Two Farm Crises

By JIM VAN DER POL

There are two farm crises. One is cyclical like the rising and the setting of the sun. These things recur with depressing regularity, every 30 years or so. The last one was in the middle ’80s. It would not be amiss to argue that this current misery has been in place for three to five years already. Such is always the case. Farm and rural people suffer for some time before the media, or even the Land Grant Universities take much notice. People lose their farms, not suddenly, as it appears to the general public through the distorted lens of our national systems of communications, but by way of losing a significant portion of the best part of their lives battling against what finally seems inevitable. This failure is not like tripping and then getting up. It is much more slow motion than that and much more destructive.

The components of this recurring failure on the farm are depressingly familiar. They don’t vary much. The farm’s people will blame themselves and spend years rehearsing what they did wrong that brought on the trouble they suffered. Lost to them is the simple truth that the difference between farmers in financial trouble and those not has mostly to do with when they bought their land. They will not so much mourn the loss of the farm, which activity would have a potential core of peace in it for them, as to be changed by it and not in a good way. Haunted by the idea they failed the family and the sainted ancestors they become bitter and hateful. The farm failure that cost them years leading up to it, too often stunts the remainder of their days. I have a high school friend, someone I knew then and played sports with and against, whose farm failed in the ’80s. He has since become so bitter I cannot talk to him anymore. Another loss and human tragedy.

Failure in our culture is this traumatic because our system of belief puts such weight on success. Our theory of economics, which for us is what passes for a national morality or ethics, is destructive of much that is good in the human heart and mind. This is evident by noticing the way in which the Universities act in these crises. They will inevitably push up some economist that will explain how this is very much the best consequence for all of us, including the ones who have lost. He (generally a he) will explain with a straight face, as did ours here in Minnesota some time ago, that 80% of the dairy farms will (must) fail, that this is good in the long run for all and that it ought not to be interfered with by the government. This fellow is taxpayer-paid and paid pretty well Look no further for one cause of the widespread resentment against paying taxes.

Then, somewhere else in the university, some group begins to work on various ways of help. These will include counseling, help with the needs of children, mediation (often in cooperation with the state) of financial issues, help in the search for employment and so forth. They will be joined by a small contingent of rural people concerned for their families and neighbors and generally working for little in the way of pay. Often, a few of the failed and failing farmers will get angry and direct that anger at the government. They will march and demonstrate and attempt to pressure their representatives to do something to stop the pain. For this they will be severely criticized by the larger number of farmers in trouble, as well as other rural people.

Towns will fail. Rural representation in the legislatures and the Congress will dwindle further. Schools will suffer and consolidate further. Children will ride buses longer. Fingers will be pointed at the minority of people in our midst that have skins darker than white.

What of the other farm crisis? This is the one that has to do with centuries long agricultural malpractice, with the delta of eroded midwestern soil extending out into the gulf of Mexico, the continuing loss of species, the pollution of our common home, increasingly with manufactured germplasm, and the idiotic notion that some guy in a lab coat is capable of replacing what we are so carelessly wasting. In the US here, we bid fair to waste in several centuries what took the ancient mid eastern civilizations an entire millennium to dispose of.

It is a crisis at this point in large measure because the situation with our climate is a crisis for all of us. Agriculture has gone on for millennia not worried or even noticing the movement of carbon. There are other things that put carbon into the atmosphere contributing to the problem, things such as cars, home heating and jet travel. I don’t want to overstate the case for agricultural practice, but I do fear the results to be found when someone more adept at math and biology than I takes a critical look at tillage and what it contributes to our climate problems. I think the contribution from the soil could be huge. As an organic farm here, we do depend on tillage in our cropping scheme and any study of carbon movement is apt to be unsettling for our idea of farming.

But more immediately, our practices change our soil, and make it more susceptible to damage due to the increasing rainfall and number of rainy days we are experiencing. Excessive rainfall and runoff collapse the soil life due to restriction of air in the profile. This too increases ponding and runoff and leads in its turn to more excessive rainfall and runoff. It is a vicious cycle, one compounded by tractor traffic, all too often on wet soils. Meanwhile extended droughts and heat rule the day in other places.

Soil health is brought about by soil life. Healthy soil life we are told, out numbers and outweighs the large animal life we graziers put on the surface of the soil. Grazing done right fosters soil life. Soil life is how fertility is preserved in the life cycle of the earth, it is the best, perhaps only, control of erosion. Key to this, as I have suggested before in this space, is our improving and increasing the use of perennial plants and decreasing our dependence on annual ones. Other systems of perennial production need to be developed which will complement and support our use of grazing animals while producing a wider variety of goods.

Market economies subject to weak or no regulation always go in the same direction. They will put all assets and all economic activity into as few hands as possible. We know this. It has proven out time and again over the centuries since capitalism was first conceived. It is what is happening at a somewhat accelerated pace in farming today. It is likely that farming, to cope with this truth, is going to need to change fundamentally.

We need, in farming as everywhere else in our economy, a sharpened sense of economic justice. And we all need community, a group of people with a common circumstance with whom we may stand and from whom we can learn and draw strength.

We could put a pretty effective band aid on the first farm crisis by adopting a guaranteed income for all Americans, including farmers. This was suggested to me by a friend, half jokingly. We probably shouldn’t laugh, because it probably is going to happen at some point. Silicon Valley wants it to cover its tracks as it works to destroy the lives of working people. This would relieve some pain for the immediate future, but it won’t fix farming. It would be best if we gave as much attention as possible to solutions for the second farm crisis, the one about the soil, because these solutions are more long term and have the potential to change everything.

We have operated for most of my life with the idea of soil as just that medium that holds crop plants upright. This is obsolete. Soil is what gives us life. We need more hands and minds on the land. Soil calls it out, for it is wonderfully varied in its aspects and properties. And that variety is our challenge. Soil cannot be cared for by our current shortcut agricultural practice. Careful work is required by people proud to be called farmers, and who are supported and secured by ongoing farming communities. Elegant solutions, it has been said, are predicated upon the uniqueness of place. Those elegant solutions are ours to supply. That is what farming can be.

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, December 15, 2019

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