Mule-headed: there was wisdom in an old farmer's pride

Vegetarian Times, May, 2002 by Alan Pell Crawford

It was always this time of year, when the rains of early spring had moistened the ground, and the woods were turning green again, that my grandfather would harness up his mules and begin to plow.

Detesting debt, he refused to borrow the money to buy a tractor. So he would trudge along behind his team, long after the other farmers of his acquaintance were seated on noisy but vastly more efficient machinery, tilling the soil in half the time.

His neighbors may have gotten the work done before he did, but no one raised corn and wheat with greater care for the soil in which these plants grew or for the foodstuffs they would become. His farm fields were a garden, not a factory floor.

Grandpa would not have lasted long as a farmer in today's world. Farms are more mechanized now, more productive, more businesslike and much more profitable.

Young farmers today go to four-year colleges and study agronomy before taking over dad's acreage--or the corporation's. Grandpa's son had to drop out in his freshman year of college because he could no longer pay the tuition.

Farmers had no social safety net then. Today's "agribusinessmen," who work from tractors with computers and air conditioning in the cabs, are the recipients of vast outlays of federal money--$300 billion since 1978 alone. Ever since Uncle Sam started showering this largesse on farmers, tying the payments to farm size, farms have gotten larger. They've become giant industrial concerns that consume untold millions of gallons of chemicals. "Get big," Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz told farmers 30 years ago, "or get out."

Congress regularly increases these subsidies. These expenditures are necessary, our elected representatives insist, "to save the family farm." These programs have done nothing of the kind, however. When my grandfather worked the land, there were almost seven million farms in this country. At last count, there were fewer than two million farms, and fewer than 350,000 of them accounted for 90 percent of all U.S. farm production.

It is easy to romanticize the American family farm. Politicians specialize in such sentimentality. They seem not to know, however, that many large, highly mechanized farms are family farms, run by forward-looking fathers and sons. These families have gone into business together, in many cases, to avoid the taxes levied on them by the same elected representatives.

Today's farm families work as hard as the men and women of my grandfather's generation, and no one should begrudge them their success. Farmers are right to improve their methods whenever they can. To rely on mules instead of buying tractors can be, well, mule-headed.

Still and all, the foodstuffs raised on today's factory farms are "the products of industry," in the words of the poet and farmer Wendell Berry. These foodstuffs are turned out in enormous abundance, with alarming efficiency but little concern for anything but volume.

That's progress. But if my grandfather could chomp into an ear of corn grown on one of those factory farms and slathered over with whatever oily yellow concoction now passes for butter, I'm not sure he would recognize the taste.

With one bite, he'd probably conclude that remaining loyal to his mules made good sense after all.