During the Colonial Era, well over ninety percent of Americans were farmers. The rest, mostly craftsmen and merchants, made their livings by providing goods and services to farmers. The wealth of the nation was ultimately derived entirely from the products of the land. The average American yeoman farmer in those days was infinitely more independent than any American citizen is in our own time, able to produce their own food for their own family on their own land, and, if a crop was good and produce could be sold on the market, perhaps generating enough money to pay for other necessities and the occasional luxury. Today, if we want so much as a piece of lettuce, we have to go to a grocery store whose supply chain is controlled by a corporate oligarchy.
Yet the American farmer in the days of old was not isolated from his fellows. In fact, for America to work, community had to play a central role in the lives of citizens. The nearest town was where a farmer came to sell their produce at the market, buy goods at the stores, and perhaps deal with some legal matter at the county courthouse. Church was vitally important, almost the glue which held society together. Each county had a militia company to protect the community from whatever might threaten it, including a distant British government that could threaten their liberties. as the poet John Donne said, no man is an island, sufficient unto himself.
Thomas Jefferson said it best in one of his most memorable quotes:
Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he made the peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. It is the focus in which he keeps alive that sacred fire which otherwise might eclipse from the face of the earth.
And to his fellow Founding Father, John Jay, Jefferson once wrote as follows:
Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most virtuous, and they are tied to the country and wedded to its liberty and interests by the most lasting bonds.
To Jefferson, the freedom of owning one's own land was coupled with a societal obligation to educate the public, down to the members of the lowest social class. He envisioned a society in which independent farmers would come home at night and read Homer in the original Greek by the fire. Some people would say that this is unrealistic, if not unobtainable. Jefferson would probably chide them for setting their expectations for the American people too low.
Lincoln, a spiritual heir to Jefferson in many ways, also understood the importance of the family farm to the fabric of the American republic. Even in the darkest days of the Civil War, he took the time to sign into law the Homestead Act and the Morrill Act, two key pieces of legislation that helped form the American Midwest into a society based around the family farm. The Homestead Act made it easy and cheap for families and individuals to secure small plots of federal land in the west, provided they agreed to live on the land and farm it. The Morrill Act allocated federal funds for the establishment of agricultural colleges, to teach American the practical skills necessary to make a success out of farming.
During his legendary first hundred days in office, Franklin Roosevelt made the salvation of the American family farm one of the top priorities. The Agricultural Adjustment Act enabled the government to raise prices by paying farmers subsidies if they reduced their planting. An emergency measure, the law helped stave off a complete collapse of the American agricultural sector.
From the founding of the republic to the middle of the 20th Century, the federal government recognized that the American family farm was an institution crucial to the social and economic fabric of the nation. That being the case, they took common sense measures to foster its development and protect it when it was threatened.
Not anymore.
It is no secret that the American family farm has been disappearing for the last several decades. It is not yet extinct, yet it clearly is in danger of becoming so. Many people, including many American farmers themselves, have entirely given up. Thirty years ago, family farms of the sort that Jefferson would still have recognized still made up over half of American agricultural production; today their percentage is less than a quarter.
On the national and state levels, the evidence is there for all to see. In the last twelve years, the number of American dairy producers had declined from 70,000 to 40,000. The great state of Wisconsin, famed across the world for its dairy products, is now seeing two dairy producers shut down every single day. Missouri had 23,000 independent pig farms in 1985, whereas today it has only 2,000. The average annual net farm income for an American farmer is now nearly about $1,500 in the negative.
Today, the bulk of American agricultural production comes out of corporate-controlled factory farms, gigantic industrial-scale operations so mechanized that to even call them by the name of "farms" seems almost absurd. The products of these facilities are not only of greatly lesser quality than those of family farms, but they are less healthy, less safe, and pumped full of chemicals, antibiotics, and growth hormones.
The decline of the American farm has precipitated a collapse in the rural society of the United States. As the farms vanished, so did the restaurants, shops, hardware stores, movie theaters, and other establishments that depended on them for their customer base. Doctors and dentists, with insufficient patients able to pay, closed up and left. Countless small towns across rural America are now empty shells, like skeletons in a desert. With those towns goes a priceless part of the national soul.
Most people believe that the decline of the American family farm has been a regrettable but unfortunately inevitable consequence of new technologies and a changing economy. It has been nothing of the sort. It did not need to happen, nor should it have happened. It is entirely the responsibility of a formidable set of corporate enemies: Tyson Foods, Perdue Farms, Cargill, Swift & Company, ConAgra, Dean Foods, Monsanto, and a whole host of others.
If the American family farm finally does die, it won't have been an accident. It will have been murder.
Corporate agribusiness has one of the most powerful lobbying presences in Washington D.C. The campaign coffers of politicians, from both parties and at every level of government, overflow with donations from wealthy people connected to these companies. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the agribusiness sector gave a whopping $118 million in campaign contributions during the 2016 election cycle. This allows them to buy an obscene amount of political influence, which they wield ruthlessly to slice down the opposition. The immense farm bills that wind their way through Congress every half decade are essentially written by the agribusiness lobbyists. Needless to say, owners of family farms do not possess even a fraction of their political clout.
Freed from the fear of any serious regulation by the government, the corporate agribusiness conglomerates can shape the marketplace as they choose, just as a sculptor manipulates clay. According to Farm Aid, a mere four companies control the majority of American supply and distribution of each of the following: beef (84%), corn (80%), soybeans (70%), hogs (66%), poultry (59%), and turkey (55%). Despite widespread evidence of price-fixing and other anti-competitive behavior, as well as numerous lawsuits, enforcement of federal antitrust laws has been effectively nonexistent. And if you think this latter fact has nothing to do with the political power of the agribusiness lobby, I have a bridge to sell you.
Because the corporate agribusiness control such a disproportionate market share, they have been able to vertically integrate the entire production, distribution, and sale of American food into their hands. Small-scale processing operations and slaughterhouses that used to fill the small towns of rural America have vanished, forcing the remaining family farms to turn to the corporations themselves to get their products to the market. Insult has been added to injury, in that the few remaining family farms are now mostly forced to produce crops and livestock to sell to the very agribusiness giants who already threaten their existence.
The dominance of corporate agribusiness is not only bad news for farmers, but bad news for the American people as a whole. The food we eat is now produced in an unnatural manner, so infused with artificial chemicals that even describing it as "food" is being charitable. The horror stories that emerge out of factory farms are so sickening as to make one vomit. The animals are pumped full of antibiotics and growth hormones and raised in nightmarish conditions.
Now, no man who loves barbecue, hamburgers, pork chops, lamb korma, and sesame chicken as much as I do could ever be a vegetarian. Nevertheless, I believe strongly that the animals from which we obtain our meat are entitled to due respect as part of the natural order of things. When I eat pork chops, I want to know that the pig from which it came was not mistreated.
Two-and-a-half centuries ago, when they felt their liberties threatened by a distant monarch, American farmers set aside their plows, picked up their muskets, and gathered on Lexington Green to fight for their freedom. Fortunately for the nation, their family farmer descendants are now doing the same. And the American people need to back them up.
Since 1985, patriotic musicians such as Willie Nelson, John Mellencamp and many others have organized an annual benefit concert called Farm Aid to raise money in support of American family farmers. From this has emerged an organization that conducts research and advocacy on behalf of ordinary farmers, provides grants to smaller nonprofits focused on food independent and sustainability, and connecting farmers with resources that can help them stay on their land. Farm Aid is one of the most worthwhile advocacy organizations in the United States.
Over the last few years, farmers markets have sprung up all across the country, in both big cities and small towns, allowing family farmers to sell their products directly to consumers. This is an act of resistance against the corporate oligarchy, side-stepping their control of the farm-to-table food chain that keeps Americans fed and going directly to the source. Buying so much as a single carton of eggs or one little basket of potatoes at a farmers market helps the American family farm survive. It is a fundamentally patriotic act.
(Use the Local Harvest website to find the farmers market closest to you.)
Many restaurants are now choosing to buy their meat and produce from local farms rather than through the agribusiness pipeline. Whenever possible, Americans need to eat at these establishments and avoid the others. Like shopping at farmers markets, doing so is a fundamentally patriotic act.
If the American family farm disappears, the United States will have lost a crucial aspect of its heritage and national identity. The agribusiness giants, in placing profit over the health, safety, and social stability of the republic, are traitors to the United States no less sinister than was Benedict Arnold. Through political advocacy, support of such organizations as Farm Aid, and being more careful with where we buy our groceries and where we go out to eat, the American people can help save the family farm.
Government on every level could implement sound public policies to help our nation's farmers, just as it did before with the Homestead Act, the Morrill Act, and the Agricultural Adjustment Act. Why not give hefty property tax exemptions and income tax deductions to family farms, provided that the sell a certain percentage of their produce directly to the public? Why not create a system of low interest loans for farmers having trouble, or for people wishing to start new family farms? Above all, why hasn't there been much more aggressive enforcement of antitrust laws against the agribusiness giants? There are any number of things that could be done.
As always, it's up to us.
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