Farmers: get big or get out; chronic low prices force families off the land as agribusiness grows - Part 2: food: farms

National Catholic Reporter, May 31, 2002 by Rich Heffern

It seems like the lines of snow geese go on forever, as they wing north over the gentle hills and stubbled fields of Brown County, Kan. Their staggered, V-shaped groups fluidly merge and weave overhead. You can still hear them calling to each other as they vanish over the horizon. Except for the colorful agribusiness signs sprouting at the edges of almost every field, this county would look much like the Kansas farm country depicted in The Wizard of Oz.

But the truth today is that Dorothy and her family couldn't make it on a small Kansas farm. Auntie Em would be working full-time in town. Or, having bought up all the adjoining farms at reduced values, Uncle Henry would be sitting in an air-conditioned tractor cab using its hookup to a global positioning satellite to line up his genetically engineered soybean and corn plants, while phoning his accountant on a cell phone or listening to the world market reports on his Walkman.

The message to farmers from those world markets is this: Get big or get out. And they have been getting out in droves. There were 6.8 million family farms in 1935, less than 2 million today. The number of farmers under the age of 25 has decreased 50 percent in 10 years.

Brown County farmer Julie Geiger recently went to a family member's auction in Horton, Kan., the town in which she grew up. In a corner between a broken pitchfork and some garden hose, she found a dusty box of old blue canning jars. Each jar had a square of tinfoil on top and an old-fashioned metal lid screwed down over it. She paid three dollars for the box.

At home she brushed off the cobwebs and slipped each jar into hot sudsy water. On the first jar she drew sparkling clean out of the water she saw a date--Nov. 30, 1858--printed on the side. "I was stunned. I could almost taste what the jar had held through the years, the wild plum jelly, the fresh pear and cherry preserves.

"In that year, 1858, I know from studying family history, my great-great-grandparents, Clemence and Rosine Geiger were married in Philadelphia, recent German immigrants," she said. "The very jar I held in my hands could have traveled with Rosine across the continent to her farm in Kansas."

Canning would eventually become a high art for Rosine as she fed her husband and 10 children every day. "That little jar probably dispersed its tasty contents at endless family dinners, from 1861, when Kansas became the 34th state, to the year women got the right to vote right up to the sad year when cousin Steve failed to come home from Vietnam. On sunny days it might have held small bunches of wild sunflowers, gathered by rambunctious children who turned out to be my dignified Aunt Carrie or my very serious Grandpa Geiger."

Now the idea of kids growing up on a farm is fast becoming an unreachable fantasy.

"A farmer here gets $3 a bushel on a good day, then goes to the store and buys two loaves of bread and pays more for 24 ounces of wheat than she got for the whole bushel," Geiger told NCR. Chronic low prices plague all crops in all regions of the country, she said. Farmers are getting paid the same amount now they got in the 1970s, even the 1930s.

"That's not much of a cost of living raise," she quipped. "We are so vulnerable here, and the worst part of the crisis is that young people aren't staying on the farm. Where is our future when they don't see any future in farming?"

The consolidation of agribusiness and the retail food industry that has occurred over the last 10 to 20 years has removed the bargaining leverage farmers once had to get a good price, while international trade policies and recent national farm legislation both favor global agribusiness at the expense of the small farmer.

A bushel of soybeans on today's market will reap $4.50, a bushel of corn $1.75, the same prices as in 1972, and well below the cost of production. A new combine to harvest those crops costs well over $120,000.

Left behind

While the U.S. economy continued to grow in the 1990s, it left rural America behind at the expense of farmers and other workers in our society, according to Bill Christison, president of both the Missouri Rural Crisis Center and the U.S. National Family Farm Coalition. "The truth is that there is a very severe farm crisis in the U.S. and Canada, and it is on the verge of forcing most of the family-sized farmers in our nation off the land," he said.

According to a recent National Farmers Union, Canada, report: "In the 1930s it took a worldwide economic collapse, a stock market crash, mass unemployment and a prairie-wide drought to drive net farm incomes to negative values. Today, stock markets are booming, employment levels are fair, the weather is generally good and crops are average or better. The current farm crisis is unprecedented in times of economic prosperity and stability."

"That's what hurts the most probably," Julie Geiger said, "watching on TV the wealth and luxury that exists in the cities and in some pockets of the rural U.S., while most of us out here scrape by. My husband works in town to help support our farm; that's the only way we can keep it going."