April 2, 2000
As Life for Family Farmers Worsens, the Toughest Wither
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
TRYON, Neb. -- Walking across
the prairie,
stepping carefully around cow pies, Mike Abel
confesses that he has told his son and daughter
not to follow in his line of work.
He sounds for a moment like a repentant
bank robber. But Mr. Abel, 45, is in an even less
promising field: He is a cattle rancher.
Ranchers like Mr. Abel on the lovely desolation of the Nebraska
prairie near this hamlet,
miles and miles from nowhere and nothing,
evoke the gritty determination and toughness
of John Wayne on a good day. These days the
ranchers evoke something else -- poverty.
This rural area, McPherson County, is by far
the poorest county in the country, measured by
per capita income. Federal statistics show that
people in McPherson County earned an average of $3,961 in 1997, the most
recent year for
which statistics were available, compared with
$5,666 for the next poorest county, Keya Paha,
also in Nebraska. The richest, New York County, better known as
Manhattan, had a per capita
income of $68,686 in 1997.
Cowboys like Mr. Abel might seem the last
people to cry. But with much of the agricultural
economy in deep distress, with dreams of family farms fading like old cow
bones on the
prairie, even the cowboys' lips are sometimes
trembling.
"What always hurt us was when we're at the
table trying to figure out how to make a land
payment, and the kids are seeing us crying as
we wonder what happens if we can't make the
payment," said Mr. Abel, a sturdy man with
flecks of gray in close-cropped hair. "We'd
always hoped this would be a family operation.
But why should my son, Tyler, struggle and
make money only two out of five years when he
could get a good-paying job in the city somewhere?"
While most of the American economy is
going gangbusters, many rural areas are undergoing a wrenching
restructuring that is impoverishing small ranchers and farmers, forcing
them to sell out, depopulating large chunks
of rural America and changing the way Americans get their food. The
gains in farming and
ranching efficiency are staggering, but so is the
blow to the rural way of life.
Just a few years ago, the United States
thought it had a plan to revitalize the agriculture economy: the Freedom
to Farm Act.
Passed by the Republican Congress and
signed by President Clinton in 1996, the law
aimed to phase out subsidies but ease regulations and promote exports to
make farming
profitable without government aid.
Almost everyone agrees that the law has not
worked (although there is also a consensus that
it is the other guy's fault). Direct federal payments to farmers last year
rose to a record
$23 billion. That is far more than the federal
government spent on elementary and secondary education, school lunches and
Head
Start programs combined.
With the failure of American farm policy,
no one has much of a plan anymore, even
though the present course appears unsustainable.
The growing cost of federal farm
programs, the replacement of small family
farms with huge factory farms, the fading of
rural hamlets -- all these point to historic
changes under way in American agriculture. Yet the changes are happening
without
anyone guiding them or the nation paying
them much heed.
The poverty statistics can seem misleading to city dwellers, for the
poor farming
areas rarely have homeless people or anything like a slum, and in any case
cattle and
hog prices are rising this year. But prospects look dismal, adding to the
pressure on
many rural areas.
The depopulation is evident in the grade
school in Ringgold, a crossroads village in
the east end of McPherson County. Leah
Christopher, an effervescent eighth grader
who is an outstanding gymnast, will graduate from the school in a few
months at the
top of her class, and at the bottom. She is
the only eighth grader.
The entire school, from kindergarten to
the eighth grade, has only one teacher and
seven students, four of them from Leah's
family. Another grade school in the county
has just four students and will drop to three
next year.
"I took a training course once where the
other teachers were talking about using the
school psychologist and other resources like
that," said Elnora Neal, the teacher at the
Ringgold school. "Well, I'm everything. At
this school, I'm teacher, nurse, psychologist,
P.E. teacher and janitor."
McPherson County had 1,692 people in
1920, and since then its population has been
steadily falling, to about 540 today. At its
peak, it had 20 post offices, 5 towns and 63
school districts; now it has 1 post office, 5
schools and, if one is generous enough to
include Ringgold, 2 towns. The average age
in the county is in the late 50's, the average
American farmer today is 54.
The Efficiency
Surge in Output Keeps Prices Down
Rusty Moore, a lanky, rail-thin fifth-generation rancher, complains
bitterly about the
difficulties as he sorts cattle on an icy,
overcast day on his 13,000-acre ranch.
"I went to college for four years and
decided to come back and live in poverty,"
Mr. Moore, 26, said laughing, as he stomped
his feet against the cold.
But while there are many reasons for the
misery in the agricultural economy, perhaps
Mr. Moore's greatest adversary is himself --
and all the other farmers and ranchers like
him who have figured out how to increase the
output of their land. In Mr. Moore's grandfather's day, it took about 18
acres of this land
to sustain a cow and her calf.
Now, ranchers
have improved efficiency so that they need
just 7 acres for a cow and a calf.
This surge in output is the main force
driving the restructuring of agriculture. In
1969, the average pig used for breeding produced 6.7 piglets per year. By
last year, that
had risen to 16 piglets per year, and the most
efficient operators got 22.
Those kinds of productivity increases have
resulted in a world awash with grain, pork,
beef and milk, even though the proportion of
the American public living on farms and
ranches has tumbled to 1.5 percent today
from 42 percent in 1900. Some experts believe that with biotechnology, the
productivity increases are now beginning to accelerate.
For many years, the agricultural equivalent of the four-minute mile
has been the
yield of 400 bushels of corn per acre. The
average is about 150 bushels, but last year an
Iowa farmer, Francis R. Childs, achieved
celebrity by producing 394 bushels under
tight monitoring.
Just as Roger Bannister changed the
world's understanding of human athletic potential when he ran a
sub-four-minute mile in
1954, so Mr. Childs is waking up agricultural
economists. If his techniques could be replicated and spread widely, that
could mean a
doubling of corn output.
"I don't see any reason why that can't be
done," Mr. Childs said.
Yet he acknowledges that he is a bit worried about what could be done
with all that
corn. Historically, increases in productivity
have brought falling prices that punish the
farmers, while rewarding consumers.
"Consumers have a great life ahead of
them," said Neil E. Harl, an agricultural
economist at Iowa State University. "We're
entering a new era, especially in crops but
also in livestock."
The Factory
Mass Producing Under Contract
You can smell the future of farming as you
approach it on a narrow dirt road just west of
McPherson County, in neighboring Arthur
County.
A series of long, low warehouses contain
what is less a hog farm than a pork factory.
The factory is still being expanded, but ultimately it will cost $5 million
and produce
120,000 pigs each year.
To anyone who thinks that hogs are dirty
and humans are clean, a visit to this farm is
an indignity. Before being allowed near the
pigs, all employees and visitors must strip,
shower, shampoo and change into new underwear, socks, boots and overalls
that the
farm provides. The aim is to protect the pigs
from diseases brought in by nonhygienic
humans.
The sows spend their days lying in tiny
pens, eating, drinking and growing piglets
inside of them. After giving birth, the sows
suckle their piglets until being weaned at 17
days and then after a few days' respite they
come in heat and the process begins again.
The sows are taken into a pen next to
several boars, whose sole job is to sweet talk
the sows and get them sexually excited.
At that point, a technician artificially
inseminates the sows, as the boars watch
from the next pen.
"It must be a frustrating existence for the
boars," acknowledged Dwayne Fritzen, the
manager of the operation.
The pregnant sows even get ultrasound
examinations at 30 days and 60 days to make
sure their pregnancies are going well.
"This is efficiency," Mr. Fritzen said. "I
grew up on an old-fashioned hog farm, where
you go out and buy hogs and you don't know
the pedigree. Here, you know everything
about these gals" -- gestured to the sows --
"and if you don't like the results, then you
switch genetic companies" and get new sows
or new semen.
Industrialized agriculture began to replace traditional family farms
in poultry,
and one study found that these days the
average poultry farmer raises 240,000 birds
a year and earns just $12,000 for his labor.
Many scholars say that increasingly, livestock and crops alike will
be produced under
contract to large food companies.
"The farmer in those contracts is somewhere between what you'd call a
businessman and a laborer," said Chuck Hassebrook,
program director for the Center for Rural
Affairs, a Nebraska research center. "Management decisions are typically
made by the
company."
Mr. Hassebrook added: "More and more,
the people on the land become simply laborers. The returns are siphoned out
of their
communities."
The Poverty
Being Squeezed by the System
With the welfare system hugely curtailed
in the last few years, there is more scrutiny
than ever of what critics see as a major
welfare system for grain and cotton farmers.
Moreover, though the evidence is mixed,
some economists argue that the billions of
dollars in federal payments are helping to
drive out family farmers and ranchers.
"Congress talks about saving the family
farm, but it pours the money disproportionately to larger farmers," said
John A.
Schnittker, who runs an agricultural economics consulting firm in
California. "As
you subsidize these large farms, they can
pay more in buying land, and they can pay
more in renting land. And so the system we
have now really concentrates farming
among the large operators."
Two situations loom, neither one encouraging: payments may continue
to soar until
they threaten the budget, or Congress may
be forced to cut payments, leaving farmers
in desperate shape.
"We're in a quandary," said Keith Collins,
the chief economist for the United States
Department of Agriculture. Mr. Collins said
the department's projections were that this
year's price for wheat would be the lowest
since 1986, for cotton the lowest since 1974
and for soybeans the lowest since 1972.
While grain farmers are ever more dependent on the agricultural dole,
ranchers --
who get left out of the payment system -- are
often irritated by the payments.
"Just to subsidize people because the price
is low -- that kills ingenuity," said Doug
Schmidt, 45, struggling to make a go of cattle
ranching on a small spread, near Ringgold.
Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman says
that farm policy has to be revamped and
broadened to do more than make payments
to distressed farmers.
He says that it should
also help them add value to their products,
make it easier for them to insure against
risks and work on mechanisms to help people
run businesses in rural communities.
"As much as we'd like to use farm programs as the panacea for problems
out there
affecting rural America, they cannot be,"
Mr. Glickman said. He added, "We've also
got to make rural America economically
thriving, so that people will have a reason to
stay on family-sized farms even if they can't
get all their income" from farming.
The larger question is why the government
should work so energetically and expensively to preserve the family farm.
Family-owned restaurants, bookstores and newspapers were all widely
regarded as beneficial
to their communities, yet in each case America allowed many of them to fade
and be
replaced by more ferocious and efficient
economic competitors. Only in the case of
family farms, presumably because they are
so rooted in American mythology and in
Jefferson's ideal of the yeoman farmer-citizen, are Americans willing to
spend $23
billion a year fighting economic change.
The Future
Corporate Flags Over Giant Spreads
As dawn comes in McPherson County, a
glorious orange sun rises from the prairies
and casts a glow on LaVerne Neal, a 73-year-old rancher feeding his cattle.
Mr. Neal has 240 cows and 3,840 acres, and
he had always assumed that his family
would ranch here forever. But he now realizes that his land is really too
small for future
generations to make a living, and he sees his
problem as emblematic of a larger pattern of
the decline of the family farm.
"I don't think there are going to be family
farms for too many more years," Mr. Neal
said wistfully, driving his pickup over the
fields. "Those big outfits are taking over."
That is one of the most common laments in
agriculture. The underlying problem for
small farms and ranches is diminishing margins and a tiny return on
capital. Many
farmers and ranches have million-dollar investments that are losing them
money, and
so the country's poorest county probably has
a high proportion of millionaires.
Yet paradoxically, for all the fears of
corporations sneaking into agriculture, dismal returns are the best
protection family
farms have. If McDonald's announced that it
were going to produce its own beef, wheat,
lettuce and tomatoes, its shareholders would
sell in panic, because the return on the
investment would be dreadful.
"Why would they want the aggravation?"
asked Ed Sowder, a county commissioner.
"If you've got ranchers out there who think
they're working for themselves, why bother?"
Only about 2 percent of farms are run by
corporations. But corporate oligopolies dominate both the input side
(selling seed and
equipment) and output side (four companies
now control 80 percent of the beef market).
The consolidation of farms under way
today seems to be a continuation of a trend
that goes back 100 years. The average American farm has gone from 139 acres
in 1910 to
435 acres today, and the driving force behind
this change is simple: economics and a
yearning for a better life.
For all the rosy
glow that is conjured by the phrase "family
farm," it was often a harsh life.
"When I was a boy, for my birthday all I'd
get was a pair of socks," Mr. Neal recalled.
"Come to think of it, that's all I used to give
my children, as well. But these days, you
walk into a kid's room, and you have to kick
aside half a dozen teddy bears just to step
inside."
As the pain in the farm sector drags on
endlessly, farmers like the Abels decide that
if they are to keep their children in teddy
bears, they may be better off in other lines of
work.
"If you pass on your ranch to your son,"
Bob Long, a county commissioner and rancher, said, "then it's child abuse."
