Keeping Farms in the Economy

By JIM VAN DER POL

It should be obvious by now that if there is to be any “farm economy” worthy of the name in the future it will be through the control of farm output, or supply. This control is critical for any prosperity on the farm, for the well being of the people doing the farming and those communities whose well being depends upon the farmers, and as is now becoming apparent, for the good of the climate.

When we allow the controlling feature of our farm policy to be an overhanging surplus of the common grains and livestock, such that we push these commodities on the world to relieve pressure on our economy, we essentially use more diesel fuel and poison than necessary to compensate for our own lack of common political sense, and we use the earth and other human beings badly.

To control supply or production will require a different mindset among farmers, bolstered by proper actions and protections by the government. And the different mind set among farmers waits for some evidence of the proper mind set in government. Farmers don’t trust the government. So for lack of trust in what could be done as a community, which is what democratic governance is, we get a one-eyed individualism among farmers, as everywhere else in the economy.

Why can’t the government do anything useful? This complaint could be heard from everywhere in the economy, certainly in farm country.

The short and obvious answer is that it too, is infected with one-eyed individualism. Our governments are in the hands of people who are essentially philosophically opposed to them, who do not believe in the efficacy of banding together to solve problems, who carry no inclination to support any kind of community effort at any level, who essentially disbelieve that humans are social animals, needing each other. This is why government is so prone to corruption too, because if you think you are alone in the world and everyone is out to get you, you will tend to grab what you can get whenever you can.

How did we get here? It was in the 1960s, I think, that the philosophy of selfishness as a political construct took hold with the Young Americans for Freedom on the nation’s campuses. The philosophy of thinkers like Ludwig von Mises and Frederich Hayek and especially Ayn Rand who appealed so strongly to adolescent boys, that most careless and unthinking sector of humanity, began to take hold and grow. I cannot figure out why. It looks mostly like fear to me, fear of what the world might be changing into in that time of tumult over war and race.

Selfishness is, of course, a natural trait of individualism. And then as now, individualism was endemic in our culture. As Americans we have always told ourselves stories praising our own individualism, whether true or not, and denigrating or denying any impact of either community or family in our success. If anything, others tend to show up as bad guys, the ones to be overcome on our way to the stars. Goodness, we can’t even tolerate a Thanksgiving meal with the ones to whom we are most closely related, to hear the keepers of the culture say it. So it was that the selfish individual was made into our modern American hero. And we citizens began electing people to run the government whose fondest wish was to destroy it.

From here we have a succession of minor thinkers, political operatives really, to develop the basic idea. We have the Chicago School of Economics, which gave us Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan, both lovers of Wall Street who had much to do with the recent destruction of our economy. And then, of course, there is Ronald Reagan, who said the government is the problem, and his main squeeze across the ocean in Great Britain, Margaret — there is no alternative (TINA) — Thatcher, who argued that there is no community, or family, but only the individual. And of course, on the Democratic side, we have Bill Clinton, who did so much to destroy the Democratic Party and so many others on both sides of the aisle.

So it is that in farm policy, as in every other area of human life, we shall have to start by pushing the libertarians out of the government so that it can work again. First we have to push them out of our heads, asking ourselves if we really amount to anything without the everlasting “I” in the driver seat.

We have several generations of very bad philosophy to get out of our minds, and there hardly seems to be time to invest in the effort. But nothing short of it will do. Everywhere we look, simple belief in the individual reigns.

Silicon Valley has used our habits of mind to build a whole new world that suits them very well. People “work” by staring at screens in cubicles. We can have our own celebrity personalities on Facebook. We are not employees now, but contractors, each of us moving constantly toward “self improvement.” Look at Uber, which when it succeeds in destroying the possibility of a cab driving livelihood, intends to move on to taking the human element out altogether, via the driverless car.

Thus, because we can no longer think of ourselves as members of any group, we are picked off one at a time as individuals. The only thing we do with others seems to be the regular campout on the street in front of the Apple store. Even there the goal is always to be first in line to buy their new gadget. Government stands by befuddled, if not actively applauding. So when we go with others to do something useful for the common good together, we engage in a radical, or really, a revolutionary act. We throw sand in the gears of corporate dreams by not acting as expected.

The move toward specialization in farming which separates livestock from land, with dire results for both, takes as its next step the separation of people from agriculture. Agriculture is being dumbed down and the “need” for crews of immigrant labor to do it testifies to that. Immigrants are not dumb. The jobs are. The meaning has been subtracted from them leaving farm workers in the same predicament as the cubicle dwellers cited above. Ask them, any of them, if they want their children doing the work they do. Might as well ask the ag financiers if they do not dream of taking people completely out of agriculture. That seems to be the goal.

This trend in agriculture by now several generations along toward replacing husbandry with finance will literally be the death of the Earth and of us. Land in use is very fragile and needs the protection of people who know it in its intricate and local detail, who will learn the difficult lessons about soil life and our impacts upon that and do the hard work to produce what the land can without damaging it. For that, we need farmers who will come to their work with their bodies and minds, with their humanity intact, farmers who will work to understand the land under their feet, and families and rural communities surrounding and supporting them in the effort. As of now, we have a very short supply of either of these human factors.

Jim Van Der Pol farms near Kerkhoven, Minn. A collection of his columns, Conversations with the Land, was published by No Bull Press (nobullpressonline.com).

From The Progressive Populist, September 15, 2018

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