Sustainable energy production can't happen without sustainable
agricultural production, and the current industrial agricultural
system is anything but sustainable, not in any way - perhaps
particularly not in its massive use of fossil fuels.
With all the talk we've had here about Big Soy, Big Ethanol, the
likes of Arcgher Daniels Midland, Cargill, Monsanto, and of subsidies
and what happens to them (soy check-off dollars and biodiesel for
instance) - what the estimable Albert Krebs refers to as "corporate
fascism" - this article is of much interest.
For those who're still fooled by the idea that Big is Better and
that's why it "succeeds" in agriculture, this is a fairly typical
example of what that success is based on - sheer bullying:
"From the 1930's to the 1960's the free-range system was the popular
way to raise poultry in the United states. It produced meaty, tender
birds at a reasonable cost, using a reasonable amount of labor and
providing valuable fertility to the land. Many farmers raised
10,000-20,000 birds per year on short-grass pasture ("range"), both
chickens and turkeys. With the rise of industrial agriculture and the
development of the confinement broiler barn, this sustainable and
profitable system was discontinued by means of withdrawing growers
contracts. Left with no market or processing facilities the practice
was abandoned within two or three years. However, even though the
system was phased out here in the U.S., it has continuing popularity
in Europe, even to the point of having legislated standards. In
France, in 2000, over 20% of all poultry (90 million birds!) was
raised using the free-range system."
https://raju.safe-order.net/free-rangepoultry/free-rangepoultryindex2.htm
Back40Books
From the article below:
>"Most problems on the farms of rural America," Mudd stresses, " can
>be traced to one fundamental cause. The underlying problem with farm
>income is concentration. As our input suppliers and the purchasers
>of our products consolidate, they acquire market power. This market
>power is leveraged against the farmer when he sells his crop. . . .
>Look somewhere else for a scapegoat; it is not the American farmer
>draining the United States Treasury. The real transfer of wealth is
>accumulating in Cargill and ADM's bank accounts."
Verily.
Best
Keith
The
Agribusiness
Examiner
July 28, 2003, Issue #273
Monitoring Corporate Agribusiness
From a Public Interest Perspective
EDITOR\PUBLISHER; A.V. Krebs
E-MAIL: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
WEB SITE: <http://www.ea1.com/CARP/>http://www.ea1.com/CARP/
TO RECEIVE: Send name and address
Commentary:
Family Farm Agriculture Battling To Survive Apathy, Policies And Myths
Amidst the recent sound and fury over such issues as genetic
engineering, mad cow disease, the quality, safety and quantity of the
food we manufacture, etc., etc. the fate of this nation's historical
family farm system of agriculture is being all but ignored --- by
both progressives and reactionaries --- considered by many of these
same folks as simply a relic of a bygone era.
Typical of such cynicism are the remarks made recently by Ken Cook,
President of the Environmental Working Group who throughout recent
years has repeatedly demonstrated his lack of understanding of
agricultural economics. Saying that he was "skeptical that nostalgia
will be discarded" it was Cook and his organization that compiled
lists of growers who received subsidies amounting to tens of
thousands and hundreds of thousands of dollars.
"Gee, it's served them so well," he said in referring to nostalgia
"usually, that's what they trot out when they're looking for more
subsidy money."
By focusing so much media attention on the "subsidy question" during
the debate on the 2002 Farm Bill, Cook's na•vetŽ allowed in large
measure corporate agribusiness to fashion legislation of the
corporate interests, by the corporate interests and for the corporate
interests.
As Keith Mudd, a farmer near Monroe City, Missouri, has pointed out "
The Environmental Working Group argues that most of the subsidies go
to the largest of farmers, who in turn use it to buy out their
smaller neighbors. The truth is that all farmers, regardless of size,
must use the subsidy just to raise the value received for their
commodity above the cost of production. In most instances, the cost
of production is covered and something is left over for living
expenses. In practically no instance is
anything left over that would be considered a return on investment
(land and equity).
"Most problems on the farms of rural America," Mudd stresses, " can
be traced to one fundamental cause. The underlying problem with farm
income is concentration. As our input suppliers and the purchasers of
our products consolidate, they acquire market power. This market
power is leveraged against the farmer when he sells his crop. . . .
Look somewhere else for a scapegoat; it is not the American farmer
draining the United States Treasury. The real transfer of wealth is
accumulating in Cargill and ADM's bank accounts."
Likewise, as Dean Baker and Mark Weisbrot, Co-Directors of the
prestigious Center for Economic and Policy Research, in Washington
D.C. recently pointed out " While many of the agricultural subsidies
in rich countries are poorly targeted, and in some cases hurt farmers
in developing nations, it is important not to exaggerate these
impacts. The risk of doing so is that it encourages policy makers and
concerned NGOs to focus their energies on an issue that is largely
peripheral to economic development, and ignore much more important
matters."
Their comments came in response to a long article by the Editorial
Board of the New York Times on Sunday, July 20, 2003, "The Rigged
Trade Game" available at
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0720-03.htm
The Weisbrot and Baker essay was taken from their paper "The Relative
Impact of Trade Liberalization on Developing Countries," available at
http://www.cepr.net/relative_impact_of_trade_liberal.htm
Both at home and abroad corporate agribusiness's minions have long
argued that agriculture to be successful must be "industrialized"
which in turn, they have argued, relies on concentrating resources
into as few hands as possible.
Agrarian populism at the close of the 19th century clearly recognized
that condition and thus believed that it was imperative to bring the
corporate state under democratic control. "Agrarian reformers,"
historian Lawrence Goodwin stresses, "attempted to overcome a
concentrating system of finance capitalism that was rooted in Eastern
commercial banks and which radiated outward through trunk-line
railroad networks to link in a number of common purposes much of
America's consolidating corporate community. Their aim was structural
reform of the American economic system."
That effort, which Ralph Nader often points out, is "still the
country's most fundamental political and economic reform" and laid
the ground work for the Progressives, Woodrow Wilson's New Freedom
and later Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal and more recently the
Great Society. The creative economic and social policies that these
programs spawned dominated the political and economic scene
throughout the entire 20th century and thwarted for the most part the
complete de-structuring of family farm agriculture in the U.S.
It was not until 1996 and the infamous "Freedom to Farm" legislation
was fashioned by a Republican Congress and signed by a Democrat
president that corporate agribusiness finally realized their dream of
robbing family farmers of their nearly last vestiges of that economic
power first conceived and asserted by the agrarian populists a
century earlier.
Thus, by deifying "cost benefit analysis" at the expense of the
"common good," corporate agribusiness has all but managed to
completely annul the positive dimensions of the family farm system
and eliminate its economic and environmental advantages, particularly
as they relate to building genuine communities.
As social anthropologists Patricia L. Allen and Carolyn E. Sachs
point out, any system built upon a foundation of structural
inequities "is ultimately unsustainable in the sense that it will
result in increasing conflict and struggle along the lines of class,
gender, and ethnicity." Corporate agribusiness has become just such a
system.
Thus, we have arrived at a point where our family farm system of agriculture is
facing its dark night of the soul, standing now on the threshold of
eradication. Throughout the 1980's we saw an ever mounting number of
farm bankruptcies, foreclosures, and forced evictions reap a grim
"human harvest" of suicides, alcoholism, divorce, family violence,
personal stress, and loss of community.
Continuing through the 1990's to this very day we have witnessed the
very economic and social fabric of rural America being ripped asunder
as the control of our food supply is being seized by the merchants
of greed whose purpose is not to feed people, provide jobs, husband
the land, but simply to monetize our natural resources and thereby
increase their cash flow and reduce their transactional costs in an
effort to placate their excess-profit-obsessed institutional
investors.
Thus, in the grand scheme of history the 20th century may well be
remembered as the
point in the evolution of humanity when those corporations that trade, process,
manufacture, pack, ship and sell the world's food successfully
removed the culture from agriculture and in the name of "efficiency"
and in the pursuit of a globalized industrialization of the world's
food supply reshaped agri-culture into an agri-business.
By attempting to deify their own myopic view of efficiency, however, corporate
agribusiness has brought family farming, the democratic control of
the people's food supply, and a wholesome and healthy natural
environment to the brink of global
disaster which unless immediately recognized, confronted and thwarted
will inevitably lead to worldwide economic, political, social and
environmental chaos unlike any seen in human history.
For in measuring efficiency in strictly quantitative and economic
terms, such as is currently being practiced by corporate agribusiness
and its merchants of greed, the qualitative aspects of an
agri-culture and a family farm food production structure are rapidly
being discarded on the scrap heap of history as mere impediments to
improving the "bottom line" of the unaccountable corporations that
process and manufacture our food.
And as corporate agribusiness seeks to meta-morphize agriculture from a culture
based upon the traditional family farm system of agriculture into a
business where capital is substituted for genuine economic, social
and environmental efficiency, and where expensive technology is
substituted for labor we see a standardization of our food supply
through an industrial manufacturing process based on the creation of
synthetic foods, such as is now taking place through the use of
genetic engineering.
Considering those characteristics by which corporate agribusiness has become
identified with and comparing them with the historical
characteristics of the family farm/peasant system of agriculture we
begin to see more clearly how corporate
agribusiness is the antithesis of family farm agriculture and how
incompatible the
two systems are in a democratically structured society.
Whereas family farming/peasant agriculture has traditionally sought
to nurture and
care for the land, corporate agribusiness, exclusive by nature, seeks
to "mine" the
land, solely interested in monetizing its natural wealth and thus
measure efficiency
by its profits, by pride in its "bottom line." Family farmers,
meanwhile, see efficiency in terms of respecting, caring and
contributing to the overall health and well-being of the land, the
environment, the communities and the nations in which they live.
While corporate agribusiness stresses institutionalized organization,
hierarchical decision making, volume, speed, standardization of the
food supply and extracting as much production from the land as
quickly and impersonally as possible, family farmers and peasants
strive through order, labor, pride in the quality of their work, and
a certain strength of character and sense of community to take from
the land only what
it is willing to give so as not to damage its dependability or
diminish its sustainability.
But the so-called "conventional wisdom" in agriculture historically
has been that
through the continual substituting of capital for efficiency and
technology for labor "inefficient" farm operators are eliminated by
"market forces" while those who survive manage to thrive.
Such "wisdom" also perpetuates the myth that the nation's
agricultural system is
still dominated by independent family-operated farms and with the
ever-increasing elimination of "inefficient producers" --- "excess
human resources" --- we will witness a
never-ending expansion of production to feed the world.
Nowhere has this "conventional wisdom" been more apparent, hoodwinked
more farmers and become the driving force of a nation's agricultural
and food policy than in the United States.
AS YOU SOW
SO SHALL YOU REAP
Reflecting on some of the numerous efforts in recent history to
preserve and maintain family farm agriculture by primarily making it
economically worthwhile for farmers to stay on the land and learn
from such efforts can be seen, for example, by the proposed
controversial "plan" offered by President Harry S. Truman's Secretary
of Agriculture Charles F. Brannan in 1949.
Designed primarily to provide a more rigid high level price support
system that would offer greater protection to small farmers and less
to corporate operators, the Brannan Plan was bitterly debated both in
Congress and among farmers.
An important section of the Brannan plan was the proposed expansion
and revision of the list of "basic" commodities for which price
supports would be mandatory. The ten commodities "of prime importance
both from the standpoint of their contribution to farm income and
their importance to the American consumer family" included corn,
cotton, wheat, tobacco, whole milk, eggs, farm chickens, hogs, beef
cattle and lambs. Support for nonbasic commodities was to be left up
to the discretion of the Secretary.
Perhaps the most hotly debated feature of Brannan's program was his
proposal that a free market set prices, with direct goverment
"production payments" making up the difference between actual and
supported prices. To protect against too great an expansion of
production and huge production payment expenditures the Agricultural
Secretary would have the power to impose production controls on all
basic commodities whenever necessary.
Truman's Agricultural Secretary also sought to impose certain
restrictions and conditions on the receipt of such production
payments by limiting the size of farms which could receive such
benefits, encouraging "the family-sized farms" and discouraging
"development of extremely large-scale industrial farming."
According to the 1945 census, about 100,000 of the largest units ---
fewer than two percent of all farms --- were selling products valued
at nearly one-fourth of all the farm products marketed in this
country. That was more than was sold in total by two-thirds of all
our farms, including half of the nation's family farms.
The validity of Brannan's belief in the family farm system of
agriculture in the United States and its basic economic and social
value to the rural community in general had already been attested to
in a landmark study done by a California social scientist Dr. Walter
Goldschmidt under the auspices of the Bureau of Agricultural
Economics (BAE).
In 1942 the Bureau of Reclamation had expressed justifiable concern
whether the 160 acre limitation principle in the federal reclamation
law should be applied to California's burgeoning Central Valley
Project (CVP). The BAE was enlisted to help and Marion Clawson, a
staff economist, was placed in charge.
Clwson and Dr. Paul Taylor of the University of California, and the
Division of Farm Population designed a study to "determine what
difference does it make to the character of rural life if the farm
units are large corporate holdings as against family-size units,"
such as provided for in the 1902 Reclamation law?
Dr. Goldschmidt was given the responsibility of conducting the
study.A comparative study of Arvin, a town located alongside the
mammoth DiGiorgio Corporation, long a symbol of California corporate
agribusiness, and Dinuba, a community surrounded by small family-type
farms, was undertaken. As Dr. Goldschmidt, now an anthropology
professor emeritus at UCLA, explains:
"The research plan that was devised from the outset included two
phases. The first was a detailed examination of the two
representative communities. From that experience a series of measures
of community organization were to be devised that would reflect the
quality of life in the towns, based upon data that could be easily
attained without questionnaires or interviews.
"Among the items to be considered were everything from the number of
local business enterprises to the rate of teacher turnovers. From
this objective data an index was to be formulated that would enable
some 23 other small towns in the upper San Joaquin Valley to be
rated."
What the Arvin-Dinuba study revealed has become near legend in the
argument for perpetuating the "family farm system" of agriculture
throughout rural America. Dinuba was found far superior to Arvin as
the quality of life in each community was directly related to the
inequities in landholdings and directly reflected in the difference
in the community's economic, political and social stability.
"Large scale farm operations is immediately seen to take an important
part in the creation of the conditions found in Arvin. Its direct
causative effect is to create a community made up of a few persons of
high economic position, and a mass of individuals whose economic
status and whose security and stability are low, and who are
economically dependent directly on the few. In the framework of
American culture, more particularly that of industrialized farming,
this creates immediately a situation where community participation
and leadership, economic well-being, and business activities are
relatively impoverished."
The small-farm community of Dinuba was supporting 62 separate
businesses with a volume of trade of $4.3 million, while the
large-farm community of Arvin had 35 established business
establishments; expenditures for household supplies and building
equipment were over three times greater in the small-farm community;
Dinuba had a larger dollar-volume of agricultural production; over
one-half of the breadwinners in the small-farm community were
independently employed, while in the large-farm community less than
one-fifth were so employed: public services in the small-farm
community were far better; the small farm community had two
newspapers while the large-farm community had one, and the small-farm
community had twice the number of organizations for civic improvement
and recreation.
As applied to a small-farm community the 160 acreage limitation
principle was also found not only to be justified, but one that
should be encouraged and supported.
As a postscript to this 1946 study, Isao Fujimoto, a University of
California - Davis behaviorial scientist professor, and his rural
sociology students some 31 years later sought to continue the work
Goldschmidt and his associates had been prevented from completing.
They surveyed some 130 towns in eight San Joaquin Valley counties to
determine the relationship between the control of land and water and
the quality of community life.
Comparing three variables --- complexity of town services, scale of
cropping patterns, and water use --- Fujimoto & Co. confirmed
Goldschmidt's Arvin-Dinuba findings, namely that areas with
large-scale farming and undemocratic water districts had noticeably
fewer towns that provided a smaller range of services while towns
associated with small-scale family farms had proportionately more
elementary schools, dentists, pharmacies and medical specialists.
While the first phase of the 1946 study was completed and reported
on, the second, due to the extended controversy surrounding the
first, was never completed.
Goldschmidt remembers, "I had hoped to calculate a regression curve
between these two variables [the size of farms measured by gross
acreage and by Îequivalent' acres, based upon the income potential,
of diverse crops] but was prevented from making this sophisticated
analysis. I have recently reexamined these data and have found that
they revealed a most important relationship . . . It showed that as
the average size of farm increases, the number of persons supported
in the rural area and local community declines."
Reaction to the Arvin-Dinuba study was immediate and ominous.
Repeated efforts were made to block its publication, the study having
been completed in 1944. When it finally was issued in December, 1946,
due principally to the efforts of Dewey Anderson, of the Senate Small
Business Committee and U.S. Senator James E. Murray, committee
chairman, it was with a quid pro quo that no mention whatsoever be
made of USDA's involvement in the study.
Efforts, principally by the American Farm Bureau and its allies, were
made in the press, on the radio, and in Congress to discredit the
study. As noted earlier, the Goldschmidt study also only exacerbated
the criticism of the BAE's activities. The BAE, no longer in
existence, has been called by some agricultural historians the
one-time conscience of the USDA.
In a September, 1946 The Nation article author Alden Stevens
suggested that the AFBF was responsible for getting a provision
written into a USDA appropriations bill which would prohibit any
further studies similar to Arvin-Dinuba. He also went on to say that
the study "was used to destroy one of the most honest and courageous
organizations in Washington, the Bureau of Agricultural Economics."
Goldschmidt, in recent years, recalls, "I wrote a letter to The
Nation saying that the study was not manifestly responsible for this
action . . . I am not so sure as I was when I wrote that letter to
The Nation that the Arvin-Dinuba investigation was not a major factor
in the curtailment of the BAE and its subsequent demise."
In fact, the USDA's Appropriations Act for 1947 contains the
following codicil: "That no part of the funds herein appropriated or
made available to the [BAE] under the heading ÎEconomic
Investigation' shall be used for state or county land and planning,
for conducting cultural surveys, or for the maintenance of regional
offices."
In further reflection on the events surrounding this study,
Goldschmidt now believes that those who sabotaged his expanded
research into a larger sample of communities knew exactly what it
would reveal. It was much easier to discount the Arvin-Dinuba
conclusions than it would have been to dismiss the results of a much
more comprehensive study.
The Brannan Plan's support of a "family farm system" of agriculture
was not the only drawback to its many enemies who finally managed to
kill it. The reasons for its defeat
centered primarily on political considerations and the fear by
Republicans and conservatives that its passage would cement the
alliance between farmers and labor which only recently had played a
major role in reelecting Truman in 1948.
And it is here again where we see the all too familiar pattern that
first emerged in the populist era, later to re-surface during the New
Deal, and now again evident in the Brannan Plan: whenever farmers and
labor show genuine signs of building an economic and/or political
coalition the various "communities of economic interests" that
dominate corporate agribusiness, including the American Farm Bureau
Federation react, and react with a sense of foreboding and urgency.
It is no coincidence that these same economic and political forces in
America which have historically tried to destroy trade and industrial
unionism are also the same elements that have traditionally and
consistently seen the major problem facing agriculture as one of
"excess human resources."
It is also true that the cost of such a plan as the one Brannan
proposed was unknown, for even he admitted that he couldn't estimate
the cost any more "than the people who came up with the first
price-support program involving loans were able to estimate for you
then."
But, cost was not the conservatives' and Republicans' major reason
for wanting the plan killed. Rather, the Grand Old Party feared
Brannan's plan might indeed have a particularly special appeal to the
farm community in the upcoming 1950 Congressional elections. "That
the Republicans will fight it is already evident," a New York Times
report declared, "because as one observer said, Îif the Democrats get
it through, they are in for life.'"
DR. WALTER GOLDSCHMIDT:
WHAT IF ??? . . .
A HALF CENTURY
AFTER "AS YOU SOW"
Half a century ago I was in the town of Wasco, California making a
study of community life and social organization. The study showed
that industrial farming creates an urbanized social system. That is,
where agricultural production is dominated by highly mechanized labor
with necessarily high capital requirements and the use of large
amounts of hired labor the result is a social order characterized by
impersonal social relationships, social class differentiation and
conflict, and the dominance of monetary over other social values. As
you sow, so shall you reap. The study was published under the title
"As You Sow."
This finding was far from trivial, obvious as it may now seem.
Republicans as well as Democrats have espoused the Jeffersonian
agrarian philosophy; the Great American Myth is fundamentally
agrarian and the small town has long been seen as the bastion of
basic American values.
It is the very heart and soul of our egalitarianism and therefore our
democratic institutions and central to our values. In this view the
California situation was seen as an aberration, as had the slavery of
our southern plantation economy --- over which we fought a major war.
Three years after Wasco, I was asked to provide an answer to a simple
question: What difference does it make if the farm units are large or
small? The question was asked as part of the Central Valley Project
Studies; a research program designed to examine the impact of that
project and set the basis for policy matters.
The Central Valley Project (CVP) in California was developed by the
Bureau of Reclamation, and the Bureau operated under a then 40-year
old ruling that irrigation waters developed (and subsidized) by it
must be sold to land units of 160 acres or less. The Question
therefore was: Should this ruling be applied to the beneficiaries of
CVP?
I initiated a study comparing the two towns of Arvin and Dinuba, one
representing those communities dominated by large-scale enterprises
and the other representing the towns where small family-sized
operations were the rule.
The study showed unequivocally that the town surrounded by the small
farms was far superior by every measure that I could devise.
Clearly, industrial scale operations exacerbated the social problems
I found in Wasco. The study was published in 1946 by the U.S. Senate
Small Business Committee. The research made it clear that the acreage
limitation ruling should be applied --- at least if we really cared
about those agrarian values of our cherished national myth.
The results of this study were denied in the halls of Congress and in
the public media, because the owners of the vast acreages in
California understandably did not want the acreage limitation applied
to their holdings. Condemned while we were still in the field,
vilified and ridiculed both in the media and in Congress when we
published the results in an attack orchestrated by the right-wing
Associated Farmers of California, we were prevented from making a
second, more comprehensive comparative study. We were very nearly
prevented from publishing our results.
***********************************************
EDITOR'S NOTE: In his classical historical work Ill Fares the Land:
Migrants and Migratory Labor in the United States, (Little, Brown and
Company, Boston: 1942) Carey McWilliams writes: "The gentlemen who
sit in their offices in San Francisco and Oakland and write checks to
the Associated Farmers are not the men who, wearing the armbands of
the group, organize mobs to browbeat and coerce agricultural workers.
They have cleverly stimulated the farmers and townspeople to act as
their storm troopers. Nevertheless the real headquarters of
vigilantism in California are to be found on Montgomery Street in San
Francisco and not in the great valleys of the state."
***********************************************
But the finds were never successfully refuted. The storm over this
research did not seriously try to invalidate the results, but was
merely part of a concerted effort to prevent the acreage limitation
law from being applied to the vast areas served by the project ---
and in this they were successful.
The result is that when we drive today on the West Side along Highway
5 and elsewhere in California served by the CVP, we find that either
there are no communities at all or they are miserable replicas of
Arvin. We find what I call a green desert, a social desert.
What if the powers that be had accepted the results of the comparison
of Arvin and Dinuba, and the government had implemented the acreage
limitation law --- as it should have done --- so that these vast
areas would have been peopled by small-farm-operators like those in
Dinuba.
Instead of that green desert, there would be some 100,000 people, 30
or 40 grocery stores, dozens of furniture and appliance stores, there
would be high schools with their bands and football teams and who
knows how many beer joints and mom and pop stores and bowling alleys
and the like. There would be at least ten Big Macs and TacoBells;
there would be 40 or so Little League teams with 800 parents
screaming at the umpires and 170 preachers to remind them that they
should love their neighbors.
In my "As You Sow" I made other predictions and other
recommendations. "Farm policy must be formulated in full recognition
of the growing urbanization of rural society. For the past quarter of
a century farm programs have been developed in terms of a stereotype
of rural life which no longer reflects the social reality. It is this
failure to adjust agricultural planning to the world of today that
has, more than anything else, spelled out the failure of our vast
farm program to accomplish its stated ends."
My recommendations in "As You Sow" were that it was essential to
recognize the industrial quality of farming, which clearly was
already diffusing throughout the nation, and its urban consequences,
which meant that the regulations of the Labor Relations Act should be
applied to the agricultural sector and that unions should not only be
allowed to develop, but should be encouraged. What was needed was a
professionalization of the farm worker.
These recommendations were also not followed. Instead, we have had
the continued exploitation of the farm workers; the increased
concentration of land ownership in the hands of the few; greater
difficulties for the small farmer precisely because they were not
protected from such centralized control of the markets, and all the
other difficulties that derive from an unregulated industrialized
agricultural system. We have seen the growth of rural slums and the
burgeoning of urban ones.
What was taken to be a California aberration turns out to have been a
harbinger of what was to take place throughout the nation. We have
seen the disappearance of millions of farms, the increased
concentration of agricultural control, the disappearance of hundreds
of rural communities and the small businesses that they supported.
The independent family farmer is rapidly giving way to the
industrialized and centralized agricultural enterprise and something
is going out of the heartland of America.
And out of her heart, as well. The genius of a people, the spirit of
a culture, lies in the way it makes its living; lies in the relation
of the work force to the resources and the means of production.
I wrote: "It is my opinion that the most important single factor in
the formulation of the character of nations is its basic mode of
production and the way that production is organized. The American
character was forged in its rural hinterland; the frontiersman
melding into the freeholding farmer created a pattern consisting of
egalitarianism, personal independence, the demand for hard work and
ingenuity, self-discipline, with its ultimate reward in personal
success."
The independent family farmer operator lay at the heart of this
quality in American life; not only in his\her operation, but in the
inspiration for others elsewhere in the economy.
There are two great forces at work that tend to destroy such
independence of action and hence of spirit. First, there is the need
for large scale operations in industry that require a high
concentration of power; this is the technological force. Against this
there is little that can be done --- it is a kind of technological
fate. I hasten to add, however, that it is by no means clear that
such concentration is either necessary nor advantageous when it
applies to farm production.
Second, there is the power of those who have wealth and positions of
influence to effect legislation and policy in such a way as to
enhance that power and wealth. We have already seen that this is the
force that prevented the application of the acreage limitation law to
California farm lands. The attacks made on my study of Arvin and
Dinuba and the continuing efforts to discredit it are cases in point.
It was also the force that prevented the application of our national
labor relations laws from being applied to agriculture. This is a
force against which it is possible to take action.
But it is not easy. The price of liberty is external vigilance. I
fear that we have been insufficiently vigilant.
Dr. Walter Goldschmidt , Professor Emeritus in social anthropology at
UCLA is author of As You Sow: Three Studies In The Social
Consequences of Agribusiness (Allanheld, Osmun & Co. Publishers,
Montclair, N.J.: 1978). This essay is excerpted from a paper, "What
If?" presented at a symposium organized by the California Institute
for Rural Studies and reprinted in the Summer, 1993 issue of
PrairieFire"s Prairie Journal.
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Biofuels at Journey to Forever
http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html
Biofuel at WebConX
http://webconx.green-trust.org/2000/biofuel/biofuel.htm
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