Farm: A Year in the Life of an American Farmer. - book reviews

National Review, Dec 8, 1989 by Doug Bandow

How We're Gonna Keep 'Em

AMERICA was once an overwhelmingly rural nation, its heart the family farm, and today, although mostly urban, the nation still feels the pull of its agrarian origins. Indeed, city dwellers desperately seek new means to teach their children the values that came naturally from rural life: self-reliance and independence, honesty and industry, family and community.

The traditional family farm still thrives, though--at least, Tom and Sally Bauer's Missouri farm does, and Richard Rhodes, author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, has written an entertaining and illuminating chronicle of a year in their lives.

The Bauers and their children manage more than a thousand acres. It is a hard life, and everyone pitches in. Although technology has made farming dramatically more productive over the years, it hasn't eliminated the long hours of work. The calves have to be castrated, and the hogs weaned. Soybeans need harvesting, and grain storage must be arranged. Machines won't run, and the weather won't cooperate. And always there are money problems.

But mixed in with the hard, often unpleasant work is bountiful satisfaction. The Bauers enjoy each other, their farm, and the community. Extended family ties are strong, in part because farming is a Bauer tradition. Tom's father was a farmer, and he hopes his children will be too. The sons are interested, so Bauer takes over operation of another farm "just in case . . ." The special allure of the land, so widespread when the nation was young, remains present for the Bauers. "You got so you knew every terrace, every row," writes Rhodes. "When [Tom] fixed something he could look back and see where it was and the whole history of it and he knew he'd made it work."

And then there is that sense of community, lacking in so much of urban America. Tom Bauer's neighbors have little time for self-conscious boosterism, but they are always ready to help one another. Even when he is in the middle of harvesting, Tom finds the time to help his friend Clarence castrate calves. In turn, Clarence drops by to help Tom pick corn.

Animal lovers may recoil from Mr. Rhode's description of life on the farm, and most consumers would probably prefer not to know the details of how some of their food is produced. The castrations performed by Tom and Clarence are low-tech and messy, although the men aren't bothered by it. They discuss who will keep the "seeds," which, Rhodes reports, are "greatly admired" by the locals, who annually host an invitational "Nut Fry." The calves and the hogs the Bauers raise exist for no other reason than sale and slaughter. Even pets can receive harsh treatment. When the dog Molly unexpectedly has pups, Tom decides to "thump" them, because he sees no room for four more mouths. For all the good one sees in Bauer, and through him in rural life, there is a disturbing hardness about him, a lack of sentiment.

There is also a kind of self-serving economic populism. Neither Bauer nor his neighbors like banks or bankers. In Bauer's view, the prices everyone else can command go up, while his often fall. In fact, Bauer seems to believe that just about everybody is out to get the American farmer.

But then Bauer happily gets a good deal at an auction at the owner's expense. He gets hog companies to bid against each other to raise his return, and he accepts the premium that grain-storage companies offer on government PIK (payment-in-kind) certificates. It seems the Bauers can be shrewd at business, but no one else is supposed to be.

Farming is a business, albeit not a very profitable one for the Bauers. In 1986, the year Rhodes spent with them, the Bauers grossed $152,090--one-third from hogs, and the rest from calves, grain, and federal support payments. Expenses seemed endless: feed, fertilizer, maintenance, insurance, seed, fuel, and on and on, for a total of $117,608. After income and Social Security taxes were paid, the Bauers cleared about $19,000. "Farming was a good life," Rhodes observers, "but it didn't make you rich."

Well, not Tom Bauer anyway. The weakness of Farm is its (perhaps unintentional) distortion of agricultural reality overall. Some farmers do get rich, many of them thanks to federal policy. Rhodes gives only the barest outline of the various federal programs, because his book is about people, not policy. Still, he does editorialize that a "government loan program wasn't a handout, wasn't farmer welfare. It was a trade-off." He fails to mention that the panoply of programs has cost the taxpayer as much as $26 billion a year, and $200 billion this decade. Some enterprises with crops such as cotton have collected $20 million in a single year; individual dairy farmers have received $10 million just to go out of business. Beekeepers collect hundreds of thousands. Sunflower growers, wool producers, and tobacco farmers all have their own expensive programs.

Tom Bauer has not been similarly enriched, because he is a small operator in a system that rewards overall production, and because his most important "crop"--hogs--is not subsidized. Just as well. Bauer is a little too independent to care much for the intrusions that accompany federal largesse. At the end of Farm, the Bauers pull most of their fields out of federal programs. "Tom knew one farmer who'd spent a full week doing the paperwork for one field. ... He hadn't gone into farming to become a bureaucrat pushing paper."