Boiled Down to Size

by Paul Hunter

Scale in farming, the size at which a farm can be successful, boils down to

three interrelated issues: access, control, and lifestyle. At the

industrial scale, the only people who can farm are those who have access to

the capital necessary to secure suitable land, equipment and inputs. At

such a scale there is no way a young person can get access to these

necessities unless he or she is already wealthy or at the minimum

well-connected, or is born into a farming family that will give the young

person a substantial hand. Why otherwise take a chance offering good

tillable land to a nobody? Let him buy marginal acres. And with the

encroachment of cities and suburbs onto the farming landscape, the price of

land is being driven out of reach of anyone who hopes to make a living from

what might be grown there.

The related issue of control challenges the independence of traditional

farming in America. Even if one had a line of credit, and thus could afford

access to land, equipment and inputs, there are invisible partners dictating

what is grown, when and where. The half-dozen biggest players in the world

food markets (which include MacDonald’s, Walmart, Kroger and Safeway in the

United States, and Carrefour and Tesco abroad) essentially dictate prices

and quotas in their contracts for most food staples, and keep those prices

artificially low, since most of their profit occurs elsewhere. For example,

truckers shipping potatoes make twice as much per pound as the farmer who

grows them, and the wholesaler and retailer each make three to four times

the farmer’s profit. Not to mention the bonus reaped by the processor of

potato chips and french fries. The U.S. Department of Agriculture provides

another level of official control, with its price supports and set-asides

and network of regulations, which some would claim farmers long ago brought

on themselves by being entirely too independent.

The third issue, lifestyle, should not be confused with any of the

decorative arts. The farmer at the industrial scale essentially machines

the land, and manages all the imputs with equipment designed to minimize

traditional farm labor as much as possible. Why? Because those unruly

hired workers might demand a larger share of the profit, and with a ripening

crop to be picked, could potentially hold the farmer hostage. Never mind

that this has rarely happened. But we might ask is this the way farming

has to be, or is it just a deadend we have somehow been led into by

corporate players who need farmers to work on ever narrower margins, fed by

the specious praise of their “efficiency”?

Let us look back through these three issues, and consider the alternatives.

If the acres and ambitions are kept deliberately small, they can be worked

without expensive large equipment and inputs. And at a smaller scale, with

more traditional equipment, many more young farmers can find the wherewithal

to get started. Of course this is assuming a different market for his

produce-say a CSA or farmer’s market, arrangement with a restaurant, or some

other local combination of alternatives that allow the farmer to keep most

of the profit from what he grows, and avoid the big-box retail track

altogether.

By implication we have already touched on the second issue, control.

Working agreements that give the farmer little or no say-so in what he

grows, and have a take-it-or-leave-it price as the bottom line, effectively

remove his independence and freedom of choice. As do large-scale bank

mortgages and equipment loans. If the farmer wants to work for himself, and

not these larger corporate partners, he needs to keep his operation modest.

Repairing used equipment, and even employing animal power for field work,

allow for an independence which is at the heart of what we conjure when we

refer to the family farm.

Finally, returning to lifestyle, we come to pleasure in the task, or why do

it at all. Farming at the industrial scale can be oblivious about chemical

inputs, runoff, and other unintended side-effects, and the work itself can

be more than a little removed from the nurturing that lies at the heart of

farming’s impulse. Days spent in the open, in the company of others who are

used to the work, can have an intrinsic worth. And the small farmer who

knows where his produce is going has every incentive to be a connected and

esteemed member of a community. Rather than treating farming as just

another extractive industry, the small farmer’s work nurtures a treasured

and secure place in the larger scheme of things.