Cultivating an Ecological Conscience: Essays from a Farmer Philosopher

A Bright Future for “Farmers of the Middle”

317 A Bright Future for “Farmers of the Middle” One of [Benjamin] Franklin’s goals in life was to provide useful advice for aspiring middle-class shopkeepers and tradesmen. He was America’s godfather of self-help business books. By creating what he called a strong “middling class,” he hoped to lay the foundation for his vision of a stable civic society in America. . . . The “middling people” should be the proud sinews of the new land.1 —Walter Isaacson The notion that the middle class is somehow the bedrock of American civic society has deep roots in our culture. In 1774, Benjamin Franklin wrote that the very survival of the Province of Pennsylvania depended on “the middling people”—the “farmers, shopkeepers and tradesmen of this city and country.” Franklin argued that “mistaken principles of religion” combined with “a love of worldly power,” exercised by a few elite in positions of authority, threatened to undo the good life envisioned by the majority in the middle.2 America’s modern-day middling people, especially the farmers of the middle, are once again under siege. According to the data from the 2002 agriculture census, in just five years (1997–2002), the United States lost 14.5 percent of its midsize farms, those with gross sales between $50,000 and $500,000. In many midwest states, where farming anchors the state’s economy, midsize operator losses were even higher: Iowa, 18.5 percent; Michigan, 18 percent; and Illinois, 16.5 percent.3 There are many reasons for these dismal statistics. Ever-increasing conThis is an edited version of a paper that first appeared in Holly George-Warren, ed., Farm Aid: A Song for America (Emmaus, Pa.: Rodale Books, 2005). 318 Cultivating an Ecological Conscience centration in the industrial food sector forces farmers to expand their operations to maintain access to markets. Large firms prefer doing business with large farms because it reduces their transaction costs. Increased fossil-fuel costs (the basis of almost all industrial farm inputs) puts undercapitalized farmers at a competitive disadvantage. The predominant business culture in our society insists that in a market-based economy, efficiency is the only important social and economic “good”; thus, the loss of the midsize farms is simply an “inevitable” outcome of free-market forces at work. Furthermore, current federal farm policies have tended to favor large farms. During this same five-year period when farms of the middle have been disappearing, the number of megafarms (those with more than $500,000 in gross sales) has been increasing. At the same time, the number of the very small farms (farms with less than $5,000 in gross sales) has also been increasing. These trends reflect growth in direct-market sales (mainly by small farms) and highly concentrated, bulk commodity farm sales (mostly by megafarms, which produce a few commodities under contract to highly concentrated firms). What emerges is a bipolar food system that offers consumers only two food choices: buying directly from small farmers through farmers’ markets , Internet sales, and other direct-marketing arrangements; or buying mass-produced (usually highly processed) foods that arrive through supply chains dominated by megafood firms offering virtually no traceability or differentiated characteristics. These circumstances place America’s independent family farm in a vulnerable position. Pushed out of the mass-production commodity market by economies of scale and prevented from direct marketing due to the lack of adequate infrastructure to accommodate their productive capacity, midsize farms are disappearing. Most Americans seemed unconcerned about these trends. As long as branded products continued to show up in local supermarkets at reasonable prices, customers seemed satisfied. Fast, convenient, and cheap has become the siren call of the marketplace. Fortunately, this situation is changing. While these grim farm statistics have been playing out, an unprecedented new market, uniquely suited to the farms in the middle, has emerged. Demand is increasing for highquality , differentiated foods that include compelling food stories and that are marketed by new supply-chain relationships. Fast, convenient, and cheap 319 A Bright Future for “Farmers of the Middle” is being challenged by memory, romance, and trust. A new business culture is needed to meet the growing demands of this new market. Restaurant chefs are no longer satisfied with the usual humdrum fare. They still wish to provide their customers with great-tasting food, but they also want to be able to tell diners where the food came from. They want...