Hello, Farm Bill Fans. It’s that time again. A new farm bill is being created by Congress, and it will affect how we farm, how we enjoy the outdoors, how we spend our money, how we eat, how the disadvantaged in our communities eat—for the next five years. Time to pay attention. Time to get informed on such subjects as benefits to industrial farms, foreign ownership of land and Country of Origin labelling.
The first Farm Bill, which is re-written every five years, was created as part of the New Deal back in 1933, to move rural America into prosperity through the adoption of new techniques. Fertilizers, pesticides, fossil fuel-driven equipment. Modern life, you know. Almost immediately, besides educating farmers on how to grow commodities instead of food, it put us into debt for the new things we would need to be competitive. Competitive with each other, that is.
Even the oldest tractors are viciously efficient when paired with a crew that can (or is forced to) work from sun-up to sun-down. While farmers of the 1930s could keep up—barely—with 40 acres or so, as equipment became more efficient they could plow, till, harvest more and more. Farm size had grown since the 1900s and now, as farmers left the business, people bought out their neighbors and farm size grew more quickly. By the 1950s, farm size averaged about 215 acres, and kept on growing.
By the 1970s, with Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz at the helm, we were encouraged to plow “fencerow to fencerow,” taking out any remnants of woods or prairie that sheltered wildlife. “Get Big or Get Out,” Butz said, and his industrial cheerleaders echoed that it is up to American farmers to feed the world.
The trends were not lost on industry, of course. Companies like John Deere led the charge when it came to building larger, shinier equipment, and companies like Staley, Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland led the way in processing. Without processing, there was no market. Besides providing the market for these farm commodities, the processors invented huge transportation networks on rivers, railroads and highways.
Every version of the US Farm Bill contributed to industry’s grip on rural America. Using our tax dollars, the government smoothed the way for these transportation giants. The Corps of Engineers dug channels in rivers so that traffic could move more smoothly and safely. The highway system, improved to its present state, provided coast-to-coast construction and maintenance.
The atrocities have continued. In the 1990s, industry introduced a poison pill that has delivered the final blows to nature when Monsanto gave farmers special deals on Roundup-Resistant crops. These seeds for soybeans, corn, cotton, canola and other commodities, grow plants that are impervious to the effects of killer chemicals. Roundup, which used to kill every weed in the field, was sprayed on the growing R-R crops. The crops would grow, the weeds would die. Because genes are clever, the weeds finally have become immune and chemical companies respond with more deadly combinations.
By allowing patents on these plants, the government-industrial complex played another mean trick on farmers. If a farmer saved the seeds from a crop, and those seeds contained a patented gene, the farmer could be sued for gene theft. Note that the farmer may have been saving seeds for his or her lifetime and just happened to have pollen from a neighboring field blow onto his or her crops, harvest the pollinated seeds and, unwittingly, been discovered with evidence of gene theft.
Our current farm bills have continued the trend to take care of industry. Rural America, now having lost population to an extent that may not be replenished, is anxious for benefits that will allow landowners to plow more, 24/7, on fields that cannot grow crops without chemical inputs. The fields are depleted, but the machines that run on them can’t tell. There is no need for a farmer, with their human eyes and brains, to participate. Equipment can be programmed to run from computers. These crops—mostly soybeans and corn—aren’t usually processed to feed you, by the way. In general, they are fed to animals in Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs). And, increasingly, the CAFOs are owned by foreign corporations doing business here but with no positive presence in our communities.
Back in 1990, Wendell Berry wrote a book called “What Are People For?” At the time, with computers and internet rare in rural America, it seemed like his essays described a sci-fi, dystopian vision. What Berry sensed was the looming power of industry over the land. And the looming power of industry over the Farm Bill, which sets out where government money will go.
If you care about the food you eat, where it comes from, how it is grown, who it exploits, become informed and speak out on this opportunity to make a difference.
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, June 1, 2023
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