Family farmers

a lesson in humility

When’s the last time you considered how food reached your table? Come on, ‘fess up—never? A decade ago? This morning? It doesn’t really matter as i suspect everyone of us professes to prefer ‘farm-to-table’, thus lauding the family farm.

A glorious institution emblazoned in our memory is the family farm, even if you are a city slicker. Fields stretching from one side of a vista to another, particularly in late June laden with thigh high (because corn is supposed to be knee high, the saying goes, on the Fourth of July). Or herds of cattle grazing lazily on verdant, rolling hills with a watering hole in the distance. Now that is farming and food no matter where it’s located. We all probably remember this from our 3rd or 4th birthdays.

I don’t profess to be a farmer though I am both from agriculture-prone Missouri (yes, yes, I am loathe admitting the Missouri part to these days but not due to the agriculture link) and both sides of my family included farmers. My paternal grandfather became a tenant farmer at age 57 after a significant financial setback; he had been a blacksmith prior to that which is certainly a field linked to animals and the land. The other side actually owned land which is pretty remarkable considering the rockiness of the land.

Few things attract me as the glory of the open prairies driving across Kansas. I had a colleague who said open areas made him nervous but I, like my son, am a ‘horizon’ person, drawn to the open view of so many things sprouting from the ground. Fallow field rgenerating amid nothing growing also appeal. It’s all wonderful although I worry about it with our growing problem of drought nationally in our breadbasket.

What really matters is how much effort farmers put into supervising cattle or grain production. We delight in proclaiming our love for family farms but rarely recognise the cost and labour intensity driving the vast majority into the hands of ‘big ag’ and all those practices we aren’t wild about. Farm equipment is expensive. Crops fail due to blight occasionally or weather more often. Farmers often need cash infusions yet those are hard to come by without federal support. Economic realities mean that the family farms began disappearing with our national urbanisation trend in the late 19th century, augmented more recently by expsnesive science increasing yield while diminishing costs for production. That tends to decrease the number of family farmers struggling to make ends meet, much less offer a lifestyle to a new generation intrigued by the city and its wiles.

We watched a marvelous introduction, called ‘This Farming Life’, to a BBC series last night. It follows farming families in Scotland pursuing a counter cultural trend to preserve the farm lifestyles (there are several) there. One setting is a recovering barrister couple seeking to preserve the crofting legacy for perhaps one further generation on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. A second is a family near Inverness replete with active sheep dogs helping shepherd the flock across the wide spaces. A third is a couple near Loch Lomand, soon to marry, with cattle, sheep, and a barley crop.

Turns out this is a six season show which we both look forward to watching as the various challenges and rewards of this lifestyle so foreign to our own, explained by the farmers themselves, to open the aperature for city slickers to appreciate what is required in contemporary agriculture.

I was particularly struck last night by the third couple’s attempts at diversifying their products (not sure what more polite word I can use). The lad concerns himself with the sheep and barley crop while the soon-to-be missus buys and breeds the cattle, truly a science on a par with breeding thoroughbred horses.

It was the challenge of sequencing that really attracted my interest. National security strategy requires sequencing but it’s something we too often as citizen forget and it’s hard to teach except as an abstract idea. Sequencing overlays a long list of items where one step creates a consequence which is utterly required to get to the third step and beyond. But we must always return to it in our decision-making. But we profer a seemless single approach which often ignores that step by step choice.

Last night’s episode was a bit more prosaic as the farmer confronted determined nature, neither controllable nor at all interested in his plans or level of tiredness. This guy needed to harvest his barley with his second-hand combine as grain for his cattle as well as a crop to provide an cash flow.

But barley, like so many other crops, is pretty demanding in its requirements for harvesting. In particular, he had a single day-long window to harvest his 40 acres without rain to spoil it and sufficient light to allow him time for that entire harvest. Straightforward, correct?

Second hand combines, like any mechanical item, can be finicky. He lost merely but fully an hour getting it retuned after it broke down. An hour does not sound like much but the schedule he had to meet to bring in the crop before anticipated rain became much more challenging.

Things went further awry when the rain, predicted for the morning (I must confess as much as I am impressed by modern weather modelling, this is Scotland where rain is about as common as sunlight in Arizona in July, regardless of the forecast), appeared around 5 in the afternoon. He lost yet more time as a result but it did stop before sunset.

Never mind! Once it stopped raining, couldn’t he simply carry on? He could try but turns out modern mechanical aids are as sensitive to wet conditions as a cellphone allowed to get too damp after falling in the ocean for a few seconds. He tried valiantly to continue combining those last acres but the dampened barley gummed up the combine to the point it simply would not function.

Wait it out to dry! Surely that would work. Except that the farmer knew he had light until 8 pm, using a huge piece of equipment in the dark was dangerous, and more rain was due in the next morning. Once that rain-drench crop dried, the harvest would be past its peak, thus offering a lesser product to sell, less income for the farm, fewer sheep and cattle for next year, and simply fewer resulting options for next year.

Yet, should he have resequenced his actions? What could he have done differently? Not a whole lot. One cannot control mother nature any better than madating the behaviour of another sovereign state. And family farms in the British Isles as any part of the world operate on a tiny profit margin as it is. The end of the episode did not indicate he would be bankrupt but he was most definitely disappointed, exhausted by the day, and recognising that he had to get down all he could because second chances were a year away.

As we think about how hard we all work, take a few moments to thank those who work the land in whatever capacity as they are truly carrying on a profession forgotten and underappreciated no matter where they are. Family farms in Iowa, Idaho or Argyll don’t face nearly the inherent problems that growers face in a place near, say, remainder of the Aral Sea in western Uzbekistan where Soviet chemical abuse over the last years of the Cold War utterly destroyed the soil. Or in Vietnam where rising salt water resulting from sea incursions are making rice production diminish precariously. Our farmers, Canadians, and several other highly productive areas are surviving but largely through ‘big ag’ and the kind of 20 hour days so many small farmers must dedicate to survive.

We consumers of course be willing to pay much more for food. I won’t speak to the Scottish mindset but I am 100% confident in saying we Yanks like lots of cheap food and want more of it!! Food is the inverse of taxes: we want more rather than less and would be up in arms to have it any other way.

We too often want to ignore the economic realities that are making our vision of ‘idyllic farms’ a mere memory, if not fantasy.

Thank the farmers whomever they are, especially say good things about those small units still toiling in their fields. They embrace a remarkable lifestyle but also a dying one.

Thank you for reading this Actions Create Consequences today. I appreciate your time and those of you who support this effort. If you find this worth recirculating, please feel free to send it to others who might enjoy it, or restack with the button below.

Be well. My agricultural productions are indeed humble but the best I can do. FIN