The future of farming: Dale Reimers of Jamestown, North Dakota, remembers when farmers lined up to drop off their grain at the local elevator. The Reimers now own the elevator, the most recent addition to what has become a 20,000-acre farm, some 20 times the average size in North Dakota. They are doing well, but Mr Reimer still bemoans the loss of small towns. He would rather farm a quarter of his present land, and have more neighbours round him. Instead, he expects to see fewer and fewer. Profit margins are good, but the community has gone [...] Roughly 20% of farmers, [Ford Runge, a professor of applied economics at the University of Minnesota] estimates, are receiving some 80% of the federal subsidies. This 20% also happen to own the largest farms. They are using the federal subsidies mainly to remain viable, but also to bid land away from other farmers. The cap for federal subsidies is very high; so the larger farms get, the more subsidies they receive. As large farms bid up land prices, capital costs for smaller operations rise, and young people find it harder to buy land. In this way, say Mr Runge and others, the federal government, far from propping up small farming towns, is hastening their decline.
There's a question. What, precisely, is the value of the small or family-owned farm these days? I'm not saying all these people should be run out of business or anything that heartless. However, I am saying that maybe, if their children are leaving the land and not coming back, having farms merge into larger blobs isn't necessarily a bad thing. (I do not believe I just said that.) From what I've been able to see, aside from the family and community issues, the principal value of the family farm is in some ways to enable American nostalgia. The way things were back in the simpler days. And I'm not saying that things were really worse than people think (although they were); I'm only saying that nostalgia is a very bad reason to prop up businesses that are failing in their current form. At least, it's a bad reason when you don't acknowledge that this is, at least, exactly what you're doing.
Of course, the other issue is that the Oglala aquifer is being badly drained by the larger cities of the Great Plains, as well as the farming. And these days, in a water-rights battle between large corporate farms, small family farms, and cities, the small family farm is almost certain to lose first.
Copyright © 2001, Iain Jackson, after-words.org
[Archives: 2001 and after]
Archives before February 5, 2001
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12/19/2001: vive la france
12/19/2001: princess, redux
12/19/2001: yemen and rumsfeld
12/18/2001: you're NOT in the army now
12/18/2001: interesting donation
12/18/2001: shame on winn dixie, indeed
12/18/2001: saudi princess
12/17/2001: new resolve
12/17/2001: a victim of the attack ... yeah, right
12/17/2001: polluters ho!