Farming Heroes

Farming is backbreaking work. You get up before the sunrise, and you often work until after sundown, tying up loose ends, tinkering with equipment, and taking care of paperwork. You’re at the mercy of weather systems and price fluctuations which can bankrupt you even when you make good choices and dedicate every waking hour to your harvest.

The state of farming in this country is a mixed bag. On the one hand, big companies have spent the past hundred and fifty years—or longer—getting as much land as possible into the hands of a few big players. At the turn of the twentieth century, forty eight percent of American families made a living from agriculture. A hundred years later, that number was closer to two percent.

Many of the families who were farming at the beginning of the last century but not at the end didn’t want to give up their land; they were forced to move because of bad harvests or unfavorable market conditions. You could say that small scale agriculture is dying, as families who have farmed for generations find that they can’t compete with the massive investments that their corporate competitors make to grow corn, wheat, and soy on an industrial scale.

Despite this bad news about family farms, there are more than ten times as many farmers’ markets in the United States today as there were forty years ago. Free-thinking farmers are somehow finding ways to start working small pieces of land, selling their produce directly to free-thinking customers. Farmers’ markets are so hot that even large mainstream corporations are aping them in tacky promotions.

Wherever you find an economy where small-scale farmers thrive, you find a system of government where individuals are willing and able to speak out. This has been the case since ancient times. When a small minority gains control of most of the land or resources, government grows corrupt, workers are exploited, and the average person doesn’t have much of a say.

Ancient Babylon (present day Iraq) lay between two mighty rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates. Their water was rich in minerals, and when the rivers flooded their banks, the silt that was left behind created fertile and productive plots. At some point a proactive priest or engineer discovered that he could make the land even more bountiful by channeling river water into irrigation systems. As large scale irrigation projects grew successful, the folks who were organizing the effort grew rich and powerful, and came to own most of the land.

There’s a tablet bearing ancient Babylonian laws that turned up about a hundred years ago in what was once Persia. One of these laws states that when someone works land that another person owns, he is entitled to keep one third of the produce he grows there. One third. Think about it. That’s sharecropping. And yet some lawmaker took the trouble to pass a law and inscribe a tablet to protect the tenants’ right to keep that one third. It must have been even worse for many renters.

Nearby, in ancient Israel, folks followed a custom known as the Jubilee Year. According to this tradition, every fiftieth year all debts were forgiven, and all land that had changed hands due to unfortunate circumstances was returned to its original owner. In other words, if you lost the family farm, when the Jubilee Year came around, you’d get it back.

If a Jubilee Year law had been in effect during the dustbowl years, thousands of Great Plains farmers wouldn’t have lost their land and trekked out to California to become migrant workers. If the Jubilee Year law had been in effect during the recent mortgage and foreclosure crisis, we wouldn’t be facing the current level of homelessness and poverty. Homes excavated from the ruins of ancient Israel tend to be relatively uniform in size. That culture didn’t have the kind of wealth disparity that you found nearby in Babylon, where people who lost their land during tough times were unlikely to ever get it back.

 In early Greece, most of the good land was grabbed early on by the military elite, and regular folks were left with rocky hillsides which they had to nurture patiently in order to get anything to grow. They planted olives and grapes, crops that the richer landowners didn’t bother with because they took too much time and patience. But olives and grapes were the right crops to grow on rocky hillsides, which weren’t much good for the wheat and barley which the wealthier landowners grew on the better lands, delegating the labor to their slaves.

Unlike wheat or barley, which grow easily and are replanted every year, olive trees and grape vines can take generations to get established. Folks who grow them can make secondary items—olive oil and wine—which are much more valuable than the basic produce, especially if you learn your craft and put out a great product. Once you put in the time it takes to get a grape vine or olive tree to bear fruit, you feel proud of your work and you want to keep that vine or tree in your family.
These early Greek farmers developed pride and independence, and before long they had started history’s first democracy. It wasn’t perfect—slaves couldn’t vote, and even wealthy landowners were shut out at first—but it was a start.

After the fall of Rome, warlords again grabbed all of the good land in Europe, just as the military elite had done in ancient Greece. They used the feudal system to offer contracts to poor peasants, who farmed land they did not own under disadvantageous terms. But around the end of the first millennium, Europeans began inventing better agricultural technologies and becoming more successful farmers.

Land ownership arrangements changed. The wealthy land owners found that it was now more profitable to hire labor and harvest their own crops than to offer long term leases to peasants.  Poor people struck out on their own, and began clearing marginal hillsides of trees and shrubs. Like the ancient Greek olive farmers, they didn’t have the kind of resources that large scale land owners enjoyed, but the process of taking a piece of land, making it their own, and getting crops to grow there transformed them from peasants into free thinking citizens. They passed laws that recognized the rights of individuals, and began challenging authority.

There’s been a similar dynamic in the United States, reaching back hundreds of years. Like the warlords of ancient Greece and medieval Europe, cattle and railroad barons grabbed up much of the land as quickly and ruthlessly as they could. At the same time, this country was founded by people who were trying to get out from under oppressive governments. Forward thinking legislators and radical farmers have always challenged the efforts of cutthroat entrepreneurs to buy up as much land as possible.

Thomas Jefferson wrote prolifically about the importance of broad based prosperity and land ownership. He was a wealthy landowner and slave owner himself, but he did have some good ideas, and he helped to create an ethic and an ideal. During the following century, the federal government encouraged the settlement of the western part of the country by offering one hundred and sixty acre parcels to homesteaders who could demonstrate that they were capable of working the land.
Despite the fact that the railroad companies were awarded half of the land--and grabbed much of the other half by sponsoring sham claims--this policy on some level was intended to foster equality, once you factor out the fact that it displaced hundreds of thousands of Native Americans from areas where they had lived for centuries.

After the Civil War, the government launched a similar program aimed at helping freed slaves to get back on their feet by offering them forty acres and a mule. Like the movement to settle the west, the reality of these land grants hardly lived up to the ideal. Many freed slaves ended up as sharecroppers, rather than landowners. Despite these failings, it was a good idea, and if it had been seriously implemented, it’s hard to imagine that we’d have the kind of social and economic disparity on the basis of race that we see today.

Once most of the land out west had been settled late in the nineteenth century, big railroad companies began getting into the food business. Food was an ideal product to transport on the new railroads because the demand for it was ongoing, and there was plenty of room out west to raise food for the densely populated Eastern cities, which were growing more densely populated every day.

The railroad companies got involved in food production in the west, raising cattle and growing lettuce. They also formed alliances with the giant meat packing companies, when they weren’t competing with them for their own share of a very profitable business. Cutthroat entrepreneurs grabbed up as much western land as possible. Their agricultural production technologies grew more expensive and efficient, as they bought bigger tractors to work bigger parcels of land.

The family farmers who had managed to get their hands on homesteaded plots had a hard time competing. They were often growing the same wheat and corn as the large-scale landowners, but they didn’t have the acreage and the equipment to achieve economies of scale, so they couldn’t put out the large enough quantities to succeed, and they couldn’t keep their small operations viable with the low prices that their industrial competitors were able to charge.

As these independent farmers found themselves unable to pay their bills and cover the cost of their seeds, they began mortgaging their land and borrowing against their equipment. The situation didn’t improve. Many were never able to pay back their loans, and eventually they lost their land. They left their livelihoods behind and went off in search of wage labor, often with young families in tow.

Big agriculture got bigger, and before long folks living in cities and even in rural towns were buying most of their food through grocery chains that did most of their business with the food conglomerates that managed most of the food chain. The big food companies built strong lobbies that shaped a political system where corporations had a disproportionately large voice, and individuals struggled to be heard.

Today we’re used to hearing about a monster food system that has so much political clout that it keeps many Americans unhealthy by offering products that are profitable but lethal, but this is hardly a new story. In the early years of the twentieth century, Upton Sinclair published a muckraking novel about the industrial slaughterhouses in Chicago, exposing the filthy food processing operations and hazardous conditions for workers.

The public outrage that the novel stirred made it obvious that the government had to take some action. Unfortunately,  rather than taking the opportunity to pass laws that would really make folks safer, government officials worked with industry representatives to create the illusion that they were making the food supply safer, when they were mostly just managing their own images.

The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 was certainly an improvement over the earlier regulatory environment. It put a cursory inspection system into place, and made it illegal to mislabel products. But the legislation was also a tragic missed opportunity to actually reform the food system by creating serious standards for regulation and food safety.

There’s a similar situation today, as monstrous factory farms breed diseases nobody could even have imagined a hundred years ago, diseases caused by overcrowding, indiscriminate use of hormones and antibiotics, and crazy practices like feeding byproducts from cow slaughterhouses back to cows, and byproducts from chicken slaughterhouses back to chickens.

We hear nearly every week about a new food safety scare linked directly to industrial farming practices. Pathogens that make their way into the industrial food supply ruin millions of pounds of meat, and outbreaks from food borne illnesses sicken thousands of people. And yet it’s tough to pass regulation that might actually improve the situation because large food companies fund such powerful lobbies, and contribute heavily to the campaigns of elected officials.

The consolidation of the food industry undermines democracy because the political influence that the large corporations enjoy ensures that fewer people have a real say in crafting laws and policies. However, the small-scale farmers who are driving the farmers’ market movement do manage to make some noise, and the more they prosper and find ways to sell their food and share their ideals, the less powerful corporate agriculture will ultimately become.

If it hadn’t been for the strong voices of independent farmers and the customers who support them, federal organic standards would allow genetically modified foods to be labeled as organic. These free thinking producers have been the force between today’s sustainable food movement, which has forced the government to overhaul nutritional recommendations, re-evaluate the school lunch program, and fund vouchers to help low income shoppers buy produce at farmers’ markets.

We’ve got a long way to go, when it comes to building a sensible, fair food system, and there’s certainly no shortage of bad news, from e coli and salmonella outbreaks, to epidemics of type 2 diabetes and heart disease. But the flashes of good news are more than just isolated incidents. Instead, they’re the work of a grassroots movement that gets stronger every day, and has the potential to change not only the way we eat, but also the way we live.