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On Behalf of American Farmers A little less than two years ago, I left a career in higher education and returned to my birthplace in North Dakota to manage our family’s farm. My decision was motivated by the conviction that the field of agriculture poses some of the most formidable challenges in today’s world. While worldwide food shortages and global population explosion present staggering challenges to agriculture, there are other issues that intrigue me on a food-producing farm. Among them are the challenges of rebuilding the soil to produce food that is more nutritious, adopting styles of farming that will consume less energy, farming without using toxic chemicals, and developing effective conservation practices to protect the soil against wind and water erosion. Since returning to the farm I have become keenly aware of the economic issues that have given rise to recent farmer protests. This problem is best illustrated by making a trip to a farm equipment store to compare the cost of essential parts with the current price of grain. This past summer, for example, I had to pay $21.00 for three steel-hardened bolts ¾ inch in diameter and ten inches long. At current local wheat prices ($2.80 per bushel) it takes 7½ bushels of wheat to pay for the three bolts. Farm economists tell us that it now costs $4.33 to produce a bushel of wheat. That means that it cost me $32.48 to produce the $21.00 worth of wheat to buy the bolts. It should be noted, too, that I had no choice. I either had to pay the $21.00 for the bolts or abandon a $30,000 piece of equipment. That incident serves to illustrate how, in the past five years, costs of essential expenditures in a farming operation, such as farm equipment, parts, 22 This is an edited version of a paper presented at one of the first U.S. gatherings of organic farmers, in Bismarck, North Dakota, in December 1978. 23 On Behalf of American Farmers and energy, have exploded, while grain prices are down 30 percent (even with the slight price improvement in 1978). It was something of an economic shock for me to remember that when I was a boy, in the 1940s, our farm sold wheat for well over $2.00 per bushel, but now in the late 1970s we’re still selling wheat for less than $3.00 per bushel. Farmers are, in fact, caught in a three-way economic squeeze that is wholly dictated to them. They are told what prices they will receive for the products they produce. They are told what prices they will pay for the products and services they have to buy. And they are told how much freight they will pay to ship their grain to the mills and their equipment from the factories. Farmers are the only American businessmen who are forced to buy retail, sell wholesale, and pay the freight both ways. Farmers have no way of influencing prices in relation to the actual costs of production or of passing their increased costs along to consumers. Farmers interpret these realities as subsidizing the rest of the nation with cheap food so that an inflation-ridden populace can escape some of the consequences of a shrinking dollar. Farmers have no one to champion their cause in this squeeze. Laborers have their unions, businesses have their conglomerates, and professionals have their associations. Each has the muscle to demand some annual increments to offset some of the inflationary pinch. Farmers have no political clout (they constitute less than 4 percent of the voting population), powerful lobbies, corporate structure, nor organization to effectively promote their interests in the political process or marketplace. Even the cabinet officer appointed to represent farmers, the Secretary of Agriculture, seems to find it hard to support farmers in their economic struggle for survival. Farmers are particularly disheartened by Secretary Berglund’s assumption that the protests of American farmers are motivated by selfish interests and that farmers are in trouble largely because of bad management decisions, which has led to a supply-demand imbalance. This is an extremely narrow view of the matter. When it comes to food production, our nation simply must begin thinking in global terms. Anyone who views food surpluses and mismanagement in terms of oversupply can only have in mind a narrow and privileged enclave of mankind. They must assume that the privileged few can maintain their favored position...

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