And one of those sets of hands belongs to my grandson! With his every stroke I see the hands of a farmer developing a feel for livestock and the land. Maybe I just needed to wait a generation to get my legacy. Of course, like my daughters, he may decline the farming life. But for now I’m hoping he will choose it. And yes, that’s the same romantic, agrarian delusion that brought me here, but, to paraphrase a friend, some delusions are worth doing again.
I’m glad Paco is a favorite with the children because I know that would have pleased Jack. When I see Paco, I wonder if Jack isn’t there in some form directing each child’s hand and smiling his mischievous smile. He is reminding me that it takes a love of folly to survive the country. Knowing that makes me smile.
And while feeding the sheep, I can gaze up in the woods where I know a grandfather tree holds the memories of all my loved ones. With every gust of wind, I know they’re dancing. Their memories are not lost to me. And as I gaze, I feel the scale of this life and the passage of its seasons—reminding me, relationships are to be cherished.
And every morning I go walking with Sarah and my new friends, Kathy and Mark, and a horde of happy dogs. Sometimes we pass Brick, with his fishing pole and big smile, off to his mayoral duties. And Nate at the Merc, and Will on his tractor, and even Luther on the porch of his bunkhouse smoking his pipe of an evening. I see them all and I’m seen by them. Knowing that makes me feel connected to this community, to these folk, and their ways.
And every evening, I lie next to an old farmer who loves me. In the darkness, I rest against the warmth of his bent frame, content in the knowledge we are a support unto each other. Yes, I am still here in this place with my stubborn, farmer’s heart. And I am grateful, so grateful, for this life.
EPILOGUE
STAY ON THE FARM
We stayed on the farm because we opened a farm stay. We also realized our story was not unique. If 12 percent of farmers are producing 90 percent of the food, you can bet the other 88 percent, like us, are not profitable. These are the small farmers, but given that they’re 88 percent of the farming population, can we really call them small? Many are farming marginal lands that big ag would not deem worth the effort. Considering also that 80 percent of them are working other jobs, it should be clear that this is a threatened lifestyle.
And rightfully so, argues the economist. After all, how many of us turn to the village cooper when our wagon wheel breaks? Some jobs are slated for obsolescence, and profitability is society’s way of winnowing the chaff. So, are we now willing to hand over our food supply future entirely to big ag’s industrial style farming? They are quite willing to accept that contract in exchange for plentiful and cheap food. If not, what are we willing to do? Support increased taxes that provide subsidies for small, inefficient farms? Pay more for our food? Based on current trends, the answer seems to be, “yes, but only a little bit more.” There is a definite limit to how much more the public will pay for organic food, either in the marketplace or through federal subsidies.
This is why farm stays offer such an innovative third option. They provide a service to the public that big ag not only can’t but wouldn’t even want to provide. And they support an American heritage, the small family farm, without raising taxes or food prices. They also provide an experience for the public that creates memories. That’s why a farm stay is not just a bed & breakfast on a farm. It’s not a room, it’s an experience. It’s a window into the rural lifestyle. Think of it as the easiest trip into a foreign country you’ll ever take.
When we realized our farm stay discovery offered a solution to a national problem, we decided to organize a national nonprofit association to connect farms with the touring public (www.farmstayus.com). We quickly found that we had invented a wheel that the rest of the world was already using. Seems the Brits have been offering farm stays since the early 1970s. In France they’re called gites, and in Germany, schlaf im stroh (sleep in the hay). In the 1990s, Italy became concerned about the influx of the rural population into cities to escape rural poverty. They countered with an aggressive agritourismo policy that turned farm stays into a multibillion-dollar industry that is effectively reversing the rural to urban influx.
So, like us, if you’ve never heard of a farm stay, you’re probably an American. Strange that the greatest agricultural power in the world doesn’t have farm stays. Or perhaps it’s because of the American trend toward industrial farming, with its heightened efficiencies, that we don’t have farm stays. Doubtful anyone wants to spend their vacation in a chaise longue on a feedlot. You have to have traditional farms to have farm stays. If the trend is toward big ag, it raises the question of what we as a culture are in the process of losing—without quite knowing it’s being lost—and what we might be willing to do about it.
What is the experience offered by a farm stay? The answer is as broad and unique as the farms that host the stay. Accommodations can range from tents to treehouses to posh digs. Most stays allow some involvement in farm life, but guests are never required to work. Heritage farms tend to be diversified operations, usually involving a mix of livestock and produce. The addition of livestock is important because interacting with animals is often the bridge that allows people to connect to the rural experience. Most heritage farmers have a strong sense of place and tradition and acutely feel the threat to their lifestyle, so they want to share their folk knowledge. That said, farm stays are not usually heavily time-structured, allowing ample freedom to explore beyond the farm or to kick back with a good book by a rippling stream.
Why should small, inefficient farms enjoy public support? By staying at a farm, aren’t we just prolonging their inevitable demise? Might it be better to prohibit farm stays from operating on land designated for farm use? These are questions I hear routinely from a vocal minority in the big ag farm lobby. There are a dozen rebuttals, but the simplest is, mother nature loves diversity more than our industrial economy loves efficiency. It is wise to remember that the Irish experiment in monoculture farming resulted in a potato famine, which went on for a decade and killed millions. It was a problem the inefficient Andean farmers, who developed the potato, did not have because they farmed multiple varieties. Small farms may be inefficient, but they are also diverse, and we should not rush to close the door on the options they provide.
This is especially true at this juncture of our history. The organic movement has been percolating since the 1930s and seems to be gathering momentum with a new generation of young farmers who combine a sense of pragmatism with a valuing of sustainability over quick profit. These young farmers are networked and sharing results as they engage in novel experiments in agriculture, economics, and social order. You can meet many of them at your local farmer’s market. They are happy to share their experiences and visions. It is too early to predict how these experiments will shake out, but it seems likely they will be a source of innovation for intensive, stratified farming of small land parcels. We need to preserve our small farms so this new breed of farmer has a platform for their innovation.
So, that’s my pitch for farm stays. Hopefully you can see it has mutual benefits for both urbanite and ruralite. What you can’t see is the ripple effect it has in the local rural economies that are presently collapsing in on themselves like black holes. If you choose this vacation option, rest assured your farm stay helps a heritage farmer stay on her farm.
ADDENDUM: A PRIMER ON FARMING
ECONOMICS: JUST THE FACTS
The United States is blessed with more arable land than any nation on earth, at present. America also has the most productive farmers in the history of the world. These joint blessings allow Americans to enjoy the most affordable food of any developed nation. And that in turn provides Americans more discretionary uses for their excess income. What follows is a brief synopsis of the economics of farming. Think of it as a health report on your food supply.
Much of the data being reported is based on the 2012 USDA census. The census was published in 2014, but
the data was collected two years earlier. Census data is collected every five years by the USDA and made available through its website. Note that a farm, as defined by the USDA, are any operation that contributes a minimum of $1,000 per year of agricultural product to the economy.
Other sources of data include the scholarly works of David Danborn, Born In The Country; Paul Conkin, A Revolutiojn Down On the Farm; and Daniel Imhoff, Food Fight.
PRODUCTIVITY
The US population is approximately 313,000,000, of which 1 percent (3,180,074) are farmers. There are 2,109,303 farms accounting for 914,527,657 acres in production with total ag sales of $402,697,828,000. This figure includes $8,053,346,000 in government subsidies.
Farms with total ag sales equaling $25,000 or less account for 67 percent of the total number of farms and 2 percent of total sales. Farms with ag sales between $25,000 and $1,000,000 account for 29 percent of total number of farms and 32 percent of total sales. Farms with ag sales above one million dollars account for 4 percent of the total number of farms and 66 percent of total ag sales. Clearly a small amount of farmers are responsible for a large amount of US food production. To see this more simply, if we use $250,000 in ag sales as the dividing line, then 88 percent of farmers are below that. The 12 percent of farmers above that line are responsible for 89 percent of total ag production. Given that consolidation is ongoing, that number could easily be 10 percent of farmers responsible for 90 percent of food production by the next census. That would be 0.1 percent of the population responsible for 90 percent of the food produced in the United States.
PRICING
The increased efficiency on the farm shows up in the supermarket. In 1945, 36.4 percent of family income went to food purchases. By 1970, it had dropped to 23.2 percent of family income, and by 2002 it was 15 percent. The price of food is getting cheaper, which is good for consumers, but it also means the margin of profit for farmers is getting narrower. As another example, from 1945 to 1970 the price of farm produce rose 41 percent while the broader Consumer Price Index rose by 116 percent. Food is becoming more affordable.
PROFIT
In 2002, 46 percent of farms made a profit. Of those making a profit, the average income was $56,000 per year, including subsidies. In 2012 the percentage of farmers turning a profit had not changed, but the average income was dropping. In 2002 the average income from a mid-sized farm (between $100,000 and $250,000 net production) was $30,000 per year, with 50 percent of that coming from subsidies. By 2007 it had dropped to $26,000 per year. Most families can’t live on this amount. Currently 80 percent of farmers take off-farm jobs to supplement their income. Additionally, 53 percent of farm couples are both working off the farm.
Since 1910 farm revenue has increased six times while farm overhead has increased sixteen times. In 1945 the average farm returned 17.5 percent of its value in income. By 1970 that figure had dropped to 6.4 percent. Today roughly twelve cents of every dollar spent on food returns to the farmer.
FARM SIZE
Essentially, all arable land in the United States is under production. There is no significant amount of new land to be developed. Total acres under production are declining as cities are expanding. In 1982 total acreage under production was 986,796,579, compared to 914,527,657 in 2012. While there is a decrease, it appears to be declining at a modest rate. Still, it deserves our concern, especially if improvements in food production are not able to keep pace with the decline in acreage.
Average farm size expanded from 145 acres in 1920 to 434 acres in 2012. Average farm size is probably only a rough gauge of the trend toward consolidation because very small “hobby” farms are abundant, skewing the average. From 2011 to 2012 farms producing over $500,000 in ag sales expanded by 8.6 percent in number and 3.7 percent in size (i.e., added acreage), while farms producing less than $10,000 decreased by 2.5 percent in number. Overall there is a broad, long-term trend towards consolidation. As profit margins narrow, there is increasing pressure to increase acreage.
DEMOGRAPHICS
A very real concern in farm policy is the aging of farmers. Over the past thirty-five years, the USDA has reported the average age of farmers to be increasing steadily. From 2007 to 2012 it rose 2 percent to 58.3 years. Also, the rate of new farmers (farming less than ten years) has decreased by 20 percent over that same time frame. Taken together, the data points to a rapid increase in start-up costs in farming, making it cost-prohibitive for young people to become farmers. This could lead to a serious skill gap when the older generation retires. The problem is very troubling with no clear answer yet.
Gender roles have witnessed considerable change on the farm. Women constitute 30 percent of all farmers, with 14 percent being primary farm operators. Most of these are small farms, with 91 percent of female-operated farms having less than $50,000 in sales. It’s too early to say what this influx of women running small farms will mean to our food culture, but I suspect it will be significant.
Another area of change is the increasing diversity among farmers. In the past, barriers to minority farmers have proven to be a disservice to the economy and the moral fabric of the country. Those barriers and inequities are now lifting, allowing for diversity that may give rise to more innovation. However, farming remains a predominantly white, male occupation.
HISTORY
Our nation was created from farming. The English colonized America in large part for the purpose of farming. The values of independence and self-sufficiency required of farming gave rise to the notion of self-governance. Our founding fathers—Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe—were all farmers. Jefferson in particular made agrarianism a centerpiece of his policies and politics. Perhaps because the nation was founded by farmers, our government is uniquely sensitive to the needs of the agricultural sector both as an economic driver and as a cultural institution for the preservation of core ideals. Thus, any discussion of American farming requires some review of seminal moments in US history.
American agriculture got its first big boost from the Congress of 1862. With the exit of Southern Democrats, the Republicans were free to legislate broad federal policies. They created the Department of Agriculture, the Homestead Act, the Merrill Land Grant College Act, and the Pacific Railroad Act. The benefits to agriculture from the first two were obvious, but the second two were just as important. The Land Grant College Act encouraged the development of state colleges specifically for the study of agriculture, greatly advancing new technologies in agronomy. Today, our state universities are engines of innovation across a wide variety of disciplines including agriculture. The Railroad Act was intended to connect the two coasts of our country, but it also opened the fertile Midwest to farming and the shipment of agricultural produce. Taken together, these four acts were visionary in their understanding and anticipation of the role of agriculture in the wealth of a nation.
By the 1880s, America was reaping the rewards of its investment in agriculture, but it was turning into too much of a good thing. While agricultural abundance was good for the nation, it was bad for the farmer. Flooded markets destroyed farm prices, leading to bankruptcies that would roil local economies. For the next fifty years, the nation would sway between violent boom-and-bust cycles as it searched for a way to stabilize commodity markets.
The great boom years were 1910–1920. American innovation pushed production to new levels just as World War I shut down European agriculture. The period just before the war (1910–1914) is considered “ideal” in that it represented peak pricing without inflation from war. It’s the standard the government uses to this day to establish “parity” in agricultural pricing. The year 1914 also saw passage of the Smith Lever Act establishing the Agricultural Extension services, essentially capturing the developments from college ag schools and then assisting farmers in rapid implementation of best farming and conservation practices.
The bust came in 1920 when European ag came back online. The return of competitive pricing caught many American farmers ov
er-extended, leading to bankruptcy, foreclosures, and a particularly severe contraction in rural economies. Just as the rural economy was starting to regain momentum, Wall Street collapsed (1929), again destroying capital and credit. Then came several years (1932–1937) of severe drought in the Western plains. Together, these events kept farmers on their backs for the better part of two decades.
Farmers sought aid from the federal government, but Republican administrations were adverse to direct intervention. Instead, they encouraged farmers to organize into cooperatives to gain more leverage on the market and stabilize commodity prices. Unfortunately, most of the cooperatives were either too broad in scope or attempted to package groups together that were too disparate in their goals to be effective.
Federal activism came in 1933 with Roosevelt’s New Deal. The farm policy focused on three parts: 1.) Restoring credit by lowering mortgages and extending the term of the loan (later adopted by the FHA), 2.) Paying farmers a subsidy to limit production, and 3.) Offering farmers a crop loan, creating a bottom below which prices wouldn’t go. The crop loan meant the government would buy the crop if the market dropped below that predetermined amount. However, once the government bought the crop it couldn’t sell it without tanking the market. So the government created granaries that became a source of emergency food relief and that eventually grew into the food stamp program of today. Roosevelt also initiated a rural electrification project (beginning with TVA) to bring electricity to every farm. It took thirty years to complete but transformed farm life and greatly increased productivity.
The goal of the New Deal’s farm policy was to strengthen the nation’s agricultural sector, especially by modulating the boom-bust cycles. It was always geared toward big ag for the simple reason that that’s where the biggest effect on the ag economy can be achieved. It was marketed as helping poor farmers, and it did. But its emphasis has always been with big ag, and big ag benefitted disproportionately. Given the goal, that is a strategically smart approach to farm policy.
Country Grit: A Farmoir of Finding Purpose and Love Page 17
