Country Corner

by Steve Fairchild

A note to the outside

Agriculture has evolved through self-interest, but not how you think

I was sitting in a restaurant pondering the human skeleton and beauty. It struck me that in the fly-blown and worm’s meal end, we’re all just a clicking pile of calcium—bones with lumps of flesh and fat attached, all covered with a stretching of skin—the body’s largest sweat and oil-oozing organ. Funny then that when we look at each other we see so many different things; funny that a plunging neckline makes for bigger tips; funny that a well-muscled body and symmetrically masculine mug is worth millions in the movies and yours truly is left to scratch away in the pages before you.

I write these things not because you should be much concerned with some Midwest farm-boy editor’s view on the advantages or shallowness of beauty. I write to illuminate the fact that our world is based on personal perception.

We all perceive things—say beauty—on a personal level, but we tend to have some societal and probably species-based norm from which we judge.

In the same restaurant, I’d been reading about the superstructure of agriculture. I’d been reading that everything that is good and wholesome (the individual) is consumed or abused by what’s greedy and evil (the company). And again I was struck by our preconceptions.

Many of us are from a generation that remembers the family farm as a bit more holistic and self-sufficient. My generation is probably the last full-scale generation of farm kids to remember it that way, though.

We remember cows that were milked for home consumption, hens that laid for home consumption, honey from backyard beehives, blackberry brambles, fruit orchards and pigs and steers that ended up in our own freezers. Just a generation before that, farm families depended on all of these things plus mills that turned the wheat to flour, oats that fed teams of horses and mules, lye soap, tallow candles and every other nuance dreamed up that made the home place self-sufficient.

Glory days, those were. And, according to the author I was reading, how quickly it was all undone by the merchants of greed. Corporations, driven by the greed of their shareholders, took the meager excess of the self-sufficient farm and turned it to processed goods, distributed it, advertised it, and sold it to the robotic consumer. Always mindful of their greedy taskmasters, the shareholders, such corporations couldn’t figure out how to best gouge consumers. Ever-increasing food costs, it was reasoned, would shock the system. The consumer would revolt.

Instead, the corporations turned back to the farm, encouraging increased output and efficiency and fooling the farmer into dumping self-sufficiency for the lust for lucre. Farmers traded the ingenuity they’d long spent on self-sufficiency for building technical know-how to produce more meat, eggs, milk and crop.

It’s lunch time. I don’t have time to relive the period of farm mechanization told through the jaundiced eyes of this book’s populist author. I just want to describe a photo I have on my desk.

I’d guess it’s from the 1940s. It’s of a man preparing to inject anhydrous ammonia on a small, cabless tractor with a three-point hitch applicator that has just a couple knives. Now this man didn’t ditch self-sufficiency because he was greedy. He ditched it because a bigger tractor beat the hell out of riding the whole cold March day in the wind, dust and ammonia fumes.

People didn’t quit chickens because some corporation sold them out. They quit because birds are a hassle, and refrigeration meant that the store had eggs every day of the week. They quit milking because it is draining to be tied down twice a day. And, they quit grinding their own flour because you could get it in a bag at nominally higher prices and you didn’t have to fix the worn-out mill every year.

Try this for perception. Tell today’s 14-year-olds how The Man owns the farmer these days. If they’re farm kids, tell them that The Man owns their father. Then tell them that to get dad out of hock, they’ll have to milk in the morning, gather eggs in the afternoon and stick their hand in a hive of angry bees to sweeten their morning oat gruel with honey. Tell them that. And watch them dump dad and the farm. They’ll dump it all right, but no more quickly than the sons and daughters of the preceding five generations have for the very same reasons.

Dear critics of farming, you can’t put it all on corporations. You’ve got to take some blame yourselves.

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