Once an industrial-chemical titan, GMO seed giant Monsanto has rebranded itself as a "sustainable agriculture company." Forget such classic post-war corporate atrocities as PCB and dioxin—the modern Monsanto "uses plant breeding and biotechnology to create seeds that grow into stronger, more resilient crops that require fewer resources," as the company's website has it.
That rhetoric may have to change, though, if Monsanto succeeds in buying its Swiss rival, pesticide giant Syngenta. on Friday, Syngenta's board rejected a $45 billion takeover bid. But that's hardly the end of the story. Tuesday afternoon, Syngenta's share price was holding steady at a level about 20 percent higher than it was before Monsanto's bid—an indication that investors consider an eventual deal quite possible. As The Wall Street Journal's Helen Thomas put it, the Syngenta board's initial rejection of Monsanto's overture may just be a way of saying, "This deal makes sense, but Syngenta can hold out for more."
The logic for the deal is simple: Syngenta is Monsanto's perfect complement. Monsanto ranks as the globe's largest purveyor of seeds (genetically modified and otherwise), alongside a relatively small chemical division (mainly devoted to the herbicide Roundup), which makes up just a third of its $15.8 billion in total sales
Syngenta, meanwhile, is the globe's largest pesticide purveyor, with a relatively small sideline in GMO seeds that accounts for a fifth of its $15.1 billion in total sales.
Combined, the two companies would form a singular agribusiness behemoth, a company that controls a third of both the globe's seed and pesticides markets. To make the deal fly with US antitrust regulators, Syngenta would likely have to sell off its substantial corn and soybean seed business, as well its relatively small glyphosate holdings, in order to avoid direct overlap with Monsanto's existing market share, the financial website Seeking Alphareports. So the combined company would have somewhat smaller market share than what's portrayed below:
In trying to swallow Syngenta, Monsanto is putting its money where its mouth isn't—that is, it's contradicting years of rhetoric about how its ultimate goal with biotech is to wean farmers off agrichemicals. The company has two major money-making GM products on the market: crops engineered to carry the insecticideBacillus thuringiensis, or Bt, which is toxic to certain insects but not to humans; and crops engineered to withstand the herbicide glyphosate, an herbicide Monsanto sells under the brand name Roundup.
The company markets both as solutions to farmers' reliance on toxic chemicals. Bt crops "allow farmers to protect their crops while eliminating or significantly decreasing the amount of pesticides sprayed," Monsanto's website declares; and its Roundup Ready products have" allowed farmers to ... decrease the overall use of herbicides."
Both of these claims have withered as Monsanto's products have come to dominate US farm fields. Insects and weeds have evolved to resist them. Farmers have responded by unleashing a gusher of pesticides—both higher doses of Monsanto's Roundup, and other, more-toxic chemicals as Roundup has lost effectiveness.
Monsanto's lunge for Syngenta and its vast pesticide portfolio signals that the company thinks more of the same is in the offing.
One immediate winner would be the Monsanto's formidable PR department. Battle-tested by years of defending the company from attacks against GMOs and also from the World Health Organization's recent finding that glyphosate is "probably carcinogenic to humans," the department would also find plenty of opportunity to flex its muscles if Syngenta came on board.
All of which would make it ironic if, as some observers have speculated, Monsanto hopes to use the deal as an excuse to move its corporate HQ to Syngenta's home base in Europe, in order to avoid paying US taxes.
The key ingredient for healthy soils and healthy crops is soil organic matter. But it has been neglected in recent decades. How could we have forgotten about it? And what is needed to bring it back in the fields and on political agendas? Insights from the AgriCultures Network.
A farmer prepares vermicompost for field application.
We know that soil health and soil fertility are essential in maintaining plant, animal, and human health, and therefore for food security and food sovereignty. Soil health depends on organic matter (see box below) which contributes to its capacity to retain water and nutrients, and feeds soil life.
Why did we forget about organic matter?
Before the 1940s, organic matter was a key theme at international soil conferences. There exists a decade-old wealth of knowledge about organic matter. But things changed after the Second World War. Organic matter became neglected, and not by accident. The process of artificially producing nitrogen was originally developed for the explosives industry, but then the resulting chemical was also used for fertilizer. The impact on maize yields was so dramatic that researchers and policy makers became convinced that chemical fertilizer could solve global hunger.
With this new emphasis on chemical fertilizers, world renowned researchers working on soil organic matter were systematically neglected. Scientific journals were no longer interested in publishing their research, and they were no longer invited to international conferences. Subsequently, the importance of soil organic matter also dropped off agricultural curricula and from policy, extension and investment agendas.
Under the influence of the economic and political power of the chemical industry (an influence that still exists today), new crop varieties and production methods that required large quantities of fertilizer were promoted. Slowly then, this belief, pushed by industry, narrowed the view of researchers, education, policy makers and extension staff and became the norm. Chemical fertilizers were so much easier to apply a few bags of fertilizers than the bulky organic matter that also demanded mixed farming. But sole addition of chemical fertilizers to soils, without also adding organic matter causes major problems, as also explained by Roland Bunch.
The trend towards simplification, away from mixed farming and specialising in either livestock or crops, gave further currency to this narrow approach to soil fertility management. In the 90s, this combined with other challenges of globalization including an increase in industrial mining, logging and oil production, which led to more pollution and degradation. Agroecological methods for building and maintaining a healthy, living and resilient soil were largely forgotten or made impossible.
The consequences
With the use of chemical fertilizers and new varieties, crop yields first increased in some parts of the world. But now, many farmers are experiencing diminishing returns. They need to apply more and more (expensive) fertilizer each season (see ‘Keeping composting simple’). This is largely due to the loss of soil organic matter and loss of its capacity to retain water and nutrients. Pollution from excess nutrients and eroded soil particles entering waterways are additional long-term consequences of this historical mismanagement.
With the globalisation of our food systems, we are also confronting a growing global imbalance. Nutrients are mined from the soil in one part of the world, and exported in the form of crops to other parts, leading to problems on both sides.
A new agenda for healthy soils
It is estimated that 17% of the land surface has been strongly degraded. So, it is high time that we revive soils with practices that increase organic matter and do not demand ever increasing amounts of non-renewable resources. These practices already exist around the world and we can draw a lot of inspiration from them. Farmers have worked with others to develop successful agroecological strategies using fallows, cover crops, green manures, mulch, and the incorporation of crop residues and compost into their living soils.
To restore our soils, we must overcome a range of obstacles, from local shortages of biomass to lost knowledge and oversimplified systems. We must build on and learn from farmers and their existing agroecological practices. TheInternational Year of Soils should build momentum to provide these practices with further support through policy and research. Then, we can work together with farmers to restore our soils so they are productive for generations to come.
The first time Helianti Hilman visited the indigenous farmers of the West Java town of Garut, she was asked to remove her shoes before entering their fields. Her surprise grew when the farmers quizzed her on her mood – they didn’t want her upsetting the plants.
“That’s when I realised that their approach to agriculture was much more than just growing organic,” says 44-year-old Hilman, an Indonesian entrepreneur and former lawyer. “It was a whole way of life. That’s when my perspective changed.”
That was eight years ago. Hilman’s efforts to protect and promote traditional agricultural practices in Indonesia since then saw her named an Asian social entrepreneur of the year by the Schwab Foundation at the World Economic Forum in March.
The social enterprise that Hilman helped to establish in 2009 works with around 50,000 smallholder farmers across Indonesia. Called Javara (which means champion in Sanskrit) the organisation oversees the marketing and distribution of more than 640 artisanal products, from organically grown vegetables and gluten-free flour to gourmet salt and coconut cooking oil.
According to Indonesia’s national indigenous people’s organisation, Aliansi Masyarakat Adat Nusantara (AMAN), around one fifth of the country’s 250 million people classify as indigenous. With statutory efforts to establish collective rights to customary lands yet to be officially sanctioned, rural communities remain vulnerable to the frequent land grabs made by palm oil producers and other forest users.
Given that most Indonesian farmers live in abject poverty, there is a clear moral and developmental case for supporting them. But there are compelling sustainability reasons too, Hilman insists.
During Indonesia’s “Green Revolution” of the 1970s, farmers were encouraged by the government to adopt commercial agricultural practices. However, many indigenous people avoided this wave of modernity and still use traditional methods, and so-called heritage or heirloom seeds.
“Back in the 1960s in Indonesia, we used to have over 7,000 different rice varieties. People have forgotten this today. They are used to buying just red, white or black rice,” says Hilman. The heritage plants grown by Javara’s network of farmers offer a wide range of distinctive nutritional properties. And with their greater diversity comes greater resilience. Hilman cites rice varieties, for example, that can grow everywhere, from forest shade and swamps to inland lakes and saline coasts.
“This isn’t just for the foodies,” she argues. “These varieties are very relevant for climate change [but] we are losing them before our eyes without even knowing it.”
Her sense of urgency is echoed by theInternational Union of Forest Research Organizations (IUFR), an Austria-based nonprofit group. In a report released in May, the IUFR emphasised the role that indigenous communities can play, both in protecting forests and enhancing food security.
“Working with farmers to combine the best of traditional and formal scientific knowledge offers tremendous potential [and] this contribution needs to be acknowledged and incorporated into management practices and policy,” the report states.
In Indonesia, that is easier said than done. For a start, its indigenous communities often live in remote areas – the country comprises nearly 1,000 permanently settled islands. Years of marginalisation has also left them distrustful of outsiders and unfamiliar with how mainstream markets work.
Hilman’s entry point came by way of the Integrated Pest Management Farmers’ Association, a nonprofit network representing more than 1 million indigenous and smallholder farmers in Indonesia. She was invited by a group of rice growers close to her parents’ home in central Java to help with marketing their produce.
She struck lucky in 2009 when she persuaded Ranch Market, a premium supermarket in Jakarta, to stock two-dozen varieties of the farmers’ rice. Orders from high-end hotels and restaurants quickly followed.
Over time, Javara has sought gradually to overcome the knowledge gaps of its affiliated producer groups through basic management training and production advice. For the large collectives in its network, it also provides assistance with organic certification and credit for the purchase of equipment.
Volume is the biggest sticking point. Indonesia’s indigenous farmers traditionally have small plots and grow mixed crops. The notion of mono-crop production or intensive cultivation is anathema to them. one community even forbids the sale of its rice varieties, permitting only barter instead.
Hilman’s solution has been to take the farmers’ specialty crops and use them to create inventive, value-added products. “A buyer might ask us for a container of turmeric, and we simply don’t have that much,” she explains. “But we have enough turmeric to blend it with heritage rice to create turmeric-infused rice.”
“And we’re not just selling the products,” she adds. “We’re selling the story and benefits behind the products.”
Take the tale of “bee whispering”, for instance. Practitioners of this ancient art herd bees towards particular flowers to influence the final taste of their honey. Clove, cotton and rambutan (a tropical fruit) are just some of the single blossom flavours in Javara’s honey portfolio.
Volume is also an issue on the demand side. Indonesia’s premium domestic market is limited, so four years ago Hilman shifted the organisation’s focus to exports. Javara’s international sales, which include Japan, Korea, the US and 11 European countries, now comprise around 85% of its total revenues.
“All of a sudden, we realised that indigenous products meet the trend in the world market,” says Hilman. “They are low-glycaemic, organic, gluten-free and sustainably produced.”
And they can be enjoyed whatever your mood – or footwear.
Monsanto positions itself as a champion of science and GM supporters tar critics as ‘anti-science’.* But is this accurate? Claire Robinson looks at how scientists who investigate the safety of GM foods are treated.
Alamy/Custom Medical Stock
When Australian scientist Judy Carman decided to carry out an animal feeding study with GM crops, she asked three GMO companies to supply seeds. one company didn’t reply; another wanted the details of her study first.
Monsanto sent her a legal document to sign stating that she would give the company the results of the study before publication. Carman said: ‘We would have been legally bound to do that whether they gave us seeds or not. No sensible scientist would agree to such conditions, and we didn’t.’
Scientists who want to find out if a GM crop is safe to eat or harms the environment need access to seeds of the GM variety as well as the non-GM parent (isogenic) variety it was developed from, grown in the same conditions.
This way, any differences found in an experiment studying the effects of the GM crop and the non-GM control are known to be due to the genetic modification and not to some other factor, such as different growing conditions.
But Monsanto and other GMO companies restrict access to their seeds for independent researchers.1,2 Anyone who buys Monsanto’s patented GM seed has to sign a technology agreement saying they will not use the seeds or crop for research or pass them to anyone else for that purpose.3 Even if permission to carry out research is given, companies typically retain the right to block publication if the results are ‘not flattering’, according to Scientific American.4
In the end, Carman used non-isogenic crops for the control pigs’ diet, noting that GMO companies had claimed, and many government authorities had agreed, that the GM crops used were ‘substantially equivalent’ to non-GM crops. She found toxic effects in the GM-fed pigs – so the GM crops could not be substantially equivalent.5
The French scientist Gilles-Eric Séralini also had difficulty accessing seed for his rat-feeding study with Monsanto’s GM maize NK603.6 No farmer wanted to risk breaching their technology agreement with Monsanto. Eventually a farm school agreed to grow the crops on condition it was not named, out of ‘fear of reprisal’ from Monsanto.7
Food writer Nathanael Johnson has claimed that since 2009 the problem of access to seeds has been ‘largely fixed’, due to research agreements being reached between GMO companies and certain universities.8 But to Carman’s knowledge, these are ‘commercial-in-confidence’ research agreements to make new GMOs, not to test for safety. In any case, we are not permitted to see them to check what conditions are imposed on the researchers.
Scientists under attack
What’s wrong with telling Monsanto about your research in advance? Scientists whose research has questioned the safety of GM crops claim to have suffered attacks on themselves and their studies. They say they fear that giving Monsanto notice of planned research will help attacks to be prepared in advance.
In some cases, pro-GMO scientists have tried to bully journal editors into not publishing the study, or retracting it after it has been published. In the 1990s the editor of The Lancet said he was threatened by a senior member of Britain’s Royal Society that his job would be at risk if he published the research of Arpad Pusztai, a scientist at the Rowett Institute in Scotland.
Pusztai’s research had found toxic effects in rats fed GM potatoes.9 The editor published the paper anyway, but Pusztai was subjected to a campaign of vilification by pro-GMO scientific organizations and individuals in an attempt to discredit him and his research.10 He lost his job, funding and research team, and had a gagging order slapped on him which forbade him to speak about his research.11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16
According to a former Rowett administrator, the campaign to silence Pusztai was set in motion by a phone call from Monsanto to US President Bill Clinton, who called British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who in turn called the Rowett Institute.
A Rowett director said: ‘Tony Blair’s office had been pressured by the Americans, who thought our study would harm the biotechnology industry, and particularly Monsanto.’17A similar smear campaign against a 2001 study that found GMO contamination in native Mexican maize was traced to Bivings Woodell, a PR company working for Monsanto.11, 18
The climate for independent researchers looking at GMO risks has not improved, though Monsanto and other GMO companies are less visible in attack campaigns – and may not need to be involved at all. They have plenty of foot-soldiers at universities and institutes to fight their battles without any apparent involvement on the part of the company, as the following examples of treatment of researchers show.
Gilles-Eric Séralini: In 2012 the French researcher published in Food and Chemical Toxicology a long-term two-year study which found liver and kidney damage in rats fed Monsanto GM maize and tiny amounts of the Roundup herbicide it is engineered to be grown with.
Gilles-Eric Séralini (second from right) and his team. They found liver and kidney damage to rats fed Monsanto’s GM maize.
As soon as the study was published, university-based scientists joined a vicious smear campaign against it.19 After a year of pressure and the appointment of a former Monsanto scientist to the journal’s editorial board, the editor retracted the study.20 The reason he gave was the supposed ‘inconclusive’ nature of some of the results.21
But David Schubert, a professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in California, commented: ‘As a scientist, I can assure you that if this were a valid reason for retracting a publication, a large fraction of the scientific literature would not exist.’22 Séralini’s study was later republished by another journal.6
Many of Séralini’s attackers had conflicts of interest with the GMO industry – but these were not made clear to the public.19 The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) also criticized the study, but it is not independent: over half of EFSA experts have been found to have conflicts of interest with the industries they regulate.23, 24
Judy Carman: After Carman received government funding for a GMO feeding study, she suffered six personal attacks by pro-GMO scientists over a 10-year period. They attacked her through her university, alleging she was lying, bringing the university into disrepute, or defaming them. Carman said: ‘It was clear to me that they wanted me sacked.’
Following the attacks, Carman says she was forced out of two successive university posts. She is fortunate not to need income from a university position, but points out that isn’t true of most scientists: ‘Any scientist in my shoes relying on a university income to eat or pay a mortgage would feel forced to stop investigating GMOs.’
Manuela Malatesta: The Italian researcher found that Monsanto’s GM soy disturbed the functioning of the liver, pancreas and testes of mice.25 ,26 ,27 , 28 After she published her papers, she says she was forced out of her job at the university where she had worked for 10 years, and could not obtain funding to follow up her research.
She commented: ‘Research on GMOs is now taboo. You can’t find money for it… People don’t want to find answers to troubling questions. It’s the result of widespread fear of Monsanto and GMOs in general.’17
Commenting on these cases, Michael Antoniou, a London-based molecular geneticist, says the normal scientific response to worrying findings is to design more experiments to get to the bottom of whether there really is a health concern or environmental impact.
Yet in the area of GM crops and foods, this does not happen. Instead, Antoniou says, ‘the GMO lobby attempts to discredit the study and the scientists who conducted it. It’s despicable and unprecedented in the history of science.’
The corporate university
It’s no surprise that many public scientists and organizations ally themselves with the GMO industry, as they rely heavily on industry funding. GMO companies have representatives on university boards and fund research, buildings and departments.29
Monsanto has donated at least a million dollars to the University of Florida Foundation.30 , 31 Many US universities that do crop research are beholden to Monsanto.32 Some academic scientists own GMO patents and are involved in spin-off companies that develop GM crops.33
‘Research on GMOs is now taboo... You can’t find money for it... It’s the result of widespread fear of Monsanto’
In Britain, the public institute Rothamsted Research counts Monsanto as a collaborator.34 Monsanto reportedly sponsored the Rowett Institute prior to Pusztai’s going public with his GM potato findings.17 , 35 Universities have become businesses and scientists have become entrepreneurs and salespeople.
Sponsorship of public institutions enables companies to steer research resources into areas that profit them. The companies develop patented GM crops in partnership with the institution and the institution generates research that, with its stamp of academic objectivity, can convince regulators of the safety or efficacy of GM crops.
An added bonus for companies is a supply of scientists who are prepared to act as GMO advocates. They are often described only by their public affiliations, even though they and their institutions depend on GMO industry money.36 ,37
Is Monsanto on the side of science? The answer appears to be: ‘Only if it can control and profit from it.’ That runs counter to the spirit of scientific inquiry, which must be free to go wherever the data leads – however inconvenient it may prove to a company’s bottom line.
Claire Robinson is the co-author with two genetic engineers of GMO Myths and Truths, available for free download at earthopensource.org. She is an editor at GMWatch, a public news and information service on genetically modified crops and foods.
Mid-sized farms are getting squeezed out of our food system. And there’s a story behind every single one of those numbers. Here are two stories: one about losing the farm — and one about hanging on and making it pay.
(Music from Josh Woodward and Podington Bear. Thanks for making your stuff available and opting out of the ridiculous U.S. copyright system. You guys rock.)
Traci and Brian Bruckner
Brian, Traci, and Sam Bruckner.
Brian Bruckner grew up on a farm in Nebraska. It had beef cattle, dairy cows, and pigs. They grew corn, soybeans, alfalfa, and had some grazing land for the animals. There was enough going on that if hog prices fell, or it was a bad year for corn, there was something else to carry the family through.
“My parents raised six children on a 400-acre dry-land farm,” he said. “They succeeded at that, you know? But they had no extra cash to help us get started, and we weren’t expecting that.”
Bruckner’s parents were just about ready to retire when he graduated from high school, so he and a brother took over the farm. Things were going pretty well. He got married and settled in. Then he took out a loan to buy a nearby hog farm.
“I was in debt approximately $200,000 at the time, which was an awful lot of money,” Bruckner said.
And things started to go wrong. Bad weather hurt the crops. The pigs kept getting sick. Brian acknowledges that he probably made some bad decisions, but he also had more than his share of bad luck. But the real problem, according to Brian’s wife, Traci Bruckner, was that the bottom dropped out of the hog market.
“What really, really damaged us and made it impossible for us to really survive was the consolidation of the hog market.”
After years of soaring growth, pig prices crashed. At the same time, big companies were buying up slaughterhouses, so there were fewer companies a farmer might sell to. Farmers had to accept whatever price they could get. They were losing money on every pig, and the Bruckners couldn’t afford to lose money very long.
“Those things just snowball on themselves, and it really got tough sledding. It was a stressful point in our lives,” Brian said. Then the bank pulled the plug — it took the hog farm and their house. Brian was working on the farm, and doing construction. Eventually, he and Traci walked away, leaving the family farm to his brother.
“Oh man, that’s a rollercoaster of emotions. There was, when I think back, there’s a lot of things I don’t want to remember because there was a lot of anger, too,” Traci said.
There was anger, but also hope for something better. Brian went to college, then got a job doing groundwater management. After learning from this experience, Traci started doing farm policy work for the Center for Rural Affairs. And she says that government policy stacked the deck against small farmers like them. For one thing, government subsidies give the big farms an advantage over the small, and drive up the price of land. “We live in an area where a majority of the people think they don’t want government interference in their lives at all,” she said. “Yet, the government is subsidizing just about every decision they make.”
And then there’s the matter of consolidation. The government has declined to pursue antitrust actions and break up big companies. It’s hard to do that when food prices are falling. The Obama administration’s line has basically been: “hey, if it’s good for the consumer …”
“I think we should worry about what’s good for rural communities,” Traci said. “The way it leads to the consolidation to agriculture is not healthy for rural communities, and in the end it’s not healthy for consumers, either.”
The Bruckners’ experience has left them with the sense that a farmer just can’t compete in the mass market without the money to grow large, and they’ve been sure to tell as much to their son.
“He grew up on the farm for a little while. He was 5 when we moved to Wayne,” Traci said. “And he’s in 4H, and we have some cows yet, maybe five or six cows that we breed out, little Herefords, and he loves them. He always said he wanted to be a farmer and that’s changed now that he’s growing up, he’s going to be 15 next week. But I’ve always told him, Sam, if you want to farm, you need to think about something highly diversified that allows you to dictate what your market is. You cannot be a John Deere tractor driver, combine driver, and expect to make it, because there’s just no room for someone with no money.”
The thing is, there are a lot of other options besides being a John Deere tractor driver and selling your food at a market price. There are premium markets emerging that give farmers more money and offer a new niche for mid-sized farms.
“I wish I could’ve seen into the future,” Brian said. “If I’d have kept raising hogs the way I was raising them, I would’ve had a market for my hogs through organization such as Niman Ranch. But I guess that’s encouraging to me, that those things are available for farmers who want to do things in that manner and that there’s a market for them and it’s a profitable market as well.”
Mass market farms are getting bigger, and as they do, there will be more people, like the Bruckners, pushed out. The economics work like an implacable ratchet. But at the same time, the demand for premium products, like Niman Ranch pork and organic grain, is expanding. And that could be the force that reinvigorates mid-sized farms and rural communities.
Gabe Brown
A cow on Brown’s ranch.
Rancher Gabe Brown has figured this out — he’s proof that there really is a place for mid-sized farms in modern America. He lives near Bismarck, N.D.
“Well, I was actually born and raised in town, in the city of Bismarck,” he told me. “At a young age, in junior high school I started taking vocational agriculture, got interested in agriculture, started working on different farms and ranches, worked at the dairy barn at the university and put myself through college. Then I was fortunate enough that I married a farmer’s daughter and he didn’t have any sons, so I was able to get into ranching that way.”
But Brown almost lost the family ranch — things just weren’t working out financially. The price of cattle kept falling, and his costs kept rising — especially the cost of the things he used to help his crops grow.
“We were having to use more fertilizers, more pesticides, but our costs were ever increasing, our margins were being squeezed tighter and tighter. Then in our particular case, what happened is the years 1995 through 1998, we went through a period of three years of hail and a year of drought, which economically more or less just devastated us. And the banker, although I’m grateful he didn’t foreclose on me, he wasn’t going to loan me any more money.”
Around this time Gabe Brown started learning about the holistic grazing guru, Allan Savory, and no-till farming master Duane Beck. Brown saw common thread between these and various other thinkers. They were all learning to farm in ways that borrowed tricks from functional ecosystems. So he stopped disturbing the soil with a plow, and made sure that the ground was always covered with some grassy armor, locked in place with its roots.
“You know, the soil is alive,” Brown said. “It’s just that our management, over the last 60, 70 years, has turned it into a sterile petri dish, more or less. All I’m trying to do is mimic nature. I’m not doing anything that hasn’t been done for eons of time.”
Because Brown doesn’t buy fertilizer or pesticides, his costs are low — it only costs him $1.44 to produce a bushel of corn. And how does that compare to the industry standard?
“Nationally, the cost to produce a bushel of corn is close to $5 a bushel,” Brown said.
That’s how much it costs to grow the stuff. But the price of corn is now around $4 a bushel. Which means most farmers are losing money on every kernel they sell. Not Brown:
“With all of our costs in there, from land-rent to seed to the seeding to the harvesting to the trucking it to market, we had a $1.44 cost per bushel for corn,” he said. “Same on the livestock, this past year it cost us $1,241 to take a beef animal from birth until harvest. Well, that’s considerably lower cost than they can do at any of the feedlots in the current conventional model. And then in turn, it’s our belief that as we focused on the soil resource, you know the soil is going to have — a healthy soil ecosystem will have more nutrients moving throughout it. Those nutrients will be in the plants, be eaten by the animals. We will have more nutrient-dense products. Now we’re selling our products directly to the consumer. And we’re getting paid at premium for them.”
Brown’s food is between 30 and 50 percent more expensive than mass market products. And I had to ask him, if his cost of production is really so low, why sell it at a premium?
“It’s supply and demand,” he said. “Some may say, Oh, but Gabe, you should mark your product down and sell it for less. I’ve spent the last 20 years building the health of my soil so I could have this premium product — I think I deserve a premium price. The market will tell me, and dictate what price I can get. For instance right now locally you can buy a dozen eggs for $1.20 to $1.50 a dozen. My son sells his for $4 a dozen and people stand up an hour before farmers market opens to buy those eggs. That tells us that there’s a real demand.”
To capture a greater share of the food dollar and sell directly to his customers, Brown isn’t just a farmer: He’s a shop keeper, a trucker, and a marketer. And he spends a lot of time talking up his products, and people are eager to hear about them. He says he turns down 10 speaking offers for every one he accepts. He spends the entire winter flying to gigs — while his wife and son take care of the ranch.
Brown’s figured out a working formula and been richly rewarded for it. But the biggest reward, he says, is in making a difference and seeing people come around. People like his in-laws, who used to be pretty skeptical of his methods.
“Well, unfortunately, my in-laws retired there when we bought the ranch and unfortunately they passed away since then,” Brown said. “But I’ll tell you this story. When I went to no-till, my father-in-law was not at all happy with his son-in-law, and he more or less told me that. You know, but he was kind about it. But in 2003, the year before he passed away, he asked my wife to get the camera and take a picture of him and his grandson, my son, standing in one of our corn fields, because he was so proud. He had never raised a crop like that himself. So, he knew then that I was on the right path.”
There are two important innovations that Gabe Brown has made. First there’s the technical innovation: figuring out this no-till holistic grazing system. The second is a business innovation: figuring out how to appeal directly to final customers and convince them that his product is worth a premium. Now, the thing about technical innovations is that they can always be scaled up. Lots of other farms, and bigger farms, can do the same thing. So this won’t be a panacea for mid-sized farms forever.
But his second innovation, the business innovation, could be the answer. There’s little future for mid-sized farms in the mass market. But, as a farmer, if you can convince eaters that you do an especially good job as a steward of the land and of their health, they’ll be happy to pay you for that.
I met Chris at a rock show, and after three drinks and about twice as many not-too-subtle glances, we introduced ourselves.
“What do you do?”
“I’m a writer. What do you do?”
“I’m a farmer.”
“… What?”
We saw each other sporadically over the next three months or so, always in Seattle, and the evening usually ended with him slipping some organic vegetables from his farmers market stock of the week in my purse. We talked a fair amount about his farm, roughly two hours from the city, but it always felt like it existed in a sort of alternate universe that didn’t have anything to do with the one in which we drank beers at pool bars. Which was ironic, because my friends exclusively identified him as “The Farmer.”
There’s a lot of romanticizing that happens around the idea of being a farmer — hell, enough so that betrothed couples across the country are banging down the barn door to get married on mist-laden agrarian dreamscapes. But after The Farmer and I settled on being Just Friends, I had the chance to ask him about what romance on the farm actually looks like — over margaritas in the city, of course.
“It’s not easy,” he said. “Because here’s the deal: It’s this fantasy job — being a steward of the land and being a farmer is the most honest job you could ever imagine. And that’s a super-romantic thing for a partner, which is great because people are generally excited about dating me. But when the shit hits the fan and I’m working 70-80 hours a week, all the time, and I’m not around, it gets hard.”
I set out to get a real idea of whether farmers encounter more or different hardships in the dating game than your average single-and-searching, and talked with six farmers of different ages, sexual orientations, and farming backgrounds and approaches across the country. I’ve collected excerpts from those very candid conversations and shared them below, and hope that together they form an honest picture of what it’s really like to look for love as a farmer.
Can you tell me a little bit about your experiences trying to meet women in the area around your farm?
I guess it’s ironic because I’m a local producer and always stressing local, but as far as females go I usually, uh, have to import from other places or meet girls at other places. I just haven’t really interacted with a girl my age in this community, well, really at all — but especially that I felt really compatible with.
Really, for my social life, period, I’m in Memphis and New Orleans a lot — that’s kind of where I get that outlet. When I’m on the farm, that’s my oasis to come and be alone and be away from all of the, ah, evil influences of the outside world. I can really focus and not be hungover all the time.
How did you meet your current girlfriend?
When I graduated [from college] I found a job at a ranch in Montana where she happened to be working. We hit it off pretty immediately and were kind of together that summer. And when we left, we just tried to make it work and it’s been kind of a battle, being so far apart when she was finishing school, but now she’s back in the South, which is great.
Is it important to you that someone who you’re dating has an interest in farming?
My farm and my family land here means a lot to me, obviously, I decided to come back to it. I grew up here and I love this place and there’s a really powerful connection that I have with it. [My girlfriend] understands that, and she really loves the farm.
When you’ve been out in Memphis or New Orleans with friends, what kind of reactions have you gotten from women when you tell them that you’re a farmer?
For some crazy reason, being a farmer — I guess from publications like yours and others — it’s become kind of in vogue recently. In your mid-20s, if you’re doing something offbeat it’s considered really cool, and I always get positive reactions from the opposite sex for that type of thing. But I think that the older you get, the financial reality of everything starts to set in, and what becomes more important is your ability to make a living and support yourself.
So if I can prove that I can do that through doing something really innovative like this, that would be great. Otherwise, I’m just another idealistic kid that thinks farming is cool. But at the same time I’m not, really, because I grew up in a family with a farming background, so I have a pragmatic outlook on a lot of this stuff. I think that’s lacking from a kid who grows up in the suburbs and reads a couple books by Joel Salatin and gets a huge boner and wants to move out to the woods.
I — ha, this is such a typical answer. I read Walden by Henry David Thoreau, and I thought, yes, I want to learn how to be self-sufficient, I want to learn to grow my own food. And I started learning a little bit about our country’s food system and the global food system, and I thought, “Oh, this is really messed up — I want to see what I can do to change the way things operate now.” So [at 18] I started volunteering at a farm, and after that I got a farm job and I really liked it.
And since you moved out to the farm that you’re working on now, have you tried to venture out into the dating scene at all?
By the end of my second week here, I was going crazy and feeling really lonely. I really needed to be around people my age — I needed someone to talk to and to make some new friends. So I made an OKCupid profile, and I guess that’s how that started.
What would you say has been your best OKCupid experience since moving out there?
There was a person who lives about an hour’s drive away from me. And I drove out to meet them one night and they seemed really great, we got along really well. We went for a walk in the woods, they cut their own hair, I cut my own hair.
On the date?
No, sorry, we talked about how we each cut our own hair. We didn’t cut each other’s hair on the date. So we hung out and talked, and that was really nice. And since then I’ve seen them a few more times.
And is this person also a farmer?
No. I have not met anyone else who is a farmer yet.
What was your worst OKCupid experience so far?
Probably my worst experience would be with the person who I had the best OKCupid experience with.
The person who also cut their own hair?
Uh-huh. Because I invited them back to the farm without considering the fact that they are vegan — which is cool, I’m also vegan, so we had that in common. And on our farm is a confined feedlot dairy operation, which I’m not directly involved and which upsets me, and it also really upset my date. And so that was a bad experience.
What was their reaction? What did they do?
They were pretty horrified, and they expressed anger that somebody would keep cows in that situation. They got me to question my own complicity in working with the same organization that, as a side project, also runs this CAFO. Yeah, they were upset.
Do you feel like you were able to have any kind of productive conversation with them about the realities of farming?
Um, definitely. We talked about how destructive and awful agriculture can be.
And were they eager to go back to the farm after that experience?
No, no definitely not. They haven’t been back to the farm since, and actually we haven’t hung out since then.
Before you got married, did you ever date another rancher?
Yes. We went to college together, he was also in the school of ag. And weirdly enough, he was the first cowboy I had ever dated. Growing up here, I didn’t ever date any ranch or agriculture-type kids. It seemed like they were all just friends, you know?
When you first got together, how did you bond over farming?
I didn’t have to explain how to ride a horse or how to sort cows — he already knew how to do everything, so that part was really fun. It was easy to talk to him about the problems with ranching. And I think it was nice for him to date someone who got it as well.
But at the same time, breaking up because we each wanted to be on our own ranch was extremely traumatic at the time. After we broke up, I said, “I’m never dating another rancher again!”
Why was it important for you to stay on and involved in your own family ranch?
He really, really wanted me to [move to his ranch]. I just knew that there was no way. I love traveling and all that, but this is my home, you know? And my dad’s one of my favorite people, so I never wanted to move too far away from him. [My neighbor] and I have talked about this extensively while we were growing up. We’ve always been very concerned with the issue of: How can we get back here [to our ranches], and how can we have men folk come with us?
Does your husband have a farming background?
No, he fully is what we call a town kid. He’s a directional driller for natural gas.
Does he ever help out on the ranch when he’s off work?
Poor guy, he gets recruited for lots of stuff. He just got his own horse last year and he never had one before. He’s really embraced it and been awesome about it. He’s actually like one of our No. 1 vaccinators now, for cows.
Last year was pretty fun because he got to pull his first calf, and he was kind of grossed out — it was all slimy. But he did really well. He’s learning new stuff every year, and he asks a lot of questions and wants to be involved, so that helps a lot.
What has been your best dating experience as a farmer?
[In Connecticut,] I ended up going on a lot of dates and then started dating this girl who was home from medical school for the summer and staying with her parents. That was a short but nice piece of luck, basically.
So she wasn’t a farmer at all?
No, but she actually got pretty into it, and would come and help us weed vegetables and stuff. She was into it enough to not be horrified that I was taking her to a trailer, literally, parked next to a river.
In terms of future relationships, and looking for long-term relationships, is it important for you to date another farmer?
On principle, not really. But I’m going to a big conference at the end of the month, and it always feels like a meat market in some ways. You meet a lot of awesome people regardless, but there are a certain percentage of us who go in kind of with the hope of meeting somebody new who you could eventually see farming with and/or having a relationship with.
I feel like there should be a Farmers only for young people where it’ll match you not only on all of the normal things, but also on whether you have land or need land, or want to stay in this geographical area or would move anywhere — that kind of stuff. It’s a bit like the Oregon Trail, mail-order bride days, but if you’re going to limit your dating pool [so much], why limit it geographically also?
Grayson, 26, Ohio: Fourth-generation corn and soybean farmer
Have you dated girls who were not involved in farming at all?
In high school, yes, I did. It was … they were fun. once we were getting ready to start harvesting for beans, and we ran all day until eight, nine o’clock that evening. I called [my girlfriend at the time], and she asked if we were done, and I said yeah, and she was like, “Oh great, we can hang out tomorrow.” But we were done for the day. And she said, when are you gonna be done, and I said, “Uh, maybe Thanksgiving, it’s September right now.” So, uh, that one was not gonna work out.
Was she upset about that?
It just kind of caught her off guard.
Where is your farm?
I live just a mile outside of town. I have a house and 40 acres where I live.
And how is the social scene and dating scene around the town?
There is none, I guess? Yeah, I wouldn’t consider going to town and going to, like, Applebee’s and finding the girl of your dreams there. If there was somebody [in town] I didn’t already know, it’d be a surprise — especially if they were hot.
How did your parents meet?
They met at 4-H camp. They were young, maybe 9 or 10?
Do you think it’s important to them that you be with someone who has a farming background?
It [doesn’t have to be] someone who’s gonna put gloves on and Carhartts and be butch and work with you, but you just find the balance there.
Is it important to you to date somebody with an interest in and understanding of farming?
It’s a good question! I think an understanding, definitely … of why I’m committed to growing healthy food for my community, why I have that drive, and [also] the environmental concerns around organic farming and replacing chemical-industrial agriculture. That understanding is kind of a basis, a non-negotiable. I would be working late and tired and smelly all the time, and so [someone would] have to understand why I’m doing this crazy thing.
Have you ever had any standout moment where you realized, “OK, this is my life now, and this is how this lifestyle is going to affect my dating life?”
No, I don’t think I ever thought about it. I don’t know — I mean, I should have. I’m 34 now, turning 35, and I’m thinking: “Oh shit, I wanted to have a kid, do the family thing.” And now it’s almost too late – I only have a couple more years of valid biological fertility, you know, and now I’m really realizing that wow, I wish I had figured this out 10 years ago.
So is this something that you’ve been thinking about more recently than you were, say, at the beginning of your farming career?
Totally, absolutely. Because I want to have a family farm, and I want to have a family on a farm, and I want to raise a kid or two on the farm. And I’ve had that dream, but I don’t think that I was really proactive enough at finding the right person back then … in [my] early years of farming.
And has that ever made you reconsider farming?
You know, I’ve never considered not farming. Since I made that commitment to myself, I just love it so much, and it’s just so satisfying on so many levels and I just love the work. But I’m getting to the point where maybe I’m going to give up the dream of having a family – it’s difficult. But I really don’t think I could be that satisfied with just a little garden. I just love farming.
Welcome to our series on the changing face of agriculture: Farm Size Matters! Over the next month, we hope to give you a comprehensive picture of the state of American farms today: all of the fun (what it’s like to date in farm country), failure (how, despite all efforts, a farmer can lose his farm), fame (an interview with Willie Nelson), and facts (a fascinating ag subsidies explainer).
So, why does farm size matter? As the total number of farms goes down, the number of big* farms is going up — and this shift hurts rural America. According to an analysis by Food and Water Watch: “Communities with more medium- and smaller-sized farms have more shared prosperity, including higher incomes, lower unemployment, and lower income inequality, than communities with larger farms tied to often-distant agribusinesses.”
In strictly economic terms, U.S. agriculture has followed a pretty unsurprising path. Better technology leads to greater crop yields, which in turn mean lower prices and larger farms. Our economic system distorts competition and fosters consolidation — and then we act surprised when farmers follow the rules of the game in order to survive.
The editors of the fantastic book Food and the Mid-Level Farm show how that has paved the road toward an increasingly polarized farm-scape:
If current trends continue, the structure of U.S. agriculture will encompass a small number of immense corporate-linked or owned farms, and large numbers of small direct-market operations. The former system of production will produce the vast majority of the food most Americans will consume.
My translation? Small farmers rule, but if we really want to change our agricultural system, we have to look beyond the farmers market.
And that’s what we plan to do in this series. During this first week, we’ll talk to commodity farmers, explore the effects of farm loss, and tell bad jokes to Willie Nelson. Next week, we’ll take a deep look at how politics have affected farming — from ag subsidies to racism in loan policy to marijuana regulations. After that, we’re exploring our food infrastructure and talking to theoft-ignored, but very important, middlemen. And finally, in week four, we’re reporting on the root of all evil, as well as the root of all root vegetable operations: money.
Once it’s all over, we hope that you, the oh-so-important reader and eater, not only understand why farm size matters, but also what you can do to make sure those farmers in the middle don’t disappear.
*A note on the numbers in the video: Between 1997 and 2012, the smallest category lost 107,732 farms (of 1,699,536 total in ’97), the middle category lost 83,611 (of 445,932), and the largest category gained 84,770 (to 1997’s 70,508). We’re assuming that most of the large category gains came from the middle, and that the middle gained quite a few farms from the smallest category as $50,000 in gross annual sales is a very low benchmark (gross sales don’t take into account operating costs like seeds and equipment, rent or mortgage payments, labor, etc.). Just because a farm jumped from the middle category to the largest category does not make it a factory farm — it could still have trouble competing with mega-farms. And, meanwhile, a farmers-market-scale farm could easily gross more than $50,000 a year. The methodology may not be perfect, but overall, both gross annual sales numbers and cropland acreage stats show a hollowing out of agriculture of the middle.
America has too much corn. Year after year of farmers responding to incentives to grow more of America’s largest crop has resulted in a glut of the commodity. With high supply and slackening demand, prices have fallen dramatically since the corn gold rush sparked in 2007. But will low prices actually encourage farmers to plant a greater variety of crops or put land aside for conservation?
Corn planting is down by 1.4 million acres from 2014 and a good chunk of that was likely replaced by soy, which is up by 934,000 acres, according to projections from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s recent prospective plantings report. That leaves nearly half a million acres of former corn land unaccounted for.
Bringing in new crops can help protect against market swings. “There is an economic benefit in diversification,” said Iowa State University agricultural economics professor Bruce Babcock.
Tim Slepicka, who farms 460 acres of corn and soybeans near Maple Park, Ill., is putting that assertion into action. After the experimental addition of one acre of pumpkins earned a $5,000 gross, he’s now including more acres of pumpkins in his traditional rotation, which also includes sweet corn and cucumbers.
Mid-sized operations like Slepicka’s do encounter headwinds in diversifying. The commodity crop industry has a laser focus on helping corn and soybean farmers efficiently and consistently maximize yields while identifying markets. “It’s absolutely perfected to a science. There are apps for your phone that compares price at market with input price,” Slepicka said. And when it comes time to sell those crops, “it’s like a drop of water in the Mississippi — you put it out there and it’s gone,” he said.
That’s just not the case with crops like pumpkins. “If I scale up my pumpkins to 40 acres,” Slepicka said, “what if there’s a glut in the pumpkin market and there’s not the price support programs there like there are for corn and soybeans?”
So are mid-size farmers willing to take on the risk that comes with a potential payout? Anecdotally, National Sustainable Agriculture Policy Director Ferd Hoefner said that mid-sized farms tend to be more diverse than mega farms, though he cautioned there’s little data to back it up.
“In order to make it work at mid size, and you don’t have the capacity to compete at scale. You have to have some sort of market niche, be it diversity, organic, or something else,” Hoefner pointed out.
“It’s a truism of sustainable agriculture that diversification is an economic and environmental benefit,” he added.
Considering the land-use change that occurred across the Corn Belt during the last seven years, any element of added diversity could qualify as a good thing.
“If you want to look at habitat loss, you have to look at the 12 million acres we’ve pulled out of the Conservation Reserve Program,” said Scott Irwin, University of Illinois professor of agriculture and consumer economics.
Starting in 2007, conservation payments from Uncle Sam couldn’t compete with high prices for corn and soy that made even marginal land look attractive to farmers riding commodity agriculture’s bruising boom/bust cycle. The increased demand for grains — driven by corn ethanol mandates and global meat consumption — resulted in a swift and dramatic land conversion as farmers exited CRP. The environmental consequences range from increased water pollution to soil erosion to a significant release of stored carbon. Wildlife and biodiversity in particular have suffered across the Corn Belt from converting varied fauna and topography into commodity row crops.
“High crop prices were behind it, and during this time we saw a significant expansion of cropland into natural ecosystems and lands that hadn’t been previously cropped,” University of Wisconsin researcher Tyler Clark said of his recent research into the issue. (The ethanol industry disputes this despite corroborating research and on the ground accounts.)
So if high prices lead to an environmental catastrophe, is the opposite true? Is there an environmental benefit with low corn prices?
“We certainly expect a slower corn price to expect less land conversion, so in that sense, there could be a payoff for the environment,” said Clark.
OK — would the benefit be quantifiable?
“At this point, I wouldn’t want to make that argument because even with 89.2 million corn acres for this year, before the recent boom hit, corn acres were running between 78-81 million acres planted,” University of Illinois’ Irwin said.
So while the slowdown in conversion is good, and we’re headed in the right direction, there is little evidence to suggest even a modest impact on the environment from low prices alone. There are, however, potentially hundreds of thousands of marginal acres that were once in CRP that were planted during the boom, but are now sitting idle because they aren’t as productive. What about these orphan acres that aren’t in a conservation program, but aren’t being farmed either?
“It will just go into pasture or be unfarmed. And that would be beneficial from a habitat standpoint,” said Irwin.
How do we resolve this tension between price and the environment? When prices go up again, those orphan acres will be the first to see the plow. Targeting federal policies seems to be the first order of business.
“If you focus on the grasslands in the upper Midwest, you focus on reforming the crop insurance program,” said ISU’s Babcock.
And when it comes to diversifying farms, a key improvement was added into the latest farm bill. As Grist’s science editor Amelia Urry wrote on Monday, “Now diversified, mixed-crop farms can insure their whole operation without the hassle of buying insurance for a bunch of different crops and livestock separately.”
NSAC’s Hoefner thinks whole farm insurance will especially benefit mid-sized farm operations. Roughly 1,000 farms have enrolled in the program’s first year. “Our hope is that the highly diversified mid-scale operations continue to enroll. Smaller farms have better options through the Farm Service Association, but the next tier of diversified operations that may grow big commodities but also have vegetables and livestock will really benefit.”
Mike Blaalid of the conservation nonprofit Pheasants Forever believes tweaking CRP to make it more viable as a long-term slice of an operation is a good path forward. By allowing managed haying and grazing of conservation land, farmers could earn enough money to make plowing it up unattractive and thus keeping it intact past current 10-year contracts.
“Conservation does pay. You can make money doing good things on the land and make money from farming,” Blaalid said.
Others do it because it’s the right thing to do. “My dad never wanted to plant fencerow to fencerow. We have CRP land but we didn’t take anything out of the program because the land is marginal with trees and wouldn’t make much dent in the bottom line. I’d rather have the trees and grass then the short-term payout,” Slepicka said.
Some basic economic forces are driving mid-sized farms out of existence. First, food prices keep falling. “Ever since World War II, agricultural commodities have trended steadily down,” agricultural economist Otto Doering told me. We are on a technology treadmill: Farmers get a new tech (like hybrid seeds), increase productivity, and make money. But then all the farmers get it, they all produce more, and prices drop, Doering said. Those new technologies cost money, so farm costs go up while food prices fall, leaving farmers with smaller and smaller profit from every bushel they harvest.
Farmers can either buy land and get bigger, drop out, or get an off-farm job to supplement their income. Forty years ago, when Doering came to Purdue University, 800 to 1,000 acres could give a farmer in Indiana a good middle-class income. Now, it takes 2,000 to 3,000 acres to support a commodity farmer, he said.
You can spin this positively: Technology is making farmers better, and allowing them to grow the same food at much lower prices — in the same way we celebrate Moore’s Law or the falling price of solar panels, there’s a lot of good in this. But it also means that people are pushed out of farming, especially in periods of crisis. And that’s often incredibly painful.
Harvest Public Media has given us permission to republish this pieceby Amy Mayer about the great farm crisis of the 1980s. When I heard it, I wanted to share it here as a reminder that there is a human cost to change. It’s a powerful thing to listen to Mark Kenney’s voice — even though he’s not giving specific details — and realize that years later it’s still hard for him to even mention that period without choking up. (See also Liz Core’s interview with Kenney here.)
The fifth generation to run his family farm, Mark Kenney says the ’80s farm crisis taught him lessons for today.Amy Mayer/Harvest Public Media
This post is part of My Farm Roots, Harvest Public Media’s series chronicling Americans’ connection to the land. Click here to explore more My Farm Roots stories and to share your own.
I met Mark Kenney on his family’s farm in Nevada, Iowa, when I was working on a story about farmer taxes. He turned out to be perfect for that — a farmer with a keen interest in spreadsheets.
Kenney and his family lived through the farm crisis of the 1980s, when the bottom dropped out of the U.S. economy and collapsing global food markets forced many farmers out of business. He surprised me, though, when he started describing how lucky he was to grow up during a notoriously tough time to be a farmer — and became choked up by the memories.
“At the time, it didn’t feel like a whole lot of fun. The ’80s for farmers in Iowa and the Midwest and throughout the country were not looked upon as, ‘Jeez those were great times,’” Kenney said. “But they also taught us a lot of lessons.”
His family’s farm, run by Kenney’s father and grandfather, survived, but he watched with them as neighbors lost their farms.
“A lot of good farmers went out of business and that’s tough to see,” Kenney said, “In some cases through no fault of their own. It’s just — caught up in a bad economic time.”
Now a farmer himself, he knows the extraordinary effort it takes to keep a farm running. And that’s in the good times.
“I’m even more thankful for my grandparents, my parents, my uncle because of the hard work they put in during those times,” Kenney said. “[They] gave us the opportunity to stay on the farm and for me to make my livelihood from the farm, too.”
As the farm crisis spiraled out of control and farmers all over the country struggled to stay afloat, it was hard for many to imagine a future on the farm.
“Commodity prices were depressed, land values kept falling, and it didn’t seem like there was a whole lot of reason to be optimistic,” Kenney said. That left many of his generation uninterested in farming.
“Becoming a farmer wasn’t cool,” Kenney said.
Even though he wanted to farm, he saw clearly the need to have a variety of skills. His background includes working at a company that financed agricultural equipment and earning a master’s degree in agricultural economics before returning to be the fifth generation to farm his family’s land, with his father and his brother-in-law. (Kenney’s niche on the farm, he said, is spreadsheets and financials.)
Talking about the 1980s is emotional for Kenney, but he said lessons learned as a young boy still stay with him today. The crisis fostered in him an appreciation for what he has.
“I’m thankful for it because I kind of know, don’t forget that those times could come again,” he said.
And the hard times also demonstrated to Midwestern farmers their intractable place in a global market.
“They taught us about world trade, they taught us about exchange rates, they taught us about interest rates, they taught us about inflation,” Kenney said. “Things that farmers before then may have been aware of, but they didn’t realize that what happens on the world stage could put me out of business.”
Now he uses a smartphone every day to check the markets.
Nearly every industrialized nation on Earth subsidizes agriculture to some extent. It’s a way to make sure production stays high, and prices stay low. It’s just a matter of figuring out how to make it work — and that’s where things get tricky.
Right now in the U.S., we subsidize certain crops pretty heavily. These are things that can be shipped and stored easily, and traded in international commodity markets.
But because of the way we manage our subsidies, we end up with A LOT of corn. In 2010, U.S. farmers produced 32 percent of the world’s corn supply on 84 million acres of farmland, raking in a cool $63.9 billion.
Most of that corn goes to non-“food” sources — either to feed livestock or to feed our cars, in the form of ethanol.
It’s hard to say how good any of this is for our health, our economy, or the climate. So why do we spend so many taxpayer dollars on corn and not, say, organic brussels sprouts? And where do those subsidies come from anyway? To find out, we’ll have to start at the beginning …
Once upon a time, in a land far away (well, in lots of places, but for our purposes let’s call it the early 20th century and here in the US of A), farms were having a hard time.
That’s sort of just what farms do: Sometimes they have very good years, other times they have very bad ones, and there’s not a lot of room between the two. Economists call it the “Farm Problem” — you have inelastic demand (you need to eat how much you need to eat) faced with an inelastic supply (you grow how much you grow).
Let’s say you, like so many American farmers, grow corn. (Why wouldn’t you? It’s a sturdy crop with a high yield after all.)
During the good years, you can grow A LOT of corn … but since everyone else is doing the same, there is so much of it on the market that the price crashes and you might have to sell your crop at a loss.
And during the bad years, you might struggle to grow much at all … so while the price goes up, you don’t have a lot to sell.
The early 1800s brought boom times for U.S. farms: Pioneers moving west were snatching up new farmland and growing so much corn they hardly knew what to do with it. For one thing, they made whiskey — and lots of it — because it added value to cheap corn, and it was easy to transport and store. As a result, the average American man in the 1820s drank FIVE GALLONS of hard liquor a year (compared to less than a gallon today) with the attendant health and social problems you might expect. Meanwhile, farmers were over-planting the land they had, setting the stage for bad times to come.
Sure enough, those times came in the 1930s. Farm production had spiked in the previous decade, as American farms ramped up to feed war-ravaged Europe. The resulting grain glut drove the price of food so low that it was basically worthless. Plus, thanks to the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, so many Americans were out of work that they couldn’t afford even the dirt-cheap food available.
To even out these kinds of wild ups and downs, the federal government decided to do something: Enter subsidies.
In an attempt to rebuild the economy in the wake of the Great Depression, the government convinced farmers to leave some of their land unplanted (“paid-land diversion”) often by supporting a set minimum price that they would expect to earn from it (“minimum price supports”).
But what began as a temporary stimulus measure gradually became into something much more permanent and unwieldy. Skip ahead through several decades of back-and-forth tinkering with the policy (see: “target prices,” “price floors,” “short crop,” “deficiency payments”) to the mid-90s, when we introduced something called “direct payments.”
That’s, uh, pretty much what it sounds like: Paying money. Directly. To farmers.
These payments were given out to certain commodity farmers, based on the historic records of what their land could produce. They were paid out rain or shine, whether prices were high or low.
Sometimes called “freedom to farm” payments, these were supposed to be a temporary measure to wean farmers off of subsidies, while letting them grow a handful of commodity crops other than corn.
But what started out as an attempt to lessen the government’s influence on farming ended up strengthening it when prices dropped in the following years. By 2014, the U.S. was on target to spend $972.9 billion on food and farm programs over the next decade.
And while the majority of that goes to nutritional programs (food stamps) and some of it goes to land conservation measures — a LOT of it ends up as, you guessed it, corn.
In 2014, after much squabbling, Congress approved a new farm bill, more than two years after they were scheduled to. The main emphasis of the federal farm policy is now on subsidized “crop insurance.”
This sounds promising at first — “insurance” should come with a focus on minimizing risk, right?
But actually, these insurance plans largely help guarantee that farmers can sell their crop above a certain price (Price Loss Coverage) or make a certain amount of revenue (Agricultural Risk Coverage), and do little to encourage, say, better drought-planning measures or a more diverse spread of crops.
And with the federal government spending over $5 billion a year to subsidize these insurance premiums, all that corn (and soy and wheat) doesn’t come cheap.
The new farm bill does have some solid wins for sustainable food. Now diversified, mixed-crop farms can insure their whole operation without the hassle of buying insurance for a bunch of different crops and livestock separately. Organic farmers can also insure their crops at their actual value — which is just peachy, since organic peaches are worth a good deal more than their conventional brethren.
Since 1995, 75 percent of federal subsidies have gone to 10 percent of farms, the same consolidated group of commodity crop growers who will continue to eat up a disproportionate share of the subsidy pie under the new system, too.
These payments fund a massive industrialized food system that takes its toll on our land and water, while our diets are full of all that extra corn, from our corn-fed burgers to our Halloween candy — and so are our cars.
Now picture the world we could live in if we subsidized the food that actually feeds people, and feeds local economies all the while. Just think! We could save money on healthcare and spend it paying for things we actually want, like well-managed land, cleaner water, a diversified localized economy, and some fresh, organic sweet corn.
