Why Cows Need Names: And More Secrets of Amish Farms

5. Get Bigger and Specialize

34 · Why Cows Need Names 34 5 Get Bigger and Specialize in the days following our meeting, it is impossible for me to get eli and Katie and the small farm they are about to establish out of my mind. actually , i don’t even try to stop thinking about them. This is, hands down, the most rewarding and interesting part of my job. While my colleagues at the university wrestle with big questions about thousands of acres, thousands of cows, thousands of pigs, or millions of chickens, i have very slowly over the years become completely immersed in the critical, everyday questions of these smallest of farms. The mantra of agriculture has long been: get bigger and specialize—or get out. Way back in my early college days, i remember so clearly the professors drumming into our heads that in order to be a successful farmer you had to grow bigger every year, and you had to specialize. So if you have chickens and pigs and cows, get rid of the chickens and pigs and concentrate on cows. if you have 50 dairy cows this year, have 60 next year, and aim your sights at 600 five years hence. In this country, we take almost as an axiom that bigger farms—or any business for that matter—are more efficient, profitable, and successful, so the professors’ message was readily accepted by all of us, with little to no reservation. at the beginning of my career as a young county agent, i frequently told Amish farmers in the settlement they needed to find some way to get bigger and specialize. Fortunately, they steadfastly ignored me and everyone else at the university. For the first few years, I secretly reasoned they would simply fade away as time went on, slowly selling failed farms one after the other. after all, they refused to follow the prescribed business Get Bigger and Specialize · 35 model. Besides that, they farmed with horses for goodness sake. The rest of agriculture gave up on horses more than a generation ago. How could these people possibly believe they could continue to farm this way and stay in business? it was years later when it became clear that amish farms were decidedly not going away. in fact, they seemed to be thriving. That i began to timidly question agriculture’s sacred mantra of “get bigger and specialize.” almost immediately, i learned that questioning a core belief is not one of the ways to be popular with colleagues in the College of agriculture. The bias toward large farms is an ongoing problem, but perhaps one of the most insidious and least understood threats to the long-term survivability of any new farm is the constant barrage of doom-and-gloom messages that the U.S. agricultural complex spoon-feeds to reporters, government officials, and the general public. No matter what the current conditions down on the farm actually are, it is devilishly easy for a reporter to find a farmer or an agricultural academic who will moan into the microphone on cue. Of course, we have paid these folks well to develop one of the worst cases of persistent adult diaper rash in history. after all, would we as a country support $20 billion of agricultural welfare payments year after year if the farm industry told us things were pretty good right now? Or, heaven forbid, what if the farm industry carefully explained to the public that the average farm family annual income is consistently higher than the average non-farm family income? Therefore, by definition, all agricultural subsidies are transfers of wealth from the relatively poor to the relatively rich. So why does all of the doom-and-gloom, sky-is-falling rhetoric of the agricultural industry have any impact on a potential new farm? Well, to begin with, young families who rarely, if ever, hear about successful small farms are unlikely to investigate the economic possibilities of starting a new farm. Farmers in the United States have always faced real challenges, but there are real success stories as well. Withholding small farm success stories at a time when the general economy is humming along nicely is a travesty. Withholding these success stories during a recession or depression is unconscionable. Further, businesses, local government, and the public make real decisions on zoning, taxes, store locations, power line rights-of-way, and a plethora of other things based on the carefully honed misconception that agriculture is in serious trouble and...