How did the modern conventional farm become farmerless?
From the beginning, American farming was about extraction rather than preservation, about settlers civilizing or taming the wilderness instead of working with it. As food writer and chef Dan Barber describes it, “We set out to conquer rather than to adapt—unable, or just unwilling, to adjust our sight to the needs of the new ecology.”1 The New World had a seemingly endless abundance of land, meaning that farmers who exhausted their soils could simply move west—not exactly an incentive to practice good soil management. By the 1820s the nation’s farmland bore visible scars: topsoil washed and blown, forests denuded, soil devoid of organic matter.2
Still, farms of this era did several things right. The most important thing to note is how diverse they were. Many species of plants and animals called the farm home, which meant each contributed to the overall health of the land. Symbiotic relationships between plant and animal species maintained soil health naturally. Farmers sold their crops and animals in local markets, feeding their families as well as the surrounding community. Farmers were also self-reliant; they saved seeds for the next year’s crop, used on-farm fertilizer produced by animals, relied on horses and oxen for muscle power, and controlled weeds and pests through crop diversification and rotation. The sun powered everything, while oil powered nothing.3 Today we might classify their farming as something close to the “whole-farm approach.”
I doubt early farmers would have described their agriculture in such a way, though. The whole-farm approach was really the only approach. Infertile soil couldn’t be remedied with synthetic nitrogen like it can today. Diesel power couldn’t replace horsepower. Families and communities couldn’t be fed with monocultures. What we call mimicking nature today was just farming during this era, much like the distinction we now make between organic and nonorganic food. What we call organic food today was simply food back then. For those who stayed in the East and perfected techniques that mirrored nature, and many did, the whole-farm approach ensured their survival by protecting their resources.
By 1900, though, most of the Great Plains was a patchwork of farms laid out in tidy 160- or 320-acre blocks. Whether the sod was suitable for farming or not, it felt the rip of the plow. Meanwhile, the Native Americans, forced to live on reservations with land so poor that even white settlers rejected it, suffered even more than the prairie.4 They were destitute, and the buffalo, the main source of survival for the Plains Indians, were practically extinct. As the food market globalized, farmers faced increasing overseas competition and they began to specialize in certain crops and animals to stay in business.5 Specialization, however, reduced farm resilience, making farmers vulnerable to bankruptcy. If wheat prices plummeted, or disease or hail destroyed the crop, the specialized wheat farmer had no other crops or animals to rely on for income or food. Growing only one or two crops or animals also meant the symbiotic relationships that existed under the whole-farm approach were destroyed and replaced by monocultures. In one analysis of diversification (or lack thereof) in the Corn Belt, researchers noted that “crop and livestock farms became operationally and functionally separate” as farms specialized.6 In other words, crop growing and livestock raising used to involve intertwined practices, such as the spreading of manure on fields and the feeding of cover crops to animals. That codependence and its resulting ecological benefits disappeared. The researchers go on to note that cattle numbers dropped by 52 percent in the Corn Belt between 1945 and 2000, with hay and oats (i.e., livestock forage) acres declining by 60 percent and 97 percent, respectively, in the same period.7 The diversified farm died with industrialization.
I didn’t realize until I started working for Tri-State Neighbor how few farms raise both crops and livestock like my family does. Almost every farm I visited in eastern South Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, and Nebraska grew only row crops like corn and soybeans. About 80 percent of U.S. corn is grown in rotation with just one other crop, soybeans, with the remaining 20 percent grown in continuous monoculture—corn on corn every year.8 Cows, sheep, goats, chickens, and horses and the pastures and hayfields that fed them were long gone by the time I got there (in Iowa and Minnesota, some farmers have hogs, but only in confinements). About the only grain farmers who still have livestock are the ones who own land that absolutely can’t be farmed, which the USDA terms “wasteland.”
Under these conditions, small farms consolidated into larger ones as families went broke or quit farming, a trend that has never reversed and which set the stage for today’s megafarms. Specialization also caused farmers to become dependent on off-farm businesses, such as grocery stores, chemical providers, machinery dealerships, and livestock feed suppliers. The typical farm family produced 60 percent of its food in 1900, but by 1920 that percentage dropped to 40.9 Farm income that was once reinvested in the business went to retailers instead. Most farmers embraced new mechanical tools, such as tractors and grain combines, which boosted production and reduced physical work. Horse and human muscle no longer limited a farm’s growth, a development not lost on farmers, who felt they controlled their destiny more than ever before. A 1930 advertisement from the International Harvester Company illustrates the farmer’s newfound sense of power and appeals to it to sell the latest tractor.10 “Be the Master of Mechanical Power,” the ad proclaims, with a picture of a man driving the company’s new McCormick-Deering tractor underneath. “In these days of mechanical power the man who places his dependence on muscle power is sadly handicapped,” the ad continues. “Mechanical power now does the profitable work of the world—both industrial and agricultural. . . . Decide now to make the great step forward. . . . And resolve to be the master of mechanical power from then on” (italics from the advertisement).11
When I researched today’s self-propelled sprayers from John Deere, I found eerily similar rhetoric. “I Run. I Spray. I Conquer. Conquer more acres in less time with the field general in sprayers: the R4045” is the caption next to one of John Deere’s latest models.12 Down the page, I read the lines, “Apply here for total solutions.”
Fast forward to 1945, when land conquering took a new chemical turn.13 At the end of World War II, the U.S. government found itself with ten industrial plants that produced highly explosive nitrate. For agricultural scientists, there was a clear answer to the question of what to do with this nitrate: spread it on America’s fields. These bomb-making plants were converted to fertilizer plants, turning the nitrate into pellets and liquids that infused the soil with nitrogen—more tools to master the soil. Synthetic nitrogen fertilizer made natural nutrient recycling unnecessary, so most farmers quickly ditched processes like cover crops and livestock grazing that recharged the soil. Over the decades, a new generation of farmers appeared that knew little or nothing about creating soil fertility through natural processes—they only understood how to apply the right formula of synthetic fertilizer.14
Pesticides and insecticides are two more World War II leftovers that became agricultural staples. Other tools developed during that time—such as self-propelled combines, cotton pickers, and bigger tractors—equipped farmers to grow and specialize further. Production exceeded demand and crop prices fell, which pushed more farmers out of business. The farm population dropped to just 15.3 percent of the total population by 1950.15 Thinking the imbalance in supply and demand was the result of too many farmers, agricultural leaders called for further farm consolidation and mechanization.16 The 1950s became the era of agribusiness, a term formalized in 1957 by Assistant Secretary of Agriculture John Davis and Ray Goldberg in their book A Concept of Agribusiness. They defined agribusiness as “the sum total of all operations involved in the manufacture and distribution of farm supplies; production operations on the farm; and the storage, processing and distribution of farm commodities and items made from them.”17
Basically, agribusiness is a word for the production chain from the farm to the consumer—seeds, machines, and fertilizers, farmers and ranchers, food processors and handlers, marketers who move the commodities and food, and supporters like banks, researchers, and consultants. The message to farmers: control as much of the production chain as you can, mechanize and specialize further, and absorb more farms. Treat the farm strictly as a business. The message turned into a command under the leadership of Earl Butz, U.S. secretary of agriculture from 1971 to 1976. He will be remembered for his five-word edict to farmers, one that haunts agriculture to this day: “Get big or get out.” The demanding nature of the statement is unsettling. Get big or get out. Absorb your neighbor’s farm or lose your own. Buy larger machinery or you’ll be plowed under. Make more money however you can or sell out. Think more acres, more technology, more chemicals, and more production, or don’t think about farming at all.
Butz directed growers to see themselves as “agribusinessmen,” not farmers and certainly not stewards or caretakers.18 He shaped public policies that forced them to expand and all but ensured they would go bankrupt if they didn’t. Butz and his supporters took little pity on farmers who either could not afford to expand or did not believe they should. “As for the farm families who cannot ‘get bigger’ and therefore have to ‘get out,’ they are apparently written off as a reasonable, quite ordinary, and altogether bearable expense,” wrote Berry in 1977 in reference to Butz’s attitude.19 If you couldn’t get big, then you deserved to fail, the thinking went. “Get big or get out” was not advice, it was a threat.
Besides “get big or get out,” another of Butz’s infamous ideas was that farmers should plant “fencerow to fencerow.” A fencerow is the strip of uncultivated land between fields, which farmers implemented after the Dust Bowl to help control erosion. Farming fencerow to fencerow meant eliminating all barriers to production, even necessary ones like fencerows that conserved soil. Physically and symbolically, his “fencerow to fencerow” policies undid much of the conservation progress that had been made after the Dust Bowl—terraces, contour plowing, no-till agriculture, crop rotation, riparian buffer zones, and lines of trees known as “shelterbelts.” By calling on farmers to abandon conservation techniques and create megafields instead, Butz asked them to return to the mental and physical landscape of the pre-1930s. Butz also dismantled the government’s production restriction programs and grain reserves intended to balance supply and demand, which encouraged all-out production.20
Farmers responded with vigor to the “get big or get out” order, plowing up what little native prairie remained, expanding fields, dozing in tree lines, and ripping up fencerows. Ranchers crammed their ranges with livestock. They borrowed heavily, a mistake that would cost many their farms a decade later during the 1980s farm crisis.21 It’s surprising how little the leaders of the 1970s remembered or cared about the nation’s worst environmental and social disaster, the Dust Bowl. After all, it was only forty years in the rearview mirror. Butz was in his twenties during the Dust Bowl, certainly old enough to internalize its full horror. Yet his concept of “full production” shifted agriculture back to Dust Bowl–era thinking, and we’re still operating under these principles today, even as climate change brings the threat of worsening droughts and floods.
My dad’s father, Marlo, was one of those who answered Butz’s call. He built grain bins and machine sheds, bought combines, tractors, and pickup trucks, leased and bought thousands of acres of land, enlarged his cattle herd, and was “pivotal,” as my dad puts it, in bringing a grain elevator to the nearby town of Bison so that farmers could produce even more grain.22 He also built a feedlot for fattening calves for CAFOs (these had appeared nationally in the 1950s and ’60s as corn prices lowered).23 His expansions continued until his death in 1997, all involving heavy debt that my parents and relatives were forced to pay off when he died. They had to sell land to do so. If anyone eagerly threw his hat into the agribusiness ring, it was Marlo. He was the person who taught my father how to farm—well, he taught my dad one version of farming—and it’s easy to see Marlo’s agribusiness ideals in my father’s current operation.
My dad well remembers these farm expansions of the ’70s, while he was in his late teens and early twenties. He recalls hearing “fencerow to fencerow” on TV and reading the phrase in newspapers. “In the ’60s, it seemed like guys were still running the old tractors, the old WD’s and the old M’s,” he told me over the phone once.24 I’d always known my grandparents were considered big farmers—my dad had the nickname “money bags” in high school on account of the farm’s major purchases, the debt notwithstanding—but I was curious to see how my dad remembered it. “Then in the ’70s, stuff started getting bigger. We’d think it was small today, but it was big then. It ended up haunting us, overproduction with no market.”
Prices were high, the government demanded more production, and the agribusiness sector was churning out amazing new equipment, agrochemicals, and hybrid seeds. The high times of the ’70s convinced many that Butz’s maxim of “get big or get out” had worked. Hindsight, though, proves otherwise, as my dad correctly points out. During the farm crisis of the 1980s, thousands of farmers and ranchers went bankrupt as commodity prices dropped to 1960s levels and below.25 For example, my mother’s parents, cattle ranchers operating twenty miles away from Marlo’s farm, declared bankruptcy in 1982, a direct result of over-borrowing to expand their herd.
One of the most troubling effects of the farm crisis, however, was the weeding out of midsize farmers and ranchers like my grandparents. As agricultural writer R. Douglas Hurt argues, farm policy in the 1980s “worked to the advantage of large-scale farmers, enabling them to purchase more land and equipment and thereby farm more extensively and efficiently while forcing small-scale, noncompetitive, or unprofitable farmers from the land.”26 In those years midsize farms broke even, if that. Small farms were practically impossible to sustain without off-farm income. As Hurt rather glumly concludes, “Given these problems, one should not be surprised at the number of people who left the farms. Rather, one should be amazed at the number who remained.”
Why couldn’t farmers like my grandparents—and today people like my father, the leaders of Roth Farms, and other conventional farmers—see through the “get big or get out” lie? Wendell Berry claims people bought into industrial agriculture mainly because it promised a better future, a promise that turned out to be false. He also points out that the adoption of conventional agriculture was a gradual process, not an instant transformation, meaning its consequences weren’t immediately clear, but became so many years later. As he observed: “A great deal of the strain of the industrial revolution has been borne by farmers, and so it has been fairly easy to secure their allegiance to the future, when more industrialization will supposedly bring a better farm economy. The industrialization of farming as we now have it is not something that farmers would have bought all in a piece; as a group they have been too traditional or conservative for that. Industrialization has been sold to farmers in stages, one implement at a time.”27 One implement at a time: buy this new machine, stop growing this crop, specialize in this, quit using that natural process. Each decision represented a supposed improvement, and given the American obsession with bettering ourselves, farmers understandably embraced what they were told was progress.
After one too many “improvements,” though, farmers woke up to find themselves trapped, too invested in industrial agriculture and in debt to turn back but barely clearing expenses. John Ikerd calls this spiral of events the treadmill of industrialization, which works like this: the promise of profit baits farmers to expand, more technology and acres or animals increase profits temporarily, then prices fall because of overproduction since everyone else also gets bigger.28 A price crisis ensues, farmers are pushed out of business, and those left on the treadmill have to run faster by getting bigger and producing even more. Instead of working together, farmers compete, with the “winners” eventually closing in on the “losers” and swallowing their farms. Writer Eric Schlosser calls this thinking the fallacy of composition, or “a mistaken belief that what seems good for an individual will still be good when others do the same thing.”29 The only way to make money in the industrial farm model is to boost yields, push down expenses, and grow more of your specialized crop. Farmers accomplish this by applying more fertilizer and agrochemicals, acquiring more land, forgoing crop rotations, farming up conservation areas, and planting GM seeds. They achieve their goal, more yield, but so has everyone else, which depresses prices further, which means farmers need to produce ever more to stay in business. As bizarre as it is, though, farmers insist on gauging their success in terms of yield, which goes up even as they go bankrupt.30
This is the farm we’ve built: one that is productive to the point of destruction, heavily industrial, and controlled by retailers and processors—where living is stressful, stewardship is gone, and the tools have undone their operators. We can see this by taking a hard look at the state of agriculture in America right now. According to the 2012 Census of Agriculture, the United States has 2.11 million farms, about 100,000 less than in 2002.31 A very small number of these farms holds the majority of the land and produces most of our commodities and food crops. About 1.7 million farms—more than 80 percent—did less than $100,000 in farm sales, together representing 5 percent of the total sales. That means about 20 percent of the farms produce 95 percent of the commodities and food. What we have is a top-heavy agricultural system, with a small number of very large farms providing most of our food. The middle is all but gone.32
The midsize farmers who are left might argue that they are separate from this top-heavy agribusiness system; that they are not who we mean when we talk about industrial farming. But every producer who engages in conventional farming and ranching is playing by the rules of agribusiness. It’s unavoidable now. Most midsize and small farmers are planting monocultures, spraying herbicides and pesticides, and sending their cattle to CAFOs. Unless those farms are organic or sustainably managed, they are industrial, no matter their size.
Judging from our agriculture, the Dust Bowl has receded from America’s collective memory, an extraordinary feat of nationwide amnesia. Relying on Dust Bowl–era practices poses greater environmental risk now than at any time in human history. Climate change is causing severe droughts, floods, and other erratic weather, and our farm and ranch land is poorly equipped to handle the changes. Yet the industrial model of agriculture does not take externalities like land or water into account as it calculates efficiency and cost. Our model only considers input versus output, and yield per acre per farmer. This is why people often say American farms are the most efficient in the world—and in a narrow input/output sense they are highly efficient—but this efficiency is hollow in almost every other sense.
That is the real state of agriculture: blind. Blind to the land, human health, rural communities, and the farm family. Blind to the future, which depends on preserving resources. Blind to everything but profit.