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Why Not Start AgriCorps, for a New Crop of Farmers?
SALINA, Kansas - When the Agriculture Department released its 2007 census recently, the news appeared surprisingly good: For the first time since World War II, the United States did not lose farms, it gained them — 75,810, to be exact, for a total of 2.2 million.
But on closer inspection, the numbers aren’t so hopeful. The discrepancy stems from this tricky question: What is a farm? The census has changed its definition nine times since 1850, most recently to “any place from which $1,000 or more of agricultural products were produced and sold, or normally would have been sold, during the census year.”
This loose definition is meant to err on the side of inclusion, but ultimately it just errs. Take, for example, the four chickens I keep in my backyard. I sometimes sell eggs to neighbors, and at the going rate I could make $500 a year. If I got four more hens, my suburban home could qualify as a farm.
Silly, right? But where do you place the lower limit — or the upper limit? The Cargill feedlot in Lockney, Texas, consists of 60,000 cattle kept in dirt yards and fattened on feed grown elsewhere. Is that a farm? While the census says yes, most Americans would say no.
So then, what is a farm?
To answer that, we must first ask: Why do we care? Really, why is it good news when farms — and, more importantly, the farmers who run them — increase?
There are sentimental reasons, of course, but there is also a practical reason. Farmers are valuable because they bring human scale to our massive food system. Think of how many people, in the wake of each new salmonella scare, turn to the farmers market. We do so because we know that farmers bring oversight and ethics to food production, contributions that only individual humans can offer.
In the future, farmers’ importance will only grow. Their intimate, human-scale knowledge of the land is what will let agriculture adapt to climate change. And as the cheap energy that industrial agriculture depends on disappears, it is farmers, with their small-scale innovation and sheer manual labor, who will feed us. Why do we care about having more farmers? Because deep down we know they are essential to a functioning food system.
So I offer this new definition of a farmer: someone who grows crops in sufficient quantity to be a true commercial entity, yet is still close enough to the ground to bring human scale and values to the process. Not the backyard chicken enthusiast, nor the corporation behind the feedlot, but the individual human on the land, growing our food.
Revisit the census with this definition, and the good news vanishes. The USDA’s reported increases occurred exclusively in farms with yearly sales of less than $2,500 or more than $500,000 — that is, the backyard operations and the corporate-scale businesses. In every other category, the numbers dropped or, in one case, stayed the same. Between 2002 and 2007, the U.S. lost 43,603 real farms.
To stop this hemorrhaging, we must shift from blindly encouraging production to investing in a system that values farmers and propagates them. We need to help new farmers obtain markets, land and credit. And we must inspire nonfarmers to enter the profession. Imagine, for instance, a program that puts interns on farms — an AmeriCorps for agriculture. In this “AgriCorps,” participants would learn the skills of farming and experience the lifestyle; hosts would receive valuable labor to bolster their businesses.
Such a program would face an obvious objection: AmeriCorps offers volunteers to public-service organizations, but most farms are private businesses. Why should the rest of us help support them?
But maybe we need to reconsider that line of thinking. By defining farms and farmers as purely economic entities, we condemn them to a system that inevitably eliminates them. What if instead we began to see farmers as the public servants they are, and enable them to be the public servants we need: stewards of our soil and water, pillars of our rural communities, and guardians of our food.
Perhaps by redefining what farms mean to us, we can help their numbers grow — for real.a
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10 Comments so far
Show AllGood article.
Why not help an 'old' farmer? Will you help me Lisa M. Hamilton?
I need support for my lawsuit against Organic Valley--Family of Farms, et al.
Cash donations would be appreciated. Ha ha.
HA!
Words (and definitions) are SO much cheaper and more pleasing to the entrenched bureaucrats, hey?
Pardon my cynicism. NOT.
But: Sincere apologies to my friends and supporters here (on CD), for I am not angry at any of you, who are poor and like me in more ways than you are unlike me. I love you and, thank you.
nedlud
On the one hand, did you ever hear of FFA, (Future Farmers of America), a popular extra-curricular club in rural high schools? Also land grant colleges, like Purdue, have agricultural programs that teach students how to farm by the rules established by the giant agri-corps like Monsanto.
On the other hand, given the current market conditions being a small scale farmer is a life of very much toil and very little reward. Replacing herbicides with hand weeding, replacing tractors with hand tilling, replacing insecticides with manually plucking tomato horn worms off your tomato plants pays about fifty cents an hour for the labor, or not enough to by a Big Mac combo meal after a day’s labor. (Maybe an enterprising horn worm plucker could sell them as fish bait and double his income to a dollar an hour.)
Farming is already seen as a public service, the Department of Agriculture hands out millions of dollars in farm subsidies, unfortunately most of these subsidies go to large farms, the larger the farm the bigger the subsidy. Currently prices for most meats are below the cost of production and the price paid for milk to farmers is well below the cost of production. If giant factory livestock feeding operations can’t produce meat or milk at a profit what chance does a small scale farmer have?
The ethanol industry, the great savior of agriculture, is in a world of hurt. VeraSun, the second largest producer of ethanol in the U.S. went bankrupt last October and they were so far from being profitable that the company had to be liquidated. Other energy companies bought VeraSun’s ethanol production plants for around half of what it cost to build them. Farmers that had contracts to deliver corn to these plants were screwed over royally by the bankruptcy judge. Instead of voiding these contracts the Judge gave VeraSun the right to wait until 10 days before the contracts came due to announce if they would honor the contract or void it. Heads VeraSun wins, tails the farmers lose.
Agriculture is so screwed up when you get to the end of writing about it it is impossible to pen a closing paragraph.
The answer to failing agriculture seems to be permaculture.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xShCEKL-mQ8
Gawd, public servants, guardians of the soil, what bunch of crap.
Agri is yet another enterprise seeking to provide for itself by providing something of value to others.
It's hard physical work, very long hours, w/o guaranteed reward much like most any enterprise that seeks to survive/expand.
Farming isn't done with mules and one bottom plows. Major investments in equipment is necessary as with many enterprises. Should we provide subsidies to other endeavors. Does one subsidy deserve another, another, etc.
The whole ethanol thing is such a joke. The food value of corn has been distorted to produce a worthless product.
If only one could walk in the shoes of a true farmer and his family, perhaps then one could define what it means to make your living from the soil as I have done for 25 years.
debi
Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars
"What if instead we began to see farmers as the public servants they are, and enable them to be the public servants we need: stewards of our soil and water, pillars of our rural communities, and guardians of our food."
Stewards are exactly what we need, not Big Agra. The big Food Industry IMV is what is destroying farming, the land, our health. At the rate they're going taking over even the slightest competition (from organic farms)etc, we'll be eating Soylent Green. That is if we survive the next swine flu epidemic caused by industrial farming.
It seems that, unless we start with removal of support for Agribusiness and CAFOs, nothing done at the bottom will amount to a hill of beans (sorry, it just came out). And if we stop support at the top, I'm not sure we'd need to promote at the bottom. We're already reading about young people gravitating toward farming.
In general, I'd say this is not a time to increase gov't power over anything.
So, I'm a farmer too? And here I thought I was just an overworked gardener. Well I'll be. I've been wondering where the line was drawn between gardener and farmer. I always thought it was defined by whether or not you had a John Deere. I always just use forks, rakes, spades, trowels hoes and my bare hands.
Even as a kid I was a farmer, walking around the suburban neighborhood I grew up in, toting my little red wagon behind me, selling fresh, ripe produce from my backyard garden. At 9 years old I'm sure I was making over a thousand dollars a summer that way. Farm out!
I grew up on a farm and yes true farming is hard, dangerous, dirty work. But it was what my parents desired to do. I remember it fondly. But then I was not the one who had to get up before dawn.
I remember FFA and 4H club. Both are still there.
Now we have a new movement, the edible schoolyard.
http://www.edibleschoolyard.org/
Edible Schoolyards teach math, science, biology, nutrition, cooking .... all while teaching kids where food comes from. It gets them outside at a time when sports are cut. It may save schools funds by having students grow some of the stuff served at lunch.
If one kid thinks "hey, I'd like to do this" or goes on to major in agriculture and if other kids, parents and teacher learn to think of food outside the box, the box store, Jack in the Box that is .... that's good.