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.