The dirty secret of the food movement is that the much-celebrated small-scale farmer isn’t making a living. After the tools are put away, we head out to second and third jobs to keep our farms afloat. Ninety-one percent of all farm households rely on multiple sources of income. Health care, paying for our kids’ college, preparing for retirement? Not happening. With the overwhelming majority of American farmers operating at a loss — the median farm income was negative $1,453 in 2012 — farmers can barely keep the chickens fed and the lights on.
I'd be surprised if any folk at our Farmer's market in Ann Arbor are ex-hedge fund managers. Even so, fruits and veggies are prohibitively expensive for students, and most people seem to come for the experience, buying two or three items. I can't see the people behind the stands shopping them.
This is a part of a bigger social problem out here where I live. The rural areas are becoming "youth deserts" for lack of a better term. If you are young and smart, you go to college and never come back. If you are young and not as smart, you get into scouting and/or FFA. Then you find out that there is a whole big world out there and you are not tied to the land that you grew up on. So these kids save and leave. What you are left with are the kids who are not motivated enough to better themselves and the kids who just give up. Kids are not stupid despite what they do and how they act (as the old guy I can say this!). They see farmers not making money, they see rural factory jobs leave and close and then get into a mindset that the future is bleak and passing them by. Why go into farming if mom and dad are struggling to pay the bills and keep the farm running? Where my friends live, they (30's) are 1/2 the age of all of their neighbors; seeing someone their own age in the area is a rarity. They have to go to the nearest city (10,000 people and 30 minutes away) to hang out with non-retirement age people. Want to know why the rural areas are so conservative? This is the same root cause. No new blood comes in with new ideas and fresh energy, so everything withers and fades. Then, the past starts to look better and better and if we just go back to the way things were all these issues will magically solve themselves. Yes, people out here think along these lines. This also points to why many rural farmers allow fracking companies to basically poison the aquifers they need for their farms. Any way to get more income is seen as a good thing. It is also why there is a backlash against organics out this way as it is seen by more than a few of the farmers as an attack on the way they care for their animals and land by people in "the Big City" who don't know what it is like out where the work is being done. (And to a point, they are sort of correct.) Kentucky literally bribes doctors to go work in rural areas with loan repayments and one of the reasons our Obamacare roll-out was so well done was to get more money flowing into rural health care as a sort of economic stimulus and at least try to lessen the massive health crisis outside of the big urban areas here. Hemp farming is not something the state started to do to make weed legal; it was started to try to jump ahead of the curve and inject some new blood into the rural farm belt here as well. Links to the program here Rural America is in a ton of trouble, and when, not if, it collapses we are going to be in a large bit of pain.
It's a worldwide phenomena, and it has a name: 'The Brain Drain'. Rural or peripheral areas just aren't interesting enough for young, educated people looking for jobs, people to meet and things to do.This is a part of a bigger social problem out here where I live. The rural areas are becoming "youth deserts" for lack of a better term. If you are young and smart, you go to college and never come back.
There is something that just might help - end the subsidies.
In NZ, that action led to some short-term pain, but long-term prosperity for a lot of farmers. The link below gives an overview of what NZ did, and what happened.
http://www.fedfarm.org.nz/files/2005---Life-after-subsidies---the-NZ-experience.pdfIn the twenty years since 1986-77, the value of economic activity in New Zealand’s farm sector has grown by 40% in constant dollar terms.
Oh god. The subsidies. Agriculture in the United States would not function without subsidies, and without subsidies the fundamental nature of our food would change. Which would be a very, very good thing but the disruption and chaos betwixt "what we got" and "what we need" would be apocalyptic. I dunno. Messing with the food supply, particularly a global producer like the United States, is a great way to kill people. BTW - highly recommend this book.
The Subsidies are destroying innovation in farming, but are the only things keeping many farms running. Yea, spending $80 billion on corn is bad, but losing our farming infrastructure would make what the riots in Missouri look like the peaceful times of yore.
I agree as well. A sound farm policy can use subsidies to transition to more environmentally sustainable farming methods, help smaller farms upgrade equipment and the like. But spending the money we do on corn and sugar is just inane. Subsidies are helping get the hemp industry started here in Kentucky, and that is helping to transition off of tobacco; this I approve of. They are also spending money on re-learning how to use hemp fibers in industry and get that set up. Again, not a bad use of money, and it may bring some industry back into the rural areas that are desperate for any economic activity not involving meth.
Disruption and chaos was exactly what was predicted here, too. It turned out a fair bit better than expected - but we are a small nation. It would be very difficult for such a thing to gain traction in the USA, and even if by some miracle it did, I would think a slower, phased-in approach would be called for.
Hadn't read your PDF before. Just did. A couple things jump out: 1) Farm profits (IE, living wages of farm owners) were cut by 66% and stayed depressed for 20 years 2) Agricultural conglomerates don't own most of your farms. This sentence: Is positively laughable in the United States.Financiers were quick to realise that there was little point in forcing farmers off their land
If there is to be a real and effective food revolution, on scales that matter, gardening has to become sexy. A home garden, backyard chickens, and canning must become a norm, to just name a few practices. It must be a humble goal of every household to raise as much of their own food as they can, and always be looking for sustainable ways to increase their annual yield. Fuck your lawn, plant a garden. Every unfinished basement (And some finished ones) should look like marijuana grow ops, stuffed with peppers, spinach, tomatoes and berries. A person should be lauded on how little they have to purchase to keep their family fed, and when they must purchase things that they cannot themselves produce, like red meat, dairy to some extent, it should be as locally sourced as possible, and bought at prices that would support a respectable standard of living for those who commit their lives to producing dairy and red meat (Really any crop that requires large investments of land and time). As to how to achieve these goals, fuck if I know. I help in my families garden, I know how to can any number of veggies, and can cook with the best of them, with whatever ingredients I have on hand. Once I have an apartment, I'll grow what I can, once I have a home I'll probably rip up the lawn and replace it with spinach, tomatoes, peppers, and as many other varieties of high yield, high nutrition plants as possible, And I'll probably keep chickens like my mother, I've grown accustomed to fresh, bright orange eggs. I'll advocate my friends and neighbors do the same, and try to change local ordinances enforcing non-productive expanses of grass in the front and/or backyard. But maybe I'm weird.
As annoying as the answer might be, that logic just doesn't work for large populations and densely populated areas. Some perspective, I've lived in and helped manage a student-run co-op of 50 for 2 years now. We have chickens, we have a garden, we have some sort of aquaponics project that still hasn't gotten itself off the ground. It's nice when I can walk out and grab mint for dinner. The cherry tomatoes we grow on the roof are delicious. I'm not a fan of the eggs (there's usually poop on them), but they do get eaten. At the end of the day, however, the gardens get plucked by deer and small rodents, the chicken coop now harbors a rat's nest, and we realistically end up buying 99.9% of the food consumed by the house. Food politics is a big thing here, and for a while I was told not to buy bananas for the house because members considered them unethical. But I've grown largely cynical of home-grown farming endeavors. They just don't work out when the number of inhabitants of a plot of land exceeds 10. In suburban and rural areas, that's fine, and it's a beautiful experience to watch organic matter rise from the ground and become food, but in apartments in cities, they serve little purpose past distracting passerbys from the bleak meaninglessness of life.
You're completely right. It does not work for urban areas. But I have a personal belief that the modern megacities are essentially pathological, just by virtue of being too dense. I believe that to improve the lives of the most people we need to, over time, depopulate cities a bit, and push more people out into essentially neo-villages, so that each populational unit is almost self sufficient with regards to food, medical services, education, and utilities. We'll always have cities, but I think that living in them will be considered a temporary inconvenience when compared to my utopian vision of small towns full of scholar-farmers.