We’ve talked about agricultural technologies and land—but ladders? The following is taken from a 1919 article titled “The Agricultural Ladder”:
The first rung of the agricultural ladder is represented by the period during which the embryo farmer is learning the rudiments of his trade. In the majority of cases this period is spent as an unpaid laborer on the home farm.
The hired man stands on the second rung, the tenant on the third, while the farm owner has attained the fourth or final rung of the ladder.1
“The Agricultural Ladder” sought to describe the pathway to becoming a full-fledged owner-operator. Each rung represented a step closer to independence: unpaid family work (i.e., “doing chores”), wage labor, tenant operation, and, finally, full ownership. I admit some of the language in the century-old quote pains contemporary sensibilities—hired man: enough said. There is also that bit of strained analogous reasoning—embryo farmer: as if the “steps” reflect a preordained progression. All that aside, there is some truth to the outline. Every one of my high school friends who now farm followed this path.
Not that it applies, or has applied, in every case. In certain farming systems, the “ladder” is a rungless one. Think landless laborers in The Grapes of Wrath, which coincidently is set just a few years after “The Agricultural Ladder” was published—they had no hope of going anywhere.2 It is also worth noting that the metaphor not-too-subtly perpetuates the Jeffersonian ideal, with ownership representing the crowning achievement of agrarian social mobility.
It would not surprise me if you had not heard the term before. The metaphor is not used much these days, in large part because the top rungs are closed to most people.
My interest in the ladder lies in something implied in the progression from step to step. Knowing how to farm is as real a barrier to agriculture as finding a farm, and in some ways it is even more of one. Say we make farmland accessible to the nonfarmers who dream of taking up this profession. What then? What does that solve if those well intentioned people lack a working knowledge of the life they now find themselves in?
How did farmers historically learn their profession? Not from a textbook. Picture it: the famed Grant Wood painting American Gothic, substituting the pitchfork in the gentleman’s hand for a book titled How to Farm.
“Farming isn’t like accounting,” I remember one farmer telling me. It was not meant as a dig to accountants. He was simply stating a fact about how one learns to farm. Farmers learn to farm by … wait for it: farming.3
Growing up on a farm and climbing “up” the agricultural ladder: that is how individuals, for generations, learned to farm, especially in areas such as the Midwest. Granted, some of my farming friends from high school went off to college before coming back to agriculture. Most went to Iowa State University, my home state’s land grant institution. There they enrolled in agriculture related classes, subjects ranging from weed science to agricultural economics, plant genetics, and agronomy. Even a degree in agricultural science—an actual major at some land grants—does not teach you to be farmer, no more than a degree in aeronautical science teaches you to be a pilot.
Which is why I am worried. From a production standpoint, conventional foodscapes have been largely self-regenerative, thanks to the agricultural ladder. Alternative foodscapes, meanwhile, do not have that inborn tendency toward mimicry. Many of these growers are first-generation, first-time farmers.4 If we want alternatives to thrive, we have to get serious about giving people the experience of farming, to attract them to the profession and then to teach them about it.
Historically, institutions have played an important role in helping farmers acquire both land and knowledge. The federal government has a long history of facilitating land transfer, starting with the Homestead Act of 1862. Its role today is far more muted, confined to offering reduced interest loans. Public universities, meanwhile, traditionally communicated a certain type of knowledge, namely, about fertilizer, feed, and irrigation schedules, business acumen, and the like. The farm family, meanwhile, was left with the unsung task of conveying everything else, imparting to future farmers all the hands-on knowledge needed to run a successful operation.
It is time to revisit that division of labor.
The concept of the agricultural ladder describes less and less the processes by which people get into farming. A recent survey conducted in Canada found that among those who reported farming for fewer than five years, only 30 percent claimed to be from family farm backgrounds, while 60 percent had nonagricultural backgrounds. Meanwhile, the majority of those who had been farming for more than ten years reported having been raised on a farm.5
With the stage set, I wish to introduce Doris, a first-generation beginning farmer in Northern California. Doris is part of the Farmers Guild community. The Farmers Guild is a collection of ten local guilds located throughout Northern California that individually serve their communities and partner organizations. The Farmers Guild’s website explains:
We are the newest wave of farmers, ranchers, and sustainable food system advocates. With a passion for feeding our local communities, we unite to share skills, knowledge and a meal after a day in the field. Founded by farmers for farmers, we support healthy food production by collectively striving toward the economic viability of agriculture as well as the social networks to attract, cultivate and sustain a new generation ready to work the land.6
“Guild”: generally defined as an association of people with similar interests or pursuits, typically associated with craftsmen and craftswomen. I especially like the term because of its historical association with trades and crafts, which further implies a skill that one has to do to learn—that’s the whole rationale for apprenticeships. This explains the group’s emphasis on sharing. Note that the term “share” makes an appearance in the above block quote before the reference to economic viability. Compare this with, for instance, the Iowa Corn Growers Association’s mission statement, which in its first paragraph pledges “to create opportunities for long-term Iowa corn grower profitability.”7
Doris and I wanted to find someplace quiet, so we walked to a grove of apple trees tucked behind the barn. Standing in the orchard, its canopies pregnant with blossoms drifting overhead, we talked about the Farmers Guild’s role in sustaining alternative foodscapes through sharing.
She began by telling me what the federal government thinks about farm succession, noting that the Farm Service Agency—an agency of the U.S. Department of Agriculture—provides loans for beginning farmers; it even sets money aside to target historically underserved populations. While serving all farmers and ranchers, the agency is required, by statute, to dedicate a portion of its loans to farmers and ranchers who fall in the following categories: women; African Americans; Alaskan Natives; American Indians; Hispanics; Asians; and Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders.8
Doris continued: “I’m not saying it’s easy to get your hands on affordable land, especially here in California. But while there are institutions and government entities tasked with making land more accessible, there’s no government program tasked with helping people learn to farm once they get the land.”
Looking up at an aircraft flying overhead, its contrails like delicate white threads stitching together the billowy clouds that were decorating the sky, she added, “What good is land if you don’t know what to do with it?”
The Farmers Guild averages a little more than an event per month, though this average hides considerable variability; some times of the year are certainly busier than others. I talked with Doris in early April, at a gathering on compost production and application and seed germination and plant transplanting.
Explaining these lulls in the Guild’s event schedule, Doris said, “Since we’re about providing farmer-to-farmer hands-on knowledge, we generally hold events when there’s something to do. The thing about peer-to-peer experiential learning is that you can’t do it with handouts”—a reference to the ubiquitous brochures that were part of the long criticized extension model common in twentieth-century land grant universities.9 In other words, farming knowledge cannot be explained but has to be experienced.
Another barrier is the well documented fact that agricultural social networks can be tricky nuts to crack if you are not white and male.10 Individuals identifying as white own well over 90 percent of all farmland nationally.11 According to the USDA’s 2012 Census of Agriculture, of the 2.1 million farmers in the United States, 67,000 were Hispanic (3 percent of all farmers); almost 38,000 were American Indian (1.8 percent of the total); more than 33,000 were black (1.5 percent of the total); and nearly 14,000 were Asian (0.7 percent of the total).12 As for the gender breakdown, 14 percent of principal operators were female.
Doris again, talking about her participation in the California Farm Bureau Federation’s Young Farmers and Ranchers Conference: “As a woman at a more conventional farm networking event, I don’t always feel like I belong.” The Farm Bureau Federation is widely considered to be a fairly conservative, conventional farm lobbying organization. It wasn’t until 2015, for example, that it admitted publicly that climate change was real. Doris talked freely about how being a woman has caused consternation when she is navigating these conventional networks. “People don’t know what to do with me,” she explained with a smile and a slightly uplifted chin—the look of pride. Doris was raised in the Los Angeles suburbs. “Then they find out I don’t have a farming background. That’s strike two. I’m not taken seriously from that point on.”
Others repeated Doris’s comments. I had the opportunity to talk with multiple female operators who were part of the Farmers Guild community. The event I was participating in had more women in attendance than men, which in itself was telling. I have been to enough “field days” in the Midwest, sponsored by the likes of Pioneer Seed and Monsanto, to know how male-centric conventional farm networks can look.
I met one of those women knee-deep in shit. No symbolism implied. I had not unintentionally put my foot in my mouth or anything like that. I was actually standing in poop, or at least what used to be poop—again, the Guild event I had attended was about compost.
Mary and I talked at length about what the Farmers Guild is and what it means to those who are a part of it. Turning manure over with a shovel, she explained: “We’re more than the sum of our parts—like this compost—which is what makes us unique from traditional farming associations.” Struck by this assertion, I asked for clarification. (Whenever a group compares itself to compost, you always ask for clarification.) After ramming the head of the shovel into the ground below our feet, she placed both hands on the handle. It looked like she was getting comfortable.
“It’s the Horatio Alger myth—that pull-yourself-up-by-your-boot-straps crap. It runs deep in agriculture.” Alger, a novelist who wrote tales about impoverished young men overcoming adversity, helped popularize the rags-to-riches story line in the late 1880s. Mary added, mockingly, “Good farmers don’t need anyone else.” Back in her regular voice, she said, “That’s where we go wrong; farmers are taught to be independent and autonomous, to a fault.”
There is actually a good bit of research backing up Mary’s depiction, what one scholar has identified as the ideology of individualism within agriculture.13 I did not see evidence of this ideology—that “pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps crap”—at the Farmers Guild. Mary again: “Here, we appreciate that interdependence isn’t a sign of weakness but a strategy for greater independence.”
Mary was saying, as I understood her, that in conventional farming circles, you are socialized to not rely on others. It is worth noting that this ideology is often blamed for skyrocketing rates of depression and suicide among farming men, percentages that greatly exceed those for male populations in urban areas.14 To believe that success means not having to ask for help is not only problematic from the perspective of community building and integration; it can also make you sick, both physically and mentally.
The Farmers Guild network sees interdependence as requisite for independence and, ultimately, well-being. This also brings us back to the compost analogy, about how this community is more than the sum of its parts.
My conversation with Mary concluded at the machine shed as we returned our shovels, gloves, and boots. “Look at how we share genetic stocks and the knowledge that goes along with them.” She was telling me about all the things that members of the group reciprocate, from expertise and stories to seeds and animals. “Farmers are at the mercy of large companies. To say those farmers back in Iowa”—we had just finished discussing a seed corn field day I had recently attended in the Hawkeye State—“are independent, really independent, goes against the facts.” Her point—that most conventional farmers are stuck between a rock (the companies they buy inputs from) and a hard place (those they sell their commodities to)—is a common theme of this book.
After handshakes and promises to stay in touch, Mary left me with this parting comment: “Farmers Guild offers a lifeline to beginning and even lifelong farmers.” Regardless of the metaphor—lifeline or ladder—the key point of both is that aspiring farmers need to be part of a knowledge community.
Chicago’s Michigan Avenue in December is a magical place: iceskating in Millennium Park, the more than seventy-five-year-old Christmas around the World exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry, and colorful storefront displays. It is a Magnificent Mile, well deserving of the name. I never turn down an opportunity to return to the city, especially at this time of year.
The opportunity, in this particular case, was an invitation by officers of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. They were helping plan a workshop on what they were calling the “circular economy” and thought it might help to throw a social scientist into the mix. They were also interested in hearing about the findings involving a study of producer and consumer food cooperatives in Colorado that I was wrapping up. The workshop itself is not relevant to this story. I am telling you about it as a means of introducing Julia.
Have you ever looked at someone and sworn they were brighter than everyone else, like the lead in a theatrical production constantly illuminated by a giant unseen light source? Have you ever seen someone walk with such energy that it looked like they were skipping? Have you ever seen someone’s entire body coil like a spring before meeting another for the first time and watched their facial expressions explode the instant they did? Have you ever met someone with the power to reduce the background noise of a room by simply talking?
Julia was a singularity: a point where the laws of physics seemed to break down. Of course she was flesh and blood. But her ability to command a room: I hadn’t seen anyone with such an ability without assistance from a title—Mr. President, Madame Secretary, Your Majesty.
A community activist residing in Chicago’s South Side, Julia had spent the better part of thirty years “fighting,” in her words, “to do right for her community.” That fight was on full display at the workshop, as when she berated city officials—the room was full of them, making the image particularly unforgettable—for their aggressive wooing of Walmart. “As if that will solve food insecurity in our city,” she claimed, rather loudly. Shortly after, once the scattering of applause from audience members had stopped, she added, “You can’t have community development without community. What we don’t need are policies that gut our communities and make collaboration even more difficult.”
Afterward I approached, wanting to learn more about her and her community’s struggles. Julia launched into a remarkable story about overcoming numerous barriers.
How? One word: cooperation.
Twenty-four hours later, we were sitting in the parking lot of a formerly abandoned shopping center. I was eagerly waiting to tour a more than 10,000-square-foot grocery store: a business proudly envisioned, owned, and operated by some seven hundred members of the surrounding community. “You’re looking at what’s possible with grassroots blood, sweat, and tears,” Julia told me. And money, I later learned—loans and grants, totaling more than $2 million, had financed the cooperative’s opening.
Riding to this site, I learned about its recent past. Julia provided the history lesson as she drove. You would have thought she could see the road from her smartphone, given how often her eyes were on that screen rather than on the analog windshield that most of use to navigate the road. A year ago, she said, I would have been driving through a USDA defined food desert. Half the households had been food insecure before the co-op opened.
First impressions were all positive. There was a bus stop next to the parking lot and another a half block away. I also remember being surprised by what I did not see: orphaned shopping carts. All were sitting securely in assigned return receptacles. This was unlike the scene at the chain store where I’d been the day before. Its lot had been littered with carts taking up parking spaces, most of them two wheels up against a tree island. People have actually studied this behavior, arguing that it can indicate, among other things, a lack of commitment to the establishment.15 When you care about something, you tend to take care of it. When was the last time you washed a rental car?
As I approached the co-op’s automatic sliding doors, my eyes went to the oversized sale signs plastered across the building’s lower front facade. Walking into the store, I grabbed a flyer listing “deals for the week.” Deli meat: $3.00 per pound. Whole chickens: $0.80 per pound. Bananas: $0.50 per pound. Those prices rival anything the chains can offer.
Looking up from the flyer, I saw Julia moving ahead, now halfway to the back of the store. She seemed to float down the aisle. Running to catch up, I found her leaning against the meat case. “Michael, I’d like to introduce you to our in-house butcher.”
In most stores, this profession has gone the way of the blacksmith. It is far cheaper for stores to buy case-ready meat that has been cut and packaged in a centralized facility. Not here. I asked about this oddity. Julia and the butcher, a thirty-two-year-old woman who had emigrated to the United States from Ukraine as a toddler with her parents, exchanged a look. The butcher, Anastasia, turned in my direction. Her expression projected pride, while her tone of voice had a hint of defensiveness to it. She answered matter-of-factly: “We’re a cooperative, which means we have the benefit of not having to think only about the bottom line. We have to always ask ourselves ‘What does the community want?’ when making business decisions.”
Julia moved around the counter and put her arm around Anastasia, giving her an open faced hug, and chimed in. “In this case, we know what the community wants because they’re co-owners. And they want to know who’s cutting their meat.”
This also explains why and how the cooperative is able to pay its employees at least $14.00 per hour. This is more than the citywide $10.50 per hour minimum wage, and more than the $13.00 hourly rate set to take effect in 2019 thanks to a 2014 city ordinance. Why? Because doing so is important to members.
Lo and behold, it also proved a wise business move. Julia was quick to mention how this better-than-average wage had reduced worker turnover and improved customer service. “It’s all connected,” Julia reminded me in a somewhat scolding tone, as if she were talking to a skeptic. “You treat your workers like shit, they’re going to treat customers like shit, not like their jobs, and leave the moment something better comes along. And your customers aren’t going to be too happy, either”—my mind immediately went back to those full shopping cart receptacles.
In the world of tight margins that is food retail, even big chains—we’re talking about the Krogers and Walmarts of the sector: the Big Dogs—are actually exploring the idea of paying their workers more, a rare instance of the business community being more progressive than many politicians, even those claiming to be pro-business. The move, at its face, might seem counterintuitive until you realize the long-term savings that come with treating workers like something other than cogs in a machine.
The community has eliminated its food desert designation. It was also a social capital desert and thus a knowledge exchange desert. Not any longer.
It did not take long for me to realize that the cooperative was improving food access within the community. As for understanding the positive impact it was having on sharing knowledge? That took the rest of the afternoon to figure out.
After a tour of the retail space, Julia took me to the rear of the store and handed me off to Nicole, one of the cooperative’s assistant managers. “We hold classes here at least once a week,” she explained as we entered a room that reminded me of a model kitchen you might see on display at Lowe’s. (I was close. It had been donated by a local home builder—a kitchen from one of the model homes.) Handing me a calendar that listed upcoming and recent events, Nicole added, “We take our self-imposed charge of doing things that benefit our community seriously. We also realize that while plopping a grocery store in a food desert is a positive first step, it isn’t the be-all and end-all to the problem.”
As I stood there looking around, I had time to take in my surroundings. The air in the room smelled of sage and rosemary chicken and what I initially thought was pie, either cherry or cherry apple. Casting my gaze around, I spotted a roaster, one of those big ones you might see at a family reunion, and, resting by the sink, a large pan of cherry crisp. Seeing my eyes fall upon the food, Nicole volunteered, as if she could read my mind, and my stomach, “For tonight—a board meeting.”
Stepping between the sink and me, Nicole went on to tell me about the cooking classes offered regularly by the cooperative. What struck me about her description was not that there were classes, or even that they were free. As nutritional literature campaigns have grown in popularity, so has the realization that people lack basic cooking skills to put that newfound nutritional knowledge to work. But these classes weren’t just about teaching people to cook.
Members of the community sign up to be an “instructor for a day.” Nicole handed me a bright yellow flyer with large lettering at the top: “Learn About a Culturally Significant Dish!” A little farther down, “Bean and plantain pottage”—a traditional Nigerian dish, Nicole informed me.
At an earlier event, attendees had been treated to a lesson on tamales. This was not your typical cooking class. I remember thinking, If HGTV aired cooking shows like this, I might actually watch! Yes, participants learned how to make this Mexican staple. But in addition, the instructor went to great lengths to explain the cultural significance of the dish. Corn and its place in understanding Mexican heritage: where does one begin? As Nicole put it, “Everyone left that event with a newfound appreciation for our neighbors to the south.” If only everyone took such a class, especially those wanting to wall themselves off from this nation and its people.
“What better way to break down cultural barriers, to give people an appreciation for others different from themselves, than through food?” Nicole’s excitement was infectious. Her face lit up while her arms moved up and down to give her words added weight. The effect created the gestalt of a human lightning bug.
Nicole bent down behind the island. After a few seconds of rustling around, she emerged with a three-ring binder. Opening it, she read off the names and self-identified ethnicities of recent instructors: Vietnamese, Korean, African American, Jamaican, German, Mexican, Kenyan, and Polish, to name the ones I managed to record.
Nicole then unfolded a property map of the surrounding community and spread it on the countertop.
“Why are some properties distinguished with a yellow highlighter mark?,” I asked.
Those who participate in the cooking class have their houses marked on the map, I was told. “It’s a way to make sure we’re serving the whole community and not just pockets of it.” Mission accomplished, given that yellow dots covered the map.
I then noticed tick marks next to most of the yellow dots. “Repeat customers.” Not only were these marks evenly distributed across the map, but there were also a lot of them.
It is hard to know just how deeply these experiences affected participants, especially from the standpoint of creating cultural competencies. But given the United States’ general cultural incompetence, we need all the help we can get. Did you see that Gallup study from 2016? The best predictor of whether individuals support things like building a wall between the United States and Mexico and who believe nonwhites have not contributed as much to civilization as those of European descent is how white their social networks are.16
Before escorting me back into the store and reuniting me with Julia, Nicole offered some parting words. The conversation had veered to how “sharing” is polysemous, that it has multiple meanings. Nicole was keen to distinguish between what Uber facilitates and what I was being shown that day in Chicago’s South Side.
“If this,” she said—both arms out and head tilting subtly to the left, then to the right—“isn’t getting people to exchange stories, culturally specific knowledge, worldviews, then it’s failing as a sharing platform. If we can better understand each other by sharing time, knowledge, and experiences, the other stuff will work itself out. Markets are unfair because people are. Ignorance is our problem.”
Whoever said good fences make good neighbors never visited this cooperative.