The present regime was made possible by two things. The cost of
capital and the cost of market access.
This led directly to the present distortion of industrial agriculture
as presently constituted. Worse though is that the excess capital
allows this industry to buy regulation to preserve bad practice as
long as possible and to subsidize it.
The internet has reshaped the market access problem into the
individuals favor. The most successful farm model today is a small
vertically integrated producer that delivers a quality product to the
customer. Production technology is also easily downsized to support
this market and one of the largest markets are exactly were those
manufacturers are.
The fight to alter regulation has only begun, but the set backs the
meat industry has faced shows us that the need it there and also the
political support from future customers.
In the past the consumer went to the farmer's gate looking for a
simple bargain and accepted the cost of processing. The farmer will
soon be better able to do just that to add the margins for his labor.
He is also naturally more efficient. After all foods not up to
shipping standards are still perfectly fine food and immediate
processing means it is produced fresh which is not as likely after it
leaves the farm gate.
My own model that I am developing for land based communities solves
the capital problem and transitions our agriculture into the new age.
The Real "Farmer"
Story: So God Made High-Fructose Corn Syrup
Friday, 15 February
2013 09:23
By Mark Engler
Of the commercials
that debuted at this year’s Super Bowl, one of the most talked
about has been “Farmer,” a Dodge truck ad that pays tribute to
the salt-of-the-earth middle Americans who work the land. (Check it
out here if you haven’t seen it yet.)
As a Midwesterner who
comes from a family just one generation removed from the farm (both
of my parents grew up on family farms that have since been lost),
some of the heartland pandering in the video worked on me. At the
same time, the main feeling I had while watching was that the ad
celebrated a type of farming that corporate agribusiness has all but
obliterated in the past fifty years.
The satirists at Funny
or Die apparently had the same idea. The other day, they released a
sly parody video called “God Made a Factory Farmer”:
As others have noted,
the content of the new Dodge ad does not reflect the current state of
American farming at all. For one, the imagery is a whitewash;
basically all the farmers shown in the commercial are white, while
the majority of actual farm workers in the United States today are
Latino.
The narration, too, is
the product of a bygone age. The speech featured in the ad was given
by radio personality Paul Harvey to a convention of the Future
Farmers of America in 1978. Even then, Harvey did not claim
authorship; the original “So God Made a Farmer” text dates back
to at least the 1940s.
In an article at the
Atlantic, Garance Franke-Ruta pointed to Harvey’s long-standing
conservative politics, as described in his New York Times obituary:
In his heyday, which
lasted from the 1950s through the 1990s, Mr. Harvey’s twice-daily
soapbox-on-the-air was one of the most popular programs on radio.
Audiences of as many as 22 million people tuned in on 1,300 stations
to a voice that had been an American institution for as long as most
of them could remember.
Like Walter Winchell
and Gabriel Heatter before him, he personalized the radio news with
his right-wing opinions, but laced them with his own trademarks: a
hypnotic timbre, extended pauses for effect, heart-warming tales of
average Americans and folksy observations that evoked the heartland,
family values and the old-fashioned plain talk one heard around the
dinner table on Sunday….
He railed against
welfare cheats and defended the death penalty. He worried about the
national debt, big government, bureaucrats who lacked common sense,
permissive parents, leftist radicals and America succumbing to moral
decay.
Of course, in the end,
it was not godless California hippies who undermined the family farm
and gave us a diet of high-fructose corn syrup. And if you’re
looking to condemn welfare scams and big-government boondoggles, you
need search no further than the subsidy regime that undergirds the
profits of modern corporate agribusiness. Sadly, like members of my
own extended family, many people who grew up on the farm, fed on the
gospel of hard work and rugged individualism, experienced misery in
trying to carry on the family tradition. As sustainable farming
advocate Tim Wightman writes in his critique of the Dodge ad:
I fell for the hype of
serving a corporate food system with duty, honor and 100 hour weeks
and very nearly ruined my health in doing so. I am now reminded of
all the John Henrys I have known over the years, desperately trying
to stay ahead of the system. I am reminded of the migrant workers
who’s names we will never know still working the 100 hour standard.
I am reminded of all the farm sons and daughters who are not on the
land. God may have made a farmer, but Big Ag broke his back[.]
Could the type of land
stewardship celebrated in “So God Made a Farmer” be revived,
protected, and made sustainable? Perhaps. But to do so would
challenge some of the most cherished values of the market. As the
great farmer-poet Wendell Berry explained in a Dissent interview with
Sarah Leonard:
To have good farming
or good land use of any kind, you have got to have limits. Capitalism
doesn’t acknowledge limits. That is why we have supposedly
limitless economic growth in a finite world. Good agriculture is
formal. You can have limits without form, but you can’t have form
without limits. If you look around the country and find small farmers
who have prospered in hard times, you’ll probably find that they’ve
prospered because they’ve accepted their limits….
There’s a
fundamental incompatibility between industrial capitalism and both
the ecological and the social principles of good agriculture. The aim
of industrialization has always been to replace people with machines
or other technology, to make the cost of production as low as
possible, to sell the product as high as possible, and to move the
wealth into fewer and fewer hands….
In the middle of the
last century, Aldo Leopold was writing and publishing on the “land
community” and ecological land husbandry. Sir Albert Howard and J.
Russell Smith had written of natural principles as the necessary
basis of agriculture. This was work that was scientifically
reputable. At the end of the Second World War, ignoring that work,
the politicians, the agricultural bureaucracies, the colleges of
agriculture, and the agri-business corporations went all-out to
industrialize agriculture and to get first the people and then the
animals off the land and into the factories. This was a mistake,
involving colossal offenses against both land and people. The costs
have not been fully reckoned, let alone fully paid.
I’d say that’s a
story that deserves the widest possible audience. Unfortunately,
something tells me it won’t be featured in a Super Bowl ad anytime
soon.
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