The Case for the Family Farmer
Hightower, James
The Case for the Family Farmer by James Hightower Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm first arrived in Washington in January, 1969, promising to defend the interests of the big-city constituency....
...There has been a lot of hand-wringing over the elimination of three million farms in three decades, but agricultural economists and other corporate apologists have rushed forward to assure us that it was all “inevitable...
...Apologists for agricultural gigantism are fond of trotting out the phrase “economies of scale,” used by academics to express the relationship between size and efficiency...
...hamburgers without meat...
...Even less likely is the prospect that any savings from a concentrated food system will be passed along to the consumer...
...Advertising and shelf space have a greater impact on prices than do factors of supply, efficiency, or product quality...
...Farm managers, corporations, financial institutions, and governmental units will work together as teams or units...
...As two economists from the Agriculture Department’s Extension Service, Harold Breimyer and Wallace Barr, put it: Farmers have a genuine love of the land, a respect for it, and a desire to protect and preserve it...
...I think it is inevitable...
...Seventy-three per cent of California vegetables are produced on farms that are much larger than optimum size...
...the fresh vegetable salad is from Tenneco, with lettuce from Dow Chemical...
...The family farmer receives only a small share of the billions of dollars the government spends annually in his name...
...Corporations can lock up an entire market, forcing farmers either to sign contracts or to go under...
...The farmer has no choice but to sell his vegetables, hogs, feed grains, fruits, and other commodities to these corporate processors, marketers, and retailers...
...John Kenneth Galbraith Economics and the Public Purpose Out on the hustings, the Secretary of Agriculture gets folksy, calling farm people “the salt of the earth,” branding himself their “cowhand on the Potomac,” and exhorting them during the 1972 presidentid campaign to vote for Nixon or “lose your Butz...
...Within selected commodities, market control is frequently much tighter...
...There is a reason for that: USDA officials are themselves products of agribusiness...
...This attitude is not mercenary...
...Take irrigation...
...Some of this unpopularity is well deserved, for most of the benefits go to the largest landholders...
...2. The stress will be on “full productivity,” with the idea that any surplus will be sold abroad...
...Tax laws have attracted the noneconomic competition of rich, urban investors looking for a rural tax shelter...
...Well, they could apply for benefits under the Family Assistance Plan, if it were enacted, or they could enroll for vocational education, if Nixon hadn’t vetoed the bill, or OEO could help them, if it were not being dismantledor, better yet, industries could be given a tax bonus to locate their plants in the rural areas and put all these little guys on the assembly line...
...The loss will be more than sentimental, for by replacing small entrepreneurs with large corporate enterprises, Butzculture will make farming less efficient...
...The saddest comment to make on these “changes” is that the direction in which they will lead us is already familiar...
...The Act authorized a special $1 0-million research and extension program for small farmers...
...It does not exist as a government document, loudly proclaimed and widely disseminated...
...the strawberries are by Purex, and there are after-dinner almonds from Getty Oil...
...Butzculture is the final enforcement of Butz’s 1955 admonition to farmers: “Adapt” to the new agriculture “or die, resist, and perish...
...Any gains in scale of operation or in integration of economic functions are offset by such cumbersome and inefficient factors as absentee decisionmaking, added levels of management, employment of administrative staff, increased labor bills, and heavier capital investments...
...The past that Butz deplores is the era of multi-goal farm programs, in which adequate food production was balanced against the need to maintain farmers’ incomes at a decent level...
...It just isn’t what it used to be...
...In contrast, Breimyer and Barr warned, “If farming were to become so highly concentrated that production and marketing of some farm commodities would be confined to a few firms, any economies of size in production would be partly or wholly denied to the consumer...
...Farming really involves more art than science or business...
...Del Monte, for example, recently abandoned its asparagus operations in California, Oregon, and Washington and moved them to Mexico, where cheap labor has reduced the corporation’s production costs by 45.1 per cent...
...The turkey is from Greyhound, and the ham is from ITT...
...Just one of those corporations-Del Monte -boasts of controlling “roughly 16 per cent of total U. S. sales” of all canned fruits and vegetables...
...In size, family farms can range from a fiveacre tobacco allotment in North Carolina to a 5,000-acre wheat spread in Nebraska...
...The idea of getting government out of agriculture is basically very appealing to me...
...He was addressing the National Agricultural Advertising and Marketing Association...
...In fact they must deal with just the four canners that control a quarter of the market and set industry practices...
...potatoes by Boeing are placed alongside a roast from John Hancock Mutual Life...
...It is small-scale capitalism, alive and performing well-if not flourishingthroughout the countryside...
...Coflsequently, if corporations completely take over the food supply there will be no great leaps in efficiency...
...But of course the price of Del Monte asparagus has not gone down...
...rubbery chickens...
...The audience was significant, for these food executives are the chosen few of Butzculture-the policy that would shift power away from efficient family farmers and put it squarely in the hands of processing, marketing, and exporting corporations...
...One is the “price support” approach, under which the government guarantees the farmer a minimum price for certain of his products...
...The cereals are essentially the same, differentiated only by color and shape...
...Food manufacturing firms will integrate and direct farm production, and will control the flow of food to consumers...
...Having failed millions of small-scale operators during the past 30 years, USDA now washes its hands of them...
...In fact, the Secretary of Agriculture has even refused to submit an Administration farm bill to Congress...
...As the food economy becomes more concentrated-and under the Butz plan it wil-shoppers will have as much control over the price and quality of a tomato as they do over a new Chevrole t . Higher prices may not be the greatest cost that consumers pay for concentration in agriculture...
...Ironically, public outrage over inflated food costs is just the fuel that the Secretary is counting on to propel his new farm program through Congress...
...Integrated farming now accounts for the production of: 5 1 per cent of fresh vegetables 95 per cent of processing 70 per cent of potatoes 85 per cent of citrus fruits 40 per cent of other fruits and nuts 100 per cent of sugar cane and sugar beets 80 per cent of seed crops 98 per cent of fluid-grade milk 40 per cent of eggs 97 per cent of broilers 54 per cent of turkeys vegetables Pressed from one side by rising input costs and from the other by output corporations that pay too low a price, and from top and bottom by corporations offering vertical integration contracts, many family farmers are now also confronted with the crushing weight of another corporate force-the conglomerate...
...The new agriculture can properly be labeled “Butzculture,” after Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz, whose vision of corporate farming has been bought by the President and is being sold to rural America...
...The collection of demographic data is a kind of Washington magic-there is no farm income problem if there are no statistics to show it...
...Last year the Federal Trade Commission found that consumers are being overcharged more than $2 billion a year for food because of monopolies within just I3 food lines...
...But any shipment of Del Monte peaches, for example, contains the same USDA grade that often sells for less under other labels...
...With the farm bloc on the wane in Congress and with food prices at an all-time high, Secretary Butz is at last in a position to implement his vision of a highly capitalized, highly integrated, highly industrialized and highly concentrated agricultural economy...
...Conglomerates and integrated producers have the outside resources to see them through such lean times, but family farmers do not...
...Where shall they go...
...Farm programs exist today because agricultural America is potentially too productiveif all the available land were farmed, we would face enormous gluts . To avoid such overproduction the government long ago devised two main programs...
...Self-exploitation is extremely important for the survival of the small firm...
...and meat filled with additives...
...If we drive the family farmer off the farm,” Talmadge warned last April, “and leave the production of the nation’s food supplies to a few large corporations that can command any price they want, then the consumer will, indeed, pay through the nose...
...A steady food supply is the public’s most basic need, as governments since that of Louis XVI have ignored at their peril...
...If you get your name on something, they’ll just shoot you out of the saddle...
...When assembled, there are three basic elements: 1. Government will get out of agriculture, leaving that mythical favorite, the “free market,” to work its will...
...the corporation does not become a farmer, it rents one...
...Of course, some “farms” will still exist under the new order, but these 500,000 or so large-scale enterprises that survive will be controlled by the managements of integrated corporations...
...Butzculture would dismantle both systems...
...In the new agriculture, what is produced, how much of it, what quality, and what price will be the decisions of these integrated corporations...
...A “free market” is a market out of control and open to domination by concentrated power...
...Income and price-support payments are based on volume and acreage, thus putting a premium on bigness and awarding the largest payments to those least in need...
...There is also the danger posed primarily by three corporate objectives in agriculture: 1) substitution of technology for labor...
...The massive Russian wheat deal was made in the name of farmers, but it was kept secret until the producers had sold their crop cheaply to grainexporting middlemen...
...Despite its embarrassingly sentimental tones, this is a real factor of production and an essential element of agricultural efficiency...
...The Congresswoman’s first act was an indignant and highly publicized protest about her assignment to the House Agriculture Committee...
...A Tenneco subsidiary controls 70 per cent of the date industry, while Del Monte accounts for nearly half of all canned peaches...
...What Goes Up Never Comes Down In a highly concentrated, noncompetitive food system, prices go up, not down...
...This means that a relatively small number of firms are able to dictate what will be produced-as well as how much, what quality, and at what price...
...But it does not...
...It is no surprise that Butzculture is being marketed on the promise that larger, corporate farms will produce cheaper food than family-size units...
...It is vital in agriculture...
...Land retirement is the easier target since it has always been an enormously unpopular program...
...An official of the Ralston Purina Company-one of the largest corporate farmers-admitted recently that “the individual farmer or family corporation can meet, and many times surpass, the efficiency of the large units that operate with hired management .” The family farm turns out to be the optimum size for most crops...
...in doing so, he reduces his compensation per unit of effective and useful effort expended...
...I simply was reporting what is going to happen...
...But the effort here is not to help the little guy in farming, it’s to help him out of farming...
...The result has been a steady industrialization of the American food supply...
...Plenty of Peaches But if the family farmer is so efficient, why isn’t he rich...
...Four years later, the relevance of the Agriculture Committee might be clearer to urban legislators...
...In the short run, consumers would be eating cheaply, but not for long...
...While the price farmers receive for their products has increased only six per cent since 1952, overhead has risen by a“whopping 122 per cent...
...In most cases, vertical integration is accomplished through contracts with farmers...
...These are the middlemen, separating the farmer from the consumer and taking two thirds of the food dollar along the way...
...But until now the family farmers have persisted, hunkered down, and become more efficient...
...Things promise to get much worse...
...It is an effort by USDA to put the small producer out of sight and out of mind...
...The price, taste, and nutritional value of our food supply depends on the farm family’s willingness to plow a bit of themselves into the land...
...It is in that middle sector of producer-marketers that power really will be concentrated, and both supply and demand will flow from there...
...Confucius said it centuries ago: “The best fertilizer is the footsteps of the’landowner...
...The surprising implication is that today’s inefficiencies are more often a product of agricultural bigness than of smallness...
...To gauge its impact, take a look at Sunday dinner...
...lntegration of certain food commodities has gone much further than the norm...
...The result would be an increased economic squeeze on most farmers, with possible failure or withdrawal of many marginal farms...
...The only “competition” is in merc h an d i sin g tech n i q u es-anima ted television commercials, radio jingles, package designs, contests, and other promotional gimmicks we have come to know on supermarket shelves...
...Under Butzculture, the small farmer is no longer an agricultural problem-he is a welfare problem...
...We’ve grown I so accustomed to thinking of any I small enterprises as debris in the path I of efficiency that we’ve assumed that I sentiment is the small farmer’s only defense...
...The Nixon Administration is now proposing to press industrialization to its logical conclusion: an assembly-line food system controlled by the likes of Del Monte, Tenneco, and Ralston Purina...
...But for the wrong reasons-to further weaken public management of the farm supply-Butz has joined the attack...
...This is a highly concentrated, oligopolistic industry, involving such familiar names as Del Monte, General Mills, Ralston Purina, Minute Maid, Kraft, United Brands, Dole, A&P, and Holly Farms...
...Get the Farmers Out of Farming The “return to the free market” aspect of the plan would be the drollest, were it not also the most serious threat to efficient farming...
...Butzculture will mean more of the same-hard tomatoes, such as the “Red Rock” variety Rutgers University has just developed...
...In fact, the family farmers can feed us better than the corporations can, unless Butzculture drives them off the land...
...The $5,000 cut-off level would rule out 56 per cent of the farms in the country...
...The Department even has a new post that it can point to as evidence of concern-assistant secretary for rural development...
...That record is unmatched in the rest of the economy...
...Despite the farmers’ resistance, vertical and contractual integration is increasing, affecting nearly a fourth of total farm output...
...Exploitation on the Farm Nothing regulates the hours of work of the individual entrepreneur, and nothing at all regulates the intensity of his effort...
...In contrast, Georgia Senator Herman Talmadge, chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee and no fan of big government, is not nearly as eager to cast family farmers out into a “free market”: “I am a conservative man...
...He may thus be in a position to offset the higher technical productivity of the better-equipped worker in the organized, but regulated, sector of the economy by working longer, harder, or more intelligently than his organization counterpart...
...Coordination will be accomplished through numerous types of decision structure systems...
...From such glimpses must Butzculture be pieced together-little clues are found in speeches, in administrative actions, and in legislative recommendations...
...The sharp pinch of the highest food prices in memory has caused an urban-oriented Congress to finally realize that what happens down on the farm affects the city as well...
...This is likely to mean that these families will be overlooked in future farm programs as well...
...Water from federal reclamation-projects is supposed to go only to farm units of less than 160 acres, but this limitation has never been enforced, allowing some of the largest landholders in the country to prosper from subsidized water...
...It is not just the family farm that is threatened by corporate agribusiness and the new agricultural policy, it is the price and quality of the American food supply...
...The Case for the Family Farmer by James Hightower Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm first arrived in Washington in January, 1969, promising to defend the interests of the big-city constituency...
...Rural development is USDA’s answer to their small-farmer “problem...
...Out of the Department come recommendations that at least half the farmers in the country must abandon agriculture...
...In the only official report issued on the subject, the U. S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) found that maximum efficiency generally is achieved “at a relatively small size of operation and remains more or less constant through the very large size range...
...Under proposals made to the Census Bureau in 1972 and 1973, families grossing less than $5,000 a year in sales of agricultural products would ,not be considered farmers-even if their sole occupation and sole source of income was farming...
...Helping the Little Guy Out Butzculture has no room for smallness...
...It gets down to this: packaging and merchandising are becoming more important pricing factors than the food itself...
...The greatest tragedy of Butzculture is that it squanders one of our rare opportunities to make progress a I friend of human beings...
...This is the inevitability of a stacked deck...
...This structure is the goal of the Butz administration...
...Yet a plan does exist,” The Wall Street Journal reported last January, claiming that a Butz speech the previous month “offered a peek at it...
...There won’t be a Butz plan,” the Secretary has declared...
...We are at a hinge year in farm policy and farm legislation,” Butz declared last April...
...For example, in materials submitted to the U. S. Senate migratory labor subcommittee in 1972, the USDA reported that the optimum size for a California vegetable farm was 440 acres...
...Butzculture promises to finally drive them to the suburbs and the factories...
...Given a laboratory and an adequate advertising budget, the food manufacturers are willing to reshape the American diet...
...From the other side the farmer feels the pinch from the “output” corporations that process, market, and retail his products...
...As the Agriculture Department’s director of agricultural economics, Don Paarlberg, wrote Senator Talmadge last February: Complete removal of all production restraints and all price support activities in 1974 might cause substantial increases in production, sharp drops in farm product prices, and even greater drops in net farm incomes in the immediate years after removal of controls...
...Admittedly, the balancing act has been difficult...
...Consumer to processormarketer to farmer is the play that Secretary Butz diagrams for the public...
...American farm policy since the New Deal days has consciously avoided the social disaster that a “free market” would bring...
...Given a concentrated food industry, they will be in a position to do just that...
...We have an unequaled opportunity to step boldly into the future and break with the past...
...There is no “free market” elsewhere in today’s economy...
...But I would be a traitor to the people of my state and nation if I were a participant in such a scheme...
...Uninformed abdut agriculture, disgruntled about the cost of farm programs, and stunned by high food prices, urban congressmen are grateful to hear a call to “step boldly” out of the past...
...His financial problems stem from finding himself squeezed from either side by big business...
...The family farm in 1973 is no anachronism, no nostalgic remnant of American Gothic...
...Stacking the Deck It is raw economic power and favorable government treatment rather than increased efficiency which has given agricultural conglomerates their competitive advantage...
...The promised land for agriculture,” he gushed in a May speech, “is near at hand...
...A farmer who does not want to produce peaches on Del Monte’s terms can look forward to a long winter of peach eating...
...The food industry model might well be ready-to-eat breakfast cereals, where four corporationsKellogg, General Mills, General Foods, and Quaker Oats-control 91 per cent of the market...
...3. The small farmer will be dismissed entirely, and the rhetorical and programmatic support will be for well-capitalized, integrated farming...
...But like Bayer aspirin, because of its advertising, Del Monte can still sell its products at higher prices than its competitors...
...It does not exist for GM, for cab drivers, for AFL-CIO members, or for anyone else, nor should it...
...Since 1952 agricultural efficiency (output per man-hour) on farms has increased by 330 per cent, compared with a 20-year increase of 160 per cent in manufacturing industries...
...Since World War 11, corporate power and government programs have combined to eliminate three million small farms and accelerate big-business domination of farm ing...
...More importantly, the record has been set on average-size farms, not on the ponderous landholdings of the conglomerates...
...This concentrated power can come down hard on family farmers, who are numerous, over-productive, and unorganized...
...And so the first tenet of Butzculturethat bigger farms will mean cheaper food-is certainly suspect...
...Farming offers no great operating efficiency from large-size units,” Breimyer and Barr concluded...
...In a word, oligopoly...
...Her successful protest reveals a great deal about urban America’s myopia about farm policy...
...Back in Washington, however, the Secretary is moving with cold determination to restructure agriculture and leave these fine folks with little more than the salt in their sweatbands...
...Even though Earl Butz is the piper, many of them are scrambling to get in line, never wondering about what they will be marching toward...
...The Butz plan for an integrated, concentraied agriculture is not put forward in the name of corporations, which will profit, but in the name of consumers, who will pay...
...From one side the pinch comes from “input” suppliers, the companies that sell such necessities as land, seed, fertilizers, pesticides, feed, and machinery...
...In agriculture the phrase expresses a very simple economic concept-for every crop there is an optimum size for efficient production...
...Already, food corporations have become the biggest investors in television advertising...
...Farming requires a degree of personal involvement that can’t be found either in the corporate board room of General Electric or on a Ford assembly line...
...The reason agribusiness corporations are increasingly dominating agriculture is that Earl Butz and his colleagues have spent their lifetimes making it so...
...While USDA ignores the needs of small farmers, it gives rapt attention to the wishes of corporate agribusiness...
...The Administration, has sought no funding for that provision in its new budget...
...Rather, as we shall see, corporate farming will bring with it a host of other disadvantages...
...If this sounds odd, it is because Americans have a fatalistic assumption that bigness is the only course toward efficiency and modernization...
...In effect, output corporations are thus able to control the farmer’s access to market...
...The bait there is the suggestion that sovereign consumers will have this concentrated economy firmly in hand...
...Obviously there are inefficiencies if acreage is too small, but it is often forgotten that there are also inefficiencies if acreage is too large...
...From genetic research programs to Russian wheat deals, USDA is present to promote agricultural bigness, integration, and industrialization...
...it will extend from genetic research outputs to end products tailored to consumer preferences...
...and 3) introduction of synthetic foods...
...Before the family farmer is discardedwhile still efficient, productive, and competitive-we ought to take a hard look at where we are being led...
...The easily obscured essence of Butzculture is that, by getting the‘ government out of farming, it will get the small farmers out of farming too...
...The removal of price supports and land retirement will, for a time, cause farm prices to drop...
...Assistant Agriculture Secretary Robert Long, who was a vice president of Bank of America before moving into USDA this year, wrote happily about corporate prospects in a concentrated agriculture: “As agriculture progresses to fewer and fewer units, those remaining will find it easier to work together in the search for a new formula for a more profitable return...
...pesticides in our food and in our land...
...The family farm is defined not in terms of acreage or sales, but in terms of independent entrepreneurship...
...As for price supports, Butz recently recommended that they “be phased out over a three-year period...
...The Secretary said last May that “a marketoriented agriculture lets production shift and adjust as consumer preferences change and as foreign demand grows...
...If any product should be spared the rigors of such a marketplace, it’s food...
...The savings have stayed with the corporation...
...Butzculture is not a manifesto...
...Even those who lament the rise of conglomerates in other spheres often reason that there is simply no other way to produce the food we need...
...Butz has underlined the point: When I said we were going to have upwards of a million fewer farmers by 1980, that didn’t mean necessarily that I approved of that...
...Agribusiness corporations have put even greater pregsure on the farmer through the trend toward “vertical integration...
...Del Monte, with an advertising budget in excess of $15 million a year, has succeeded in creating the impression that its canned goods are of superior quality...
...Traditionally, farm policy has been left to Corn Belt senators, cotton congressmen, and the slick James Hightower is director of the Agribusiness Accountability Project...
...It has, of course, been accompanied by President Nixon’s exhortations to “keep the government off the farm...
...He is, to put the matter differently, almost wholly free, as the organization is not, to exploit his labor force since his labor force consists of himself...
...It’s just not so...
...Producing an abundant, high-quality crop-whether a field of tomatoes or a brood of chickens-simply cannot be reduced to impersonal factory techniques...
...it has roots that are almost religious...
...While tirelessly praising the family farmer over the past 30 years and basking in his productivity and efficiency, the government has been selling him out to corporate America...
...Yet, the average size of the corporate farms that dominate vegetable production in California is 3,206 acres-eight times larger than efficiency warrants...
...Convenient Family-Size Package For all his rhetoric about traditional American verities, the message that Earl Butz carries across the country is that farming is no longer a way of life-it is a business...
...A I969 Department of Agriculture study found that in half the cans sampled, Del Monte products contained less fruit and more liquid than any competitive brands...
...2) standardization of the food supply...
...Butz was not just gaffing a bunch of farmers...
...Scale economy in crop production is handicapped by space and distance-there are cost disadvantages in farming acreages located far from headquarters...
...The 1968 study concluded that the highly touted economies of scale already exist on today’s “modern and fully mechanized one-man or two-man operation...
...Prior to becoming Secretary of Agriculture, Earl Butz, for example, served as a paid board member of Ralston Purina, Stokely Van Camp, and International Minerals and Chemical Corporation...
...Anyone who admires what Detroit’s Big Three have done for automobiles will be pleased with the new agriculture, for the same quality, cost competition, and reliability will soon be built into the food we eat...
...And that’s exactly where Earl Butz has us headed...
...lobbyists of the agribusiness interests...
...A 1966 study by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) showed that the 100 largest food manufacturers (three tenths of one per cent of the total industry) accounted for 46 per cent of the industry’s total “value added,” 60 per cent of the food manufacturing assets, and 71 per cent of all profits...
...In simple terms, this means that a corporation which previously had sold to or bought from a farmer decides to become a farmer itself...
...The other is limiting the acreage planted in, say, corn or soybeans, with the government paying the farmer to keep the land out of production...
...The 1972 Rural Development Act could help small farmers shift to crops in which they could be more competitive, it could provide better marketing information, it could help them maximize their efficiency through cooperative practices-it could do as much for the small farmer as it does for the biggest farmer and for corporate agribusiness...
...It’s one thing for gasoline to be priced and sold by such artificial gimmicks-but food...
...Chronic low prices for their product, unavailability of credit, and the sheer market power of the corporate integrator all combine to force farmers into signing contracts that promise a corporate middleman a certain amount at a given price...
...Nowhere has that been made clearer than in the USDA’s effort to alter the official definition of a farm...
...Tax-supported research and extension programs have developed a technological arsenal that is rarely adaptable to the family farmer’s scale of operation...
...No amount of chemical spray can replace it...
...In a 1967 paper written for the President’s National Advisory Commission on Food and Fiber, three economists predicted that “many farming operations will become ‘online production factories.’ ” The authors offered this view of how American agriculture will look in 1980: The farm of the future will be a carefully integrated complex...
...That supply is not something to be turned over to the whim of uncertain market forces...
...For example, fruit and vegetable farmers technically could bargain with ,any of 1,200 U. S. canners...
...There is no competition in price or quality...
...That may have a nice ring on the banquet circuit, but it doesn’t mean much on the farm...
...He knows better...
...These are not the simple yeomen of Jefferson’s ideal...
Vol. 5 • September 1973 • No. 7
