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  • From: Bob Waldrop <bob@bobwaldrop.net>
  • To: permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] [might be spam] Re: NYT morons at work: Don't Let Your Children Grow Up to Be Farmers - NYTimes.com
  • Date: Wed, 13 Aug 2014 21:30:15 -0500

It's paid labor, their children have children of their own and generally the operation is arranged as a partnership of some sort. They sell direct to the public and also sell into the regular commodity system. They are also larger. One of our members is the largest certified organic wheat farmer in Oklahoma, and the only certified organic beef producer, he has 5,000 certified organic acres. They sell wheat, flour, and organic beef through our Coop.

When I grew up on a farm in SW Oklahoma, my father always paid me for my summer labor. 50 cents an hour for planting cotton, chopping cotton, changing irrigation pipe, plowing wheat stubble, feeding cattle, and other misc farm chores of the 1960s in southwest Oklahoma. of course that was in 1966 when 50 cents was two silver quarters and gasoline was less than a quarter.

Bob Waldrop, Okie City

On 8/13/2014 9:00 PM, farmer1@gasperfarm.com wrote:
I have a question about the long term established farmers who don't depend
on off the farm jobs.

Are you saying they are successful enough that they're able to employ the
next generation, or that they're depending on the unpaid labor of their
children?

I know of some producers who do good business selling to chefs but by and
large it is trouble. They're rarely willing to pay a high enough price for
what they want and many farmers have gone under due to unpaid accounts
from restaurants.

Pete



The Oklahoma Food Cooperative has about 100 active producers, of that
number, 59 of them are growing food or raising poultry or livestock.
About half our producers are women owned or women managed operations.

All of the "newer farmers" of our 59 have to have an off-farm job in
order to support their "farming habit". The only ones that don't have
off-farm income are long-term established farmers, many of those are
parents and their kids as the labor (older kids, often starting their
own families).

Of course, this isn't necessarily restricted to organic or other forms
of alternative agriculture. Years ago, some farmers in southwest
Oklahoma went in together and bought a bunch of Texas lottery tickets.
They won. One of them was interviewed by an Oklahoma City television
station, and he was asked what he was going to do with his share of the
winnings (several hundred thousand dollars). He said, "Well, I reckon
I'll just keep on farming until it is all gone." Hoots of laughter were
heard around the state, but it was kind of a bitter laughter.

I dated a girl in junior high and later in life was back home for a
family event and we were catching up and I asked about her, and there
was a sudden silence around the table. Finally my grandfather cleared
his throat and said, "Bobby Max, I forgot you used to date her. Their
family was losing their land to a foreclosure, and her mother committed
suicide." She laid herself down on the burning trash pile behind their
house and burned and asphyxiated herself to death. It was written up in
the NY Times. This was during one of the big waves of farmer
bankruptcies over the last 30 years or so. I forget the numbers but that
year I believe there were several hundred farmer suicides.

Sales here at the Oklahoma Food Cooperative have been declining slowly
for two years. We got started in 2003 and spent the next few years
running to keep ahead of the demand, and then we topped out in
2012-2013, having sold $5.8 million in locally grown and made food and
non-food items in ten years, and it has been a slow downhill grind since
then. The three year drought certainly hasn't helped things at all.
We have less vegetables for sale now than we had three years ago, but
part of that is that when we got started, there were maybe 4 or 5
farmers markets in Oklahoma County, now there are 30, so there are more
places for farmers to sell their produce.

One of our more established farmers, who has been with us since our
first year, called me up last year and asked, "Is it time to give up
yet?" My heart was chilled when I heard that from her because she's
from a multi-generational farm family, all organic operations, certified
Animal humane operations, certified naturally grown, produces a diverse
mixture of crops and livestock/poultry for sale and everything is sold
direct to the public. Plus she makes a line of body care and household
cleaning products. She has a traveling grocery store on an old school
bus with a regular route, and she sells through us. It's her and her
family, at least one daughter and a son are involved with the food
production. If she is edging towards despair, I'm worried. She appears
to have gotten a second wind though and has now opened a store in one of
our larger regional cities. So I'm glad about that but I hear similar
laments from other producers.

Alternative farming as we know it is hard and all the cards are stacked
against these folks. At one point I proposed to the producers that the
Coop start a oklahomafoodbtob.coop to facilitate sales to businesses.
Not a single coop producer was interested --

(1) They didn't want to sell what they had at a wholesale price. "That
just means less money for us."
(2) They said there was zero chance the restaurants would actually pay
us on time.

They set their own prices when they sell through the Coop, and each
producer functions as his or her own brand. Members order items from
specific producers. The customers pay us a commission for buying through
the Coop and the producers pay a commision for selling through the Coop,
so the bottom line for our producers is that they get 77.5 cents out of
every Coop grocery dollar, except for the sales tax.

Most of them had had very bad experiences with local chefs. The Coop
pays our producers when they bring in their orders, "same day payment"
has always been our rule. We can do that because (a) we have working
capital built up from the sale of member shares, and (b) we pay the
farmers the same day our customers pay us. And our customers do pay us
or they don't get their groceries.

So we ditched that idea.

It's not a surprise that it's an unsustainable system, and this is what
it looks like when a system is accelerating towards collapse.

Bob Waldrop
Oklahoma City


So it's an unsustainable system out there.
On 8/11/2014 6:43 PM, John D'hondt wrote:
There was a time in this country where you could support a family from a
farm, but that is no longer the case because of the cheap food system
which was intentionally setup to concentrate all the profits in the
system
in the hands of the processors.

Pete

Exactly, in the 1930's a farm laborer could feed his family for a week
from the proceeds of one sheep fleece (just wool). I saw recently
sheep being sold for 25 cents per head.
Prices for farm produce have been deliberately driven to near nothing
since 1945.
John

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Permaculture: -- portal to an expanding global network of landtech
pioneers practicing and teaching permaculture
while designing ecological, biointensive land use systems with integrated
elements for synergy, sustainability, regeneration and enhanced
nature-compatible
human habitat --


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https://plus.google.com/+Avantgeared
Permaculture: -- portal to an expanding global network of landtech pioneers
practicing and teaching permaculture
while designing ecological, biointensive land use systems with integrated
elements for synergy, sustainability, regeneration and enhanced
nature-compatible
human habitat --

--
http://www.ipermie.net How to permaculture your urban lifestyle and adapt to
the realities of peak oil, economic irrationality, political criminality, and
peak oil.





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