It’s a late May morning after Memorial Day, hot, humid, and sunny, with wide and puffy clouds passing overhead. On the northern horizon, a bank of rain clouds mushrooms into the sky, a storm that will break upon us later. The ground is wet from more than an inch of rain the night before. Rice grows in the fields along the road, flooded and green. Ryan and I are “riding cane,” which means driving by in the pickup and scanning for diseases like orange rust or brown rust. Alligators eye us in the canals as we pass.
Ryan identifies the different varieties of cane, some that yield higher tonnage, some with higher sucrose levels, others that grow faster and close quicker to choke out weeds. Some cane has a thin blanket of rust on the leaves, as he slows down to show me, while other cane is bright green, shining with health. With so many farmers growing sugarcane in the area—especially the sugar corporations like Florida Crystals and U.S. Sugar—being big is the only option here. “You’re gonna have to be a bigger producer,” Ryan tells me as we pass walls of green stalks. “The smaller guys are gonna get pushed out or get bigger.” And get bigger is exactly what Roth Farms did.
One way the farm expanded was by adding turfgrass. Turfgrass production involves heavy watering and frequent mowing followed on some farms by a vacuuming of the clippings. It’s tough to keep up with an industrial-sized lawn, but with new houses, golf courses, and athletic fields springing up across South Florida, the Roths enjoyed high demand for their turfgrass for years. When the housing market collapsed during the 2008–9 recession, though, so did the sod market. Sod plummeted from fifteen cents a foot to seven cents, Ryan tells me, and Roth Farms went from harvesting one hundred truckloads of sod a day to just fifteen.
The Roths were forced to shut down the harvesters that had been motoring over the fields for decades—but that wasn’t entirely bad in Ryan’s estimation. “Sod was probably the most profitable crop we were growing,” he says. “But when you harvest grass, you are sending muck out of the farm.”1 That’s one major drawback of growing turfgrass: at harvest, machines scrape it off the field, keeping the roots intact but slicing away a thin layer of dirt. The machines either spool the grass into rolls or cut it into slabs. Either way, the process strips away soil. “To me that wasn’t good for the long-term ability to farm, because I want to be here thirty to forty years,” Ryan says. “If they are selling with the sod an inch of muck every time they harvest, that wasn’t something I was happy about. I wasn’t glad that the housing market fell apart, I wasn’t glad that it cost us a bunch of money, but I’m glad that we stopped growing grass.”
Ryan correctly realizes that something good came out of the crash: the farm became more sustainable. If the decision had been his alone, then the farm would have eliminated turfgrass sooner. “It took us two years longer to get out of the sod business than it should have because it was emotional,” Ryan says. “We thought, we have people who are sod harvesters and they’ll have to quit. And we’ve been doing this for years, and we have a separate company called Roth Sod and this is what we do. Other farms said, ‘Psh, there’s no money in sod, let’s get something else planted here.’”
I commend the genuine concern about workers losing their jobs, but Ryan’s explanation mostly reveals that acting quickly in response to changing conditions isn’t easy for farms as large as Roth’s. Getting out of sod wasn’t a matter of simply planting something else; it meant fundamentally changing the farm’s business model. This is why industrial farmers feel like they can’t diversify or stop growing the crops they’ve specialized in—they’ve sunk capital into the equipment and infrastructure needed to grow a handful of crops in a big way. Growing a new crop means starting a new business, which most can’t afford or don’t want to do. In contrast, midsize and small farms tend to be more flexible and resilient in the face of change, and that is a good trait in a volatile world made even more so by climate change. Midsize farms in particular would be capable of responding to consumer and government demands for regenerative practices—they have more access to financial resources than small farms—and they would also have a bigger impact on the food supply because of their size and output.
While he says he is happy overall, I think Ryan is chaffing a bit under the yoke of conventional agriculture, though he might not put it that way. “There are certain crops that are just completely and totally uninteresting to me,” he tells me. “Radishes are not interesting. Do we grow them?” He grimaces and nods. Why aren’t radishes interesting? I ask later. There are two main types of radishes, Ryan explains, open-pollinated (OP) radishes and hybrid radishes. In the U.S., growers can buy just one OP seed variety called red silk—the bright, cherry-red kind found in most stores. Given that radishes aren’t very popular in the U.S., Ryan doesn’t expect researchers to develop new OP radishes anytime soon. He’s tried growing hybrids, but the seeds are four times more expensive, and it’s already tough to make money on radishes. Plus, consumers don’t want hybrids, he says. He’s tried different colors and sizes, such as watermelon radishes that have red flesh, green skin, and a somewhat sweet flavor, but he couldn’t sell them. So every year, Ryan plants red silk radishes—and that’s it, which is why radishes aren’t a very interesting crop to him. “I like looking at new varieties and looking at how different things respond to weather and yield differently, but there’s just nothing being done there,” he says about the radish business.
As Ryan tells me all this, my mind jumps back to the black spot issue. One way to combat black spot is to plant on “fresh” ground, or fields that haven’t had radishes for a while. But another way would be to grow different varieties that don’t easily succumb to the disease or resist it altogether. Switching varieties every so often would also disrupt the pest cycle. Ryan doesn’t have the option of using these natural processes, though—and it’s a result of the agribusiness push for standardization, which eliminated all OP radish varieties but one. Years of standardization redefined the consumer’s idea of a radish, which is now limited to small, red, and round. Because agribusiness research money goes toward profitable crops like corn, cotton, and soybeans, radish producers are stuck. If anything ever happens to the red silk variety—a bug or disease makes it impossible to grow any longer, let’s say—then there’s no backup option. In the case of radishes, we’ve standardized almost to the point of disappearance.
Ryan has more options with sugarcane, one reason he finds it more interesting to grow. “You can play around a lot planting different varieties, trying to maximize production on certain farms,” he says. He enjoys the intellectual work—proof that when farming becomes too automated, the farmer can get bored, but when it’s hands-on, the farmer is more engaged. Sugarcane is a four-year crop; the same plants are harvested once a year for four years. The harvesting machines leave one or two inches of the plant behind and it grows back. At first I am amazed by this fact, but then I remember that sugarcane, a member of the Poaceae or grass family, is really just oversized, sugar-heavy grass.2 Of course it grows back, just like a lawn. Definitely interesting. No matter how interesting a crop is, though, it has to be profitable. Ryan sees little room for sentimentality in farming. “You do have to love it, but you do have to be able to react. You can’t stay in a crop just because you love it. You can’t love your crop. You can love your job, but you can’t love your crop. You have to be able to say, ‘That doesn’t make me money anymore. Let’s do something else.’”
You can’t love your crop. Ryan’s words might sound harsh, but he is right. Farmers and ranchers, even regenerative and organic ones, can’t raise crops and livestock that consumers don’t want; if they do, they’ll go bankrupt. But if the rise in organic food sales over the last decade is any indication of the future, then there will come a day when most consumers don’t want the crops Roth Farms and other industrial operations produce. Conventional farmers will have to look at their fields and say, “That doesn’t make me money anymore. Let’s do something else.”
The most significant “get big or get out” move at Roth Farms came in 2005: the construction of a commercial produce packinghouse.
The idea was to vertically integrate, to control more of the supply chain and therefore a bigger portion of the profits. Roth Farms was selling vegetables wholesale at market price to commercial packers, who packaged and washed the vegetables, then turned around and sold them at higher prices. If Roth Farms owned a packinghouse, the board thought, then there would be no middleman between them and the grocery store. Other farms in the area and across the country had already made such a move. Ryan explains the economics behind the decision: “We grow vegetables and we pay other people $1.25 to cool every box that we grow. It probably costs them somewhere in the eighty- to ninety-cents-per-box range to cool that product, so they were making thirty to forty cents on every box. We grow the box, and they get thirty to forty cents profit. Not revenue, profit. There is no guarantee of thirty or forty cents revenue or profit on the farm. It may be a loss. The packinghouse is almost guaranteed money. So the idea was that we could build a packinghouse, and if we grow more product we can make more money. Also, you look around Belle Glade, there are farmers that go broke,” he continues. “Packinghouses never go out of business. Something goes right at the packinghouse. It’s almost guaranteed money.” The second time he says this phrase, he emphasizes almost instead of guaranteed. “There’s not as much risk as farms have. Farms have a lot of risk.”
The desire to mitigate risk is awfully appealing to farmers. When people say farming is like gambling, they aren’t far from the truth. Inputs like herbicides, fertilizers, and GM seeds appear to reduce risk, but a farm’s success is also intimately connected to the weather—which is becoming more erratic because of climate change—and other uncontrollable factors such as commodity prices and consumer taste. But acquiring another link in the farm to the consumer chain turned out to be much different than the Roths expected, largely because of the 2008–9 recession. “We built it with the idea that even if vegetables were bad, sod production was so good that it would pay all the bills and it would be no problem,” Ryan says. “Then the housing market crashed and we almost went out of business.”
Roth Farms was in debt to the tune of $11 million and their main revenue stream had dried up. They received offers of $6 million and $7 million for the packinghouse, which they understandably rejected. They elected to keep it and sell land to cover the payments instead; they reasoned that if they took a low offer, they still would have to sell farmland to pay it off, so why not keep the asset and hope its value increased. Still, the situation remained grim. “I was trying to decide what I was going to do if the farm went out of business,” Ryan says. “I guess I was going to go back to school and be a lawyer or something, I don’t know.” The Roths didn’t intend to over-leverage quite so much. Two investors backed out at the last minute, leaving them and one other farm to foot the bill. “What we should have done at that very moment was cut the size of the thing in half where we could spend less money, have it just be big enough to run our packages,” Ryan says. “Looking back on it, I wish we hadn’t built it. We had a really good farm that we had to sell in order to keep it afloat. A two-hundred-acre farm, probably the best farmland we had, we had to sell.”
The packinghouse stands on Belle Glade’s northern edge, near the municipal airport. Next door is TKM Farms, whose packinghouse supplies lettuce to Taco Bell and Kentucky Fried Chicken. The Roth packinghouse isn’t Belle Glade’s largest, but it’s one of the newest and coldest, as Ryan describes it, meaning the building’s fancy cooling mechanisms and modern airtight design can maintain low temperatures better than older, less efficient packinghouses. The parking area is nearly empty on the May morning I visit, with only one forklift buzzing pallets of sweet corn to and fro. The packinghouse is tall and gray and studded with loading docks, like an oversized Wal-Mart without the sliding doors. Rain pours off the roof in waterfalls; the gutters can’t keep up. A shroud of mist hovers around the building, named “Ray’s Heritage” after Ryan’s grandfather, Ray Roth, who founded the farm in 1948.
Huge boxes of sweet corn still in the husks wait to be carried inside on pallets. Ryan says corn surrounded the packinghouse from morning until night in the two weeks before I arrived, and inside it was stacked clear to the ceiling. Trucks lined up down the road to pick it up. “Today it’s a ghost town,” Ryan laughs. Such is the volatile nature of supply and demand. Springtime is the main sweet corn season in Florida, and growers time their harvests to meet the big sweet corn rush over Memorial Day weekend (Memorial Day was Monday; I came the following Thursday). One-third of America’s sweet corn originates in the Everglades Agricultural Area.3 “Belle Glade is the sweet corn capital of the world,” Ryan says. “There are two million crates pulled in a two-week period out of this area. If you eat sweet corn on Memorial Day somewhere inside the United States of America, the likelihood is it came from here.”
He says this with pride, and it is an astounding fact. I think of the boxes rattling inside a truck from here to Bison, over two thousand miles, and ending up in the town’s tiny grocery store, where Josh rummages through the box for a dozen big ears to eat on Memorial Day. And the corn doesn’t stop there—it keeps going to Texas, California, New York, Washington, Maine. I imagine Belle Glade as a heart pumping corn down the highway arteries. One section of drained Everglades, a tiny area when compared to the whole nation, can supply almost all of America with sweet corn for a few weeks. Just a handful of farmers produce this corn, and I’m sure Ryan knows most of them. It’s a testament to our top-heavy, shipping-dominated, increasingly fragile food system.
He shows me the radish line and the green bean line and then two “cold boxes,” or giant warehouse-sized rooms that store vegetables until they leave on trucks. Overhead fluorescent lights illuminate corn boxes stacked almost to the ceiling, more ears than I’ve ever seen. Everything shines—handrails, stairways, even the walls. The cold boxes, and the whole packinghouse, have high ceilings so that warm air floats up, away from the vegetables. “There are no food safety problems in this building whatsoever,” Ryan says proudly. “It’s clean, it’s beautiful, it’s perfect.”
The packinghouse may be top of the line, but it’s a liability. Roth Farms is now stuck growing green beans and radishes because they have specialized packing lines for those two crops. “Green beans have been terrible the last few years. We can’t make any money with green beans right now,” he says. Still, they have to keep growing enough beans to keep the lines running, or buy beans from other farmers to supplement their own. The radish line is the result of the farm’s emotional attachment to growing radishes. It was a tradition, something Roth Farms had done since Ray’s time. Investing in those lines was the equivalent of Roth Farms saying, “We love radishes and green beans”—and we know the rule about loving your crop. You can’t. “We spent a lot of money to build that pretty radish line. Now we have to grow radishes for the next fifteen years until we pay it off,” Ryan says. “I wouldn’t have done it. I wouldn’t have built that radish line. I would have quit growing radishes.”
Leafy vegetables also end up at the packinghouse, but unlike radishes and green beans the leaf gets sorted and packed in the field. The goal is to harvest, cool, and ship the highly perishable lettuce all in thirty-six hours. Ryan explains that packinghouses used to hold lettuce for seven to ten days before sending it off, a practice that didn’t contribute to freshness—or to food safety. Lettuce and other leafy vegetables are extremely susceptible to salmonella, E. coli, and Norovirus. A 2009 report, ominously titled “The Ten Riskiest Foods Regulated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration,” analyzed reported foodborne outbreaks between 1990 and 2006. The researchers found that leafy greens were the nation’s most contaminated food, accounting for 24 percent of total outbreaks.4 Keeping leafy greens clean and safe isn’t easy. Animals, manure, water, or improper handling can contaminate them. Pathogens tend to linger and grow until consumers eat them. Postharvest treatments such as chlorine washes reduce contamination, but they aren’t perfect—bacteria can live in the washing systems, which can contaminate batch after batch of prewashed bagged greens.5
Roth Farms has never had issues with contaminated greens or other vegetables. Ryan attributes this to their careful compliance with food safety rules, such as providing hand-washing stations and gloves and preventing workers from eating in the fields. The farm keeps a food safety manager on staff year-round, a move that goes beyond federal regulations. He also points out that the EAA’s topography—flat with very little runoff—and lack of livestock help ensure safe food. Still, the potential for contamination is always there. When Ryan’s produce leaves on a truck, for example, he cannot control how it is handled. I ask Ryan what it’s like to carry the burden of food safety on his shoulders—the guilt if someone were to be sickened or, worse, die, the danger of lawsuits that could sink the farm, the shame of putting out “dirty” produce. “It’s extremely terrifying because I’m not in control of my own product before it gets to the consumer,” he says. “The likelihood, if somebody gets sick, is that the first person they are going to talk about is the farmer. [They will say] the product coming out of the field is bad. But there are so many different inputs, so many different people touching the crop, the product, before it makes it to the person’s plate. It does scare you to know you’re sending food out. I’m not growing something that gets cooked. It’s all raw. There are a lot of things that make you uncomfortable. I feel a lot better about sweet corn and green beans because people eat them cooked.”
The long and uncertain chain from farmer to consumer and the lack of control the farmer has over the product once it leaves the farm—these are the consequences of the industrialized food system. Farmers live in fear of contamination that will be blamed on the farm even if it didn’t originate there. And with dozens or, for the super-sized farms, hundreds of workers handling produce, on-farm infection is a real concern. Meanwhile, the consumer lives in fear of foodborne pathogens that can sicken or kill, pathogens that spread quickly and invisibly through massive food processing facilities and distribution networks. E. coli that originates in a lettuce processing plant in one city can easily appear across entire regions or the whole country.
But Ryan can’t market his produce locally or even regionally because buyers in the Southeast don’t pay enough, he says. Florida farms fight for a share of a commercial vegetable market dominated by California and, increasingly, foreign imports—and they have a hard time competing. Southeast buyers reason that they shouldn’t have to pay as much for Florida products because that food doesn’t have to be shipped as far, so they offer less. Ryan’s produce ends up with the highest bidder, which is usually thousands of miles away. “Say lettuce is ten dollars a box. I’m making very small margins at ten dollars,” Ryan says. “The Southeast buyers want to pay seven or eight dollars. Up in New York, they’ll pay ten dollars. I would much rather put it on the truck and get it up there to them, but I’m losing some control. What would be great is if local people down here would spend a little bit more money on their vegetables.”
Getting bigger, it seems, hasn’t translated into higher profits, less risk, or more security for Ryan and his family. Far from being the silver bullet Butz promised, getting big has shackled them to a small number of low-profit crops, saddled them with debt, separated them from the consumer, and removed them from the land and actual work of farming. This is what family farming looks like all over America—but despite the farm’s size, Ryan insists that his is a small family farm, as similarly sized, conventional grain or dairy farmers in other states would likely argue. “In our area, we’re a small producer,” Ryan says. “We’re not a big farm. Here? Here, we’re dealing with the likes of 150,000-acre sugarcane farms. We’re small. We’re a real small farm compared to that.”
I take Ryan’s point. Roth Farms is definitely modest compared to its neighbors. Maybe size, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder, or best understood in comparison to the surrounding farms. In my eyes, Roth Farms is big, not because of its acreage but because of how it operates. With a commercial packinghouse, corporate-like structure, and input-heavy production model, Roth Farms plays by the “get big or get out” rules. If the conventional American farm can’t afford to stay small, Ryan tells me, then it should try to act small in as many ways as possible. “If a small farm in acreage, size, and personnel won’t survive because of the new agriculture, then strong family farms have to figure out a way to remain in business and get bigger, and continue to act like family farms,” he says.
Ryan’s dad, for example, does farm tours, bringing grade-school kids out to the fields. Ryan names workers who’ve been on the farm for thirty, twenty-five, and fifteen years, testaments to the good working conditions. He tells me about an end-of-the-season party his dad and uncle threw during one of the farm’s toughest post-packinghouse years. The Roths gave the workers a bonus, cooked food, and made Roth Farms T-shirts. The radish-line ladies immediately went to the bathroom and changed into their new shirts. “They came out and said they wanted a picture. We didn’t tell them this was what we wanted to do. They said they wanted a picture with me, my dad, and my uncle,” Ryan says. “We were about to go out of business. They didn’t leave and go find other jobs that were more secure. They stayed with us. We took care of them.”
The Roths are good people who care about their employees and act small when they can. But acting small in some ways is not enough to counteract the problems of acting big overall. In his book Let Them Eat Junk, Robert Albritton argues that even small, family-owned farms become pawns of agribusiness when they adopt the conventional model, because farming conventionally means using the inputs provided by agribusiness corporations and growing crops and livestock according to agribusiness standards.6 Conventional farmers become reliant on inputs—herbicides to kill weeds, fuel to run tractors, GM seeds to resist sprays. Meanwhile, food processors insist on standardization. Vegetables must be a certain size, weight, color, and variety. Wheat needs to have a certain protein percentage. Specific standards apply to chickens, hogs, cattle, grain, milk, eggs, virtually every product intended for the mass market. If a farmer’s output (crop or livestock) does not meet the standard, then it cannot be sold. Ryan being forced to grow red silk radishes is exactly what Albritton is talking about.
The conventional farmer, no matter how big or small, must comply with agribusiness specifications or lose money—comply or die. These specifications predetermine the farming process, driving farmers to adopt a business model that helps them meet these standards and ditch crops or practices that don’t. Regenerative practices are usually the first to go since their benefits cannot be calculated on a profit-and-loss sheet. It’s not just food processors setting the standards, it’s machinery dealers, chemical and seed companies, feed sellers, crop insurance companies, anyone who represents a link on the agribusiness chain between farm and consumer. Farmers, including Ryan, tend to see themselves as responding to consumer demands, and that is how they explain their choices. But compared to the power of agribusiness corporations—in shaping government policy, funding university research, influencing consumer views, and controlling the food chain from farm to grocery store—the consumer shapes very little of the market, while agribusiness forces shape most of it. Farmers aren’t growing for the consumer, but for corporations.