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  • From: Steve Hart <stevenlawrencehart@gmail.com>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] America: Becoming a Land Without Farmers
  • Date: Tue, 24 Mar 2015 20:29:55 +1300

LL...one more for the library

http://www.ag-transition.org/pdf/Agricultural_Transition_en.pdf

Steve Hart

On 24 March 2015 at 19:23, Lawrence London <lfljvenaura@gmail.com> wrote:

> America: Becoming a Land Without Farmers
> September 10, 2012
>
> Evaggelos Vallianatos (Photo Credit: Homini:))
>
>
> http://www.independentsciencenews.org/environment/america-becoming-a-land-without-farmers/
>
> The plutocratic remaking of America has a parallel in the countryside. In
> rural America less than 3 percent of farmers make more than 63 percent of
> the money, including government subsidies.
>
> The results of this emerging feudal economy are everywhere. Large areas of
> the United States are becoming impoverished farm towns with abandoned
> farmhouses and deserted land. More and more of the countryside has been
> devoted to massive factory farms and plantations. The consequences, though
> worse now than ever, have been there for all to see and feel, for decades.
>
> Abandoned Farmhouse, Washington, USA
>
> Walter Goldschmidt, an anthropologist with the US Department of Agriculture
> (USDA) was already documenting the deleterious effects of agribusiness on
> small communities in California’s Central Valley as long ago as the 1940s
> (1).
>
> He revealed that a community (he studied the town of Dinuba in northern
> Tulare County) with small family farmers thrived. Its economy and cultural
> life were vigorous and democratic. Thus the Dinuba of 1940 was a
> middle-class town whose residents were not divided in any significant
> manner by differences in wealth. They had a stable income and strong
> interest in the life of their community.
>
> However, the town surrounded by industrial farms (he studied Arvin in
> southeastern Kern County) did not share in the prosperity of agribusiness.
> Its schools, churches, economic and cultural life were impoverished. Its
> residents were sharply divided in terms of wealth. Only a few of them had a
> stable income. The rest barely made it. Even the managers of Arvin’s large
> farms did not live in Arvin. The town had become a rural slum and a colony
> of the plantations.
>
> For Goldschmidt the family farm was “the classic example” of American small
> business. He became convinced that its spread over the land “has laid the
> economic base for the liberties and the democratic institutions which this
> Nation counts as its greatest asset.”
>
> Goldschmidt, who was well read in the Greek and American democratic
> traditions, knew that in concluding this he was not alone. He was aware
> that in 1862, Isaac Newton, the first commissioner of US agriculture,
> reported to his president, Abraham Lincoln, that haciendas brought down
> Rome. The message to the country was pretty clear: small family farmers
> were the foundations of the American Republic (2).
>
> Goldschmidt’s employers did not care for history, however. By the early
> 1940s, USDA no longer saw the family farm as a national asset. It fired
> Goldschmidt and almost suppressed his work.
>
> *The Carter Administration’s Rethink*
>
> In the late 1970s, the Carter administration tried to postpone the decline
> of rural America. The Secretary of Agriculture, Bob Bergland, was a farmer
> from Minnesota who thought the family farm had served America well and
> needed protection. He admitted that all the USDA programs, as well as
> federal policies on taxation, economic concentration, and corporate power
> favored large farmers becoming super-large. He also admitted that he too
> had adhered to the dogma that assisting the “major commercial farmers”
> would eventually “filter down to the intermediate-sized and then the
> smallest producers.” However, he became doubtful of such a prospect. “I was
> never convinced,” he said, “we were anywhere near the right track. We had
> symbols, slogans, and superficialities. We seldom had substance.” (3)
>
> Bergland, with family farming disappearing in front of his eyes, decided to
> find out how and why American agriculture had become almost synonymous with
> large farms. He ordered his scientific staff to study the situation and the
> result was scholarly research and a series of meetings all over rural
> America. In one of those public meetings, a family farmer named William C.
> Beach from Oak City, North Carolina, defended the idea of the family farm
> and explained who is a family farmer and who is not:
>
> “The family farm is democracy and free enterprise at its best, a family
> running and working a business together, working together to produce food
> and fiber…. The family farm is not the agribusinessman in town, the lawyer
> at the courthouse, the doctor at the hospital, the professional man in his
> office. He is not people looking for a farm to buy as a hedge against
> inflation, nor the person looking for ways to reduce his income tax while
> making a safe investment. This group also includes the multinational
> corporations, food-processing industries and vertical integrators.” (4)
>
> Bergland also received a 1979 report from Louis Harris and Associates. The
> pollsters had surveyed Americans about the role of agriculture in American
> life. The report confirmed Americans loved the family farm:
>
> “Some Americans see the small family farm as an economically insignificant
> reminder of an outdated, romanticized way of life. But the public’s
> preference is for ‘a country which has a relatively large number of small
> farms’…. Significantly, there is a broad-based consensus on this issue,
> with strong support for the small family farm in evidence in every region
> of the country and in every significant demographic subgroup of the
> population.” (5)
>
> Bergland also heard from his own scientists. One of them was Don Paarlberg
> who was an expert on the country’s agricultural universities. These were
> known as land grant universities from the land the federal government
> donated to states for the founding of these public schools. In a draft
> report dated May 23, 1980, Paarlberg said:
>
> “[E]vidence has come before us that the land-grant college system… has
> served to speed the trend toward an industrialized agriculture. It simply
> has not been possible to make such great advances in efficiency as have
> occurred without having profound effect on the structure of agriculture….
> The Extension Service, with its advice that a farmer should have a business
> ‘big enough to be efficient,’ undoubtedly speeded up the process of farm
> consolidation and reduced the number of farms. In the classroom, emphasis
> on modern management helped put the traditional family farm into a state of
> total eclipse.” (6)
>
> This and other damning evidence convinced Bergland to “modify” the programs
> and policies of USDA, to slow down or prevent large farmers from becoming
> even larger. He recommended changes to federal policies on taxation,
> technological development, commodity, credit and marketing. Bergland wanted
> federal policies to touch and favor the small and medium sized family
> farmers. Even so, he knew his dream for the survival of the family farm was
> being dashed by the reality that agribusiness owned rural America.
>
> Despite Bergland’s noble sentiments, Jimmy Carter lost to Ronald Reagan in
> 1980. Indeed, the Bergland USDA issued its painful report, “A Time to
> Choose,” in January 1981 under the shadow of Reagan. The Reagan USDA chose
> to return to cannibalism as usual and the family farm was indeed brought to
> the verge of extinction (7).
>
> By 2005, from a farm population of 30.5 million in 1940, rural America had
> a much-diminished number of people who made a living directly out of
> farming. There are no statistics but I would guess that probably 100,000
> small family farmers and their families make up this alternative rural
> America. Most of these family farmers practice organic farming.
>
> In 1983, another researcher, Dean MacCannell, professor of rural sociology
> at the University of California-Davis, issued a severe warning that
> repeated those of Walter Goldschmidt and Bob Bergland: Size of farms
> matters in agriculture. Large farms destroy rural America.
>
> MacCannell, like Goldschmidt, said pro-agribusiness policies “cut against
> the grain of traditional American values.” His studies showed that giant
> farmers were becoming “neo-feudal” lords who, with government assistance,
> were propelling rural America into a Third World of poverty, injustice,
> exploitation and oppression. When large farms are in or near small rural
> communities they suck all life out of them:
>
> “In the place of towns which could accurately be characterized as providing
> their residents with [a] clean and healthy environment, a great deal of
> social equality and local autonomy, we find agricultural pollution, labor
> practices that lead to increasing social inequality, restricted opportunity
> to obtain land and start new enterprise, and the suppression of the
> development of [a] local middle class and the business and services
> demanded by such a class.” (8)
>
> MacCannell could also have said that black farmers suffered the worst fate
> of any in the emerging empire of large farms.
>
> *Black farmers*
>
> In 1900, there were 746,717 black farmers in the United States. In the next
> ten years black farmers increased by 19.6 percent, becoming 893,377. By
> 1920, black farmers had reached their highest number ever: 925,710. Then
> followed a precipitous decline, with most black farmers abandoning farming.
>
> The explanation for this decline lay with white society in the form of
> government and large farmers, which hit the landed blacks with the force of
> a cataclysm. They waged an invisible and unreported war of cheating former
> slaves of their promised forty acres and a mule. Large white farmers,
> agribusiness, and government agencies at the county, state, and federal
> level intimidated black farmers, giving them faulty information, denying
> them loans, and harassing them from their land (9).
>
> When black Americans started demanding civil rights in the 1950s, the wrath
> of the large white farmers boiled over. Black farmers fled to the northern
> cities as fast as they could. The legacy of slavery and the failure to
> distribute land to black Americans after the Civil War, which continued
> with the racism of the land grant universities and the federal extension
> service, took their toll. By the year 2000, fewer than 18,000 black farmers
> were still farming, a catastrophic decline of 98 percent in the twentieth
> century.
>
> On September 28, 2004, the Constitutional Subcommittee of the House
> Judiciary Committee had a hearing about the legal problems of the black
> farmers who were suing USDA. The Congressman who chaired the hearing, Steve
> Chabot, captured the tragedy of the black farmers, saying:
>
> “When slavery was ended in the United States, our government made a promise
> – a restitution of sorts – to the former slaves that they would be given 40
> acres and a mule…what is clear is that promise was intended to help freed
> slaves be independent economically and psychologically, as holders of
> private property rights. What also is clear is that the very government
> that made this promise, the “People’s Agency” [US Department of
> Agriculture] established in 1862 under President Abraham Lincoln, has
> sabotaged it by creating conditions that make sovereign and
> economically-viable farm ownership extremely difficult.”
>
> On December 8, 2010, the first black president of the United States, Barack
> Obama, signed into law a bill for the compensation of black farmers who had
> been discriminated against by USDA. However, for at least some black
> farmers this late policy did not heal the wounds of decades-long agrarian
> racism. For example, it did not please Gary Grant, president of the Black
> Farmers and Agriculturalists Association <http://www.bfaa-us.org/>.
> Grant’s
> parents had filed a discrimination suit against USDA in the early 1970s,
> but died in 2001, long before it was settled.
>
> In 1998, I met both Grant and his parents. They were hospitable and gentle
> people who had suffered greatly. Farming and the ownership of land were
> their passion.
>
> In a press release dated December 10, 2010, Gary Grant said he was present
> when Obama signed the 2010 act to bring a closure to the drama of black
> farmers in the United States. Grant, however, was unhappy with the law,
> especially the government officials who had harmed black farmers. He called
> them “evil and recalcitrant agents of the government” who “never lost their
> employment, and are now preparing for rich retirement with many benefits
> from having stolen the land, the livelihood, the health and for causing all
> manner of family destruction in the lives of so many black farmers.”
>
> *USDA’s rural America: get big or get out*
>
> The tragedy of black farmers, including small white family farmers, does
> not exist in official statistics. According to the 2002 Census of
> Agriculture the picture of rural America has not changed much in the last
> quarter of the twenty century: In 1974 the United States had 2,314,013
> farms and in 2002 there were still more than two million farms in America.
> Exactly: 2,128,892 farms.
>
> The other finding of the USDA census was that the average farm hardly
> changed in size. In 1974 the average was 440 acres. That size became 491
> acres in 1992 and then 441 in 2002. Even the number of the largest farms
> did not change that much. In 1974 there were 62,225 farms of 2,000 acres or
> more and in 2002 those giant farms numbered 77,970.
>
> This apparent stasis, however, conceals a dramatic increase in the number
> of very wealthy farmers. In 1974, for example, there were 11,412 farms,
> which earned $500,000 or more. But, by 2002, the number of super-farms
> making $500,000 or more was 70,642. Three percent of the farms making
> $500,000 or more shared 62 percent of total sales and government payments.
> Wealthier even than these were 29,862 farms making one million dollars or
> more from sales and government subsidies.
>
> Meanwhile, at the other end of the spectrum, thirty-five percent of
> America’s farmers in 2002 were completely impoverished. These farmers
> earned less than $2,500, which, in 2002, represented one percent of sales
> and government payments. Like the increase of billionaire Americans, this
> divergence in incomes is the outcome of decades-long agricultural policies.
>
> *Will the United States become a Brazil or an Argentina?*
>
> If the United States does nothing to abolish its oppressive system of giant
> agriculture, the remaining white family farmers – who declined by about 66
> percent in the twentieth century — will “get out” like their black brothers
> and sisters before them. Rural America will increasingly resemble the
> routine horror of an animal factory or a plantation.
>
> Such an agricultural system was described by Nancy Scheper-Hughes
> <http://anthropology.berkeley.edu/users/nancy-scheper-hughes> in her
> book *Death
> Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil*. Agriculture in
> the United States is slowly becoming more and more like the
> death-without-weeping haciendas of Northeast Brazil, but such a system is
> not a hospitable place for ecology, democracy, family farming or even for
> simple economic development.
>
> Another cruel colony of agribusiness is Argentina. Nearly the entire
> country is one vast field of bioengineered soybeans. Brewster Kneen
> <http://ramshorn.ca/brewster-kneen>, a Canadian researcher studying
> Argentina’s conversion to agribusiness, reports:
>
> “Argentineans, who used to be among the best fed people anywhere, are now,
> [in 2005], being, quite literally, forced to consume soy in place of milk,
> meat, vegetables and pulses such as lentils which were once produced in
> abundance on the small farms that have been overrun by large landowners
> growing soy. Lentils are now imported from Canada… One does not even want
> to wonder how many of the ubiquitous garbage pickers on the streets of
> Buenos Aires were once small farmers.” (10)
>
> The agribusiness developments in Argentina meanwhile, also destroy millions
> of small family farmers in America and Europe, and take the land of
> countless millions of peasants in the tropics. And what about the loss of
> wildlife following the mass application of machinery and toxins to
> agriculture? Brewster Kneen did not exaggerate when he said, “Industrial
> agriculture is bad, from beginning to end.” It is. Another researcher, Bill
> Mollison, an Australian promoter of intensive small-scale farming known as
> “permaculture,” says, “Most things in [modern industrialized] agriculture
> today [1992] are really death systems.”
>
> The international peasant and family farmer civil society organization, Via
> Campesina <http://viacampesina.org/en/>, says that it is this monstrous
> giant agriculture that is pushing family farmers and peasants throughout
> the world to the brink of “irredeemable extinction.”
>
> Which is why I hope Americans will not allow this project, however flashy
> it looks in its science garb, to complete its evil trajectory.
>
> Evil project? Yes, indeed. Platon said that doing wrong is bad, nasty,
> evil. But doing wrong without making amends is the worst of all evils.
> One would be hard pressed to find anything better fitting that description
> than the work of giant agriculture as it slices land and rural communities
> in its imperial conquest of nature and society.
>
> ENDNOTE: Josef Hoppichler of the Austrian Federal Institute for less
> Favoured Regions and Mountainous Areas sent us this report he wrote for the
> UN FAO in 2007. It is a very insightful examination of the relationship of
> traditional farming to agribusiness from a non-US perspective. The FAO
> declined to publish it. Read the Report: Disappearance of peasant
> farmers_EN_FAO_2007
> <
> http://independentsciencenews.org/environment/america-becoming-a-land-without-farmers/attachment/disappearance-of-peasant-farmers_en_fao_2007/
> >
>
> *Footnotes*
>
> (1) Walter Goldschmidt, As You Sow: Three Studies in the Social
> Consequences of Agribusiness (Originally published in 1947, Montclair, NJ:
> Allanheld, Osmun & Co., 1978).
>
> (2) US Congress, House of Representatives, Report of the Commissioner of
> Agriculture for the Year 1862 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office,
> 1863).
>
> (3) US Department of Agriculture, A Time to Choose (Washington, DC:
> Government Printing Office, January 1981) 4.
>
> (4) USDA, A time to Choose, 16.
>
> (5) USDA, Ibid.
>
> (6) USDA, A Time to Choose, 129.
>
> (7) The 2007 and 2012 farm bills only perpetuate this tradition.
>
> (8) Dean MacCannell, “Agribusiness and the Small Community” (University of
> California at Davis, 1983).
>
> (9) US Commission on Civil Rights, The Decline of Black Farming in America
> (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, February 1982); Gary R.
> Grant, Spencer D. Wood, and Willie J. Wright, “Black Farmers United: The
> Struggle Against Power and Principalities,” The Journal of Pan African
> Studies, vol. 5, no. 1, March 2012, 3-22.
>
> (10) Brewster Kneen, “The Giant Made Visible,” The Ram’s Horn, October
> 2005, 3.
>
> Evaggelos Vallianatos, former EPA analyst, teaches at Pitzer College. He is
> the author of several books, including “Poison Spring” (forthcoming from
> Bloomsbury Press).
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Kia ora

[image: Picture]
*Steve Hart*
*Ecology Architect*
*Designer, Teacher, Builder of Ecologically Sustainable Resilient
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