls the taxpayer bailout of these super-farms "the Chrysler syndrome," and warns that the current farm program is a harbinger of things to come...

...In order to funnel FmHA inventory land back to small and middle-sized family farms, Congress included a section in the 1985 Farm Bill directing the FmHA to make all "suitable" land available to FmHA-eligible, family-farm sized operators for a three-year period...

...It's a lot easier to prevent that concentration now than it will be to enact a program of land redistribution somewhere down the road...

...If current trends continue, the black American farmer will be extinct in a decade...

...People who have no connection with farming may think corporate farms are more efficient because of their size and management style, but family farmers see it the other way...

...That concern is shared by many family-farm activists...

...Only $11.8 million of that total went to 209 black farmers...

...The Kays submitted the highest offer for the farm, but the land went to the second-highest bidder, a retired farmer who was buying the farm as an investment and offered to pay cash...

...The mechanization of agriculture in the 1950s played a major role in driving black farmers from the land...

...The FmHA has issued no clear guidelines for regional offices to use in determining whether land is "surplus" or "suitable...

...One of every seven farmers at that time was black...

...Not for the taxpayers...

...Again...

...Prudential is buying farmland as a good investment, accumulating land not only through liquidation but through outright purchase...

...Of the 133 FmHA ownership loans approved in Louisiana in 1984, only two went to black farmers...

...standpoint," says Jerry Hansen, a credit analyst at the Center for Rural Affairs...

...The young Nebraska couple submitted a sealed bid to the Farmers Home Administration (FmHA), the government agency selling the land...

...We saved Chrysler because we couldn't afford to let it fail," he says...

...only one farmer in sixty-seven was black...

...He added that it is impossible to assess how much agricultural land foreign investors actually own since they buy through partnerships with American companies...

...There is nothing there—towns are just shriveling up...

...mulated huge chunks of land through liquidations and foreclosures...

...But the U.S...