Rural Routes/Margot Ford McMillen

Thought for Food as Farmers Hit the Wall

A few days ago, one of our thoughtful readers, we’ll call him Dan from Fort Madison, sent me a packet of clippings from Iowa. Leafing through them, there was one bad piece of news after the other: Overproduction is sending the meat markets into a downward spiral, worldwide. For years, Americans have been eating imported meat even though we produce plenty of our own.

The shell game that is industrial agriculture sends products from one place to another and benefits only the oil companies, the transporters and the shareholders of the companies. The only impact on the true producers — the farmers — is negative, and tariffs are making a bad story even worse. And that’s the future as we see it.

In another bit of news, Monsanto and Bayer are merging, perhaps to erase the name of the worst actor in agriculture—Monsanto — by replacing it with one of the most beloved painkillers — Bayer. The main ingredient of Monsanto’s weed killer, Roundup, is being found in children’s cereals and has been linked with cancers, including one in the groundskeeper of a children’s school.

With all this news coverage, and it’s about time somebody noticed that the food system is screwed up, what new observations can I add? Well, I couldn’t help notice that the players left in the articles are “farmers,” a herd of amorphous, faceless avatars. Maybe the layout adds a photo, a guy on his John Deere or in his pickup truck, but rarely if ever do readers see him as a human being, doing off-hours human being stuff, like playing catch with his kids or smiling at his wife.

Granted that play time and smile time are in short supply these days in farm country, those families are the future and they need some attention. It’s autumn, back to school time and the most beautiful time of the year. We should be celebrating the beautiful fall colors, the migrations of birds and butterflies, and the harvest, cooking our favorite fall-time foods (Apples! Tomatoes! Pears! Melons! Squash!)

Farm income has dropped to its lowest level in decades and one Congressional estimate tells that 90% of farm income is coming from off-farm jobs. This means that everyone in the family — husband, wife, teen-age kids — is working every hour they can squeeze in, leaving nothing for family or neighbors. So much for quality of life. And that’s the future as we see it.

Needless to say, any kind of unexpected expense, from a health problem to the usual flat tire, becomes a crisis of major proportion under those circumstances. When something needs to be handled or someone needs an extra ride to town, it’s an emergency.

While we could treat this crisis as a purely economic problem, economics don’t mean anything until you consider the human impact. And farmers, farmers’ wives and farmers’ kids are a stoic bunch of folks. It’s hard to figure out what’s going on. And what will be the future.

So here’s a report from the women and kids that I know in rural America:

One of my best friends, and closest neighbor, is packing up even as I write this, and moving to town. With no money to move, and a husband that has been incapacitated by the stress of too-much-work and investments-gone-wrong, neighbors are taking time from harvest and pitching in to help, even though we are heartbroken. Their kids are grown and can help them out and, as her husband told me, “we are lucky to be in a position to move ...” He adds, “so many of our neighbors can’t ...”

Another friends has plunged into the political scene, backing candidates that promise to help. Still sporting a Trump sticker on her car, she has a large family, each with a hard story to tell. Instead of being available to help, she’s at continual meetings and working hard to place signs for her favorites all over the county. While I endorse the new political awareness, frantic activity doesn’t hold the politicians accountable after they’re elected. Besides working for new bad guys, we need to stay after the entrenched ones—stop the mergers, support American-raised products with labeling.

There are only a few longtime farmers left, and one who takes pride in being the fifth-generation in his family to farm his land, is the first guy to help when somebody needs it. His is also the first truck on the road in the morning and the last one home at night. He’s our community’s most fair employer, and his kids want to stay around, but he believes and says privately that the kids will be the ones to pay for the industrialization we see around us. Mergers like Bayer-Monsanto mean fewer choices, less competition, and narrower choices for them.

It isn’t news to add that the community supports local institutions: Churches, schools, businesses. Here in my community, like many rural places, schools have been cut back to four days a week.

And that’s the future as far as we see it.

Margot Ford McMillen farms near Fulton, Mo., and co-hosts “Farm and Fiddle” on sustainable ag issues on KOPN 89.5 FM in Columbia, Mo. Her latest book is The Golden Lane: How Missouri Women Gained the Vote and Changed History. Email: margotmcmillen@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, October 15, 2018

Populist.com