The future: more farmers not fewer

Whole Earth Review, Spring, 1989 by Gene Logsdon

ALTHOUGH THE PERCENTAGE of Americans engaged in farming has been decreasing steadily since the ink was hardly dry on the signing of the Louisiana Purchase (from 90 percent of the population then to 21/2 percent today), and has been decreasing in actual numbers since 1916, the one continuous viewpoint I have heard in my 50 years among farmers is that the number of farmers can't go any lower. I have personally known all the editors of the prestigious Farm Journal except the first, who started the magazine 110 years ago, and at some point in their careers, every one of these astute gentlemen opined editorially or privately that the decline of the farm population was about to bottom out. Even Wheeler McMillen, who in the thirties wrote a book entitled Too Many Farmers (thereby earning himself the undying enmity of small farmers everywhere) thought that the right number to get down to was about 9 million, more than four times what it is today. And of the 2.2 million remaining (or whatever the number is this week), only about 700,000 contribute significantly to the commercial food market. All of which at least means I am in good company when I continue the naive tradition of optimism in the face of statistical and economic reality and declare without batting an eye that the family farm is not dead, and that, far from continuing to decrease, farms and farmers are on the increase.

Although megafarms will continue to be an important part of the food production business, I don't think the future belongs to them at all, despite the predictions of wishful-thinking agribusiness interests. The real action is going to occur in comparatively small-scale food production systems now sprouting up everywhere, and in those which have handily survived the economic crunch of the eighties. In short, there is no better time than right now for dedicated young people, determined to own and operate their own businesses, to make it in agriculture.

I can give three reasons for my prediction that the number of food and fiber producers (food-andfiber-producer is the only definition of farmer that works) is about to increase: (1) Historically, in all past civilizations I can discover, the denser the population becomes, the smaller and more numerous the farms become; (2) financially, the economies of scale that apparently rule manufacturing do not really apply to any sustainable kind of food production - when you count all the costs, it is cheaper to raise a zucchini in your garden than on your megafarm; and (3) socially, people are beginning to understand they really are what they eat and are demanding quality food that megafarms can't supply.

New attitudes toward food are not only increasing the number of farms, but more importantly, are bringing a new kind of farmer to the land - a farmer with roots in urban culture, not traditional rural culture. While commercial agriculture stolidly continues to pile up government-subsidized mountains of surplus hybrid corn and hard red wheat, these new farmer-entrepreneurs bend an ear to the marketplace and produce the food consumers want. They are often called specialty farmers, but they are more apt to refer to themselves as "guerrilla marketers" - they strike where the big boys aren't looking. They come in a variety that is mind-boggling. The New York Times, noting that "there's not a New Englander or farmer in the lot"' listed in a recent article by Marian Burros such disparate new farm products in New England as goat cheese, farm-raised oysters, handpressed cider, hydroponic spinach, stone-ground flours and meals from locally grown organic grains; baby lambs for the hoity-toity restaurants of New York and Boston; pheasant and other once-wild game, such as buffalo; and dairy sheep producing roquefort cheese.

All across America, hundreds of small sheep flocks have come into existence in the last ten years to supply wool directly to the bustling cottage handspinning and weaving industry. Angora goat farms have become almost common, even in the corn-and-soybean wastelands of the Midwest. A feedlot in Nebraska now raises ostriches, some of which bring 22,000 a pair. In Michigan, Juliet Sprouse told me last year that female llamas she and her husband raise on their 35 acres had skyrocketed in price from $1,500 six years ago to 10,000 now. New Jersey vegetable farmers, taking a cue from the West Coast, are learning to market squash flowers for food as well as squash fruit. Catfish farms thrive in the South as consumers learn how good a humble, downhome fish can taste when raised in unpolluted water. Crayfish farms are on the upswing in the South, too, and very likely, if humans persist in using their rivers and oceans as a sewage-disposal system, all fish and seafood will eventually be raised on domesticated "farms."

Samuel and Louise Kayman are good examples of specialty farmers developing new markets. In 1983 they began making high-quality yogurt from their herd of Jersey cows at Stonefield Farm near Wilton, New Hampshire. Sam had quit his job in the defense industry in the sixties. Their market exploded and they could not keep up with demand. The Kaymans sold their cows and concentrated on the yogurt, buying Jersey milk from surrounding farmers and paying them a premium for their milk over the price the outrageously expensive, tax-funded, dinosaur government subsidy program allows farmers in the conventional market. They brought in Gary Hirshberg from New Alchemy Institute to provide financial and overall management. By 1988 they had hit $3 million in sales and moved into a half-million-dollar plant away from the farm, still paying a premium for Jersey milk. "Significant profit is still in the future," says Hirshberg, "but there's a tremendous non-monetary reward we gain from customer satisfaction. We get hundreds of letters from people who love our yogurt and that's very important to us. We also provide a better profit picture for the farmers who sell milk to us, which is part of our overall goal of revitalizing rural areas. When we succeed at those goals there's an intellectual payoff more valuable than money."