Wylie Harris / December 1, 2003 / Aired on KEOS 89.1 FM,
"Are you a rancher?" a new friend of mine asked me recently. I gave him the usual answer. We do raise beef cattle, and our place hasn't been planted to row crops since my grandparents' day, but we still call it "the farm," not "the ranch." In a state where some ranches have acres in the millions, scraping by on a couple hundred makes a person a little sheepish about adopting the title "rancher."
The usual answer didn't satisfy him. His definition of ranching wasn't about cattle versus crops, or number of acres. "Yeah," he said, "but does it make more money than you spend on it?"
The painful truth is, not often. We keep one anxious eye perpetually on the balance sheet, hoping we'll turn a profit enough years to keep the IRS from getting suspicious. Everyone involved in our farm has an off-farm job - working, as we put it, to support the farming habit.
The context, more painful still, is that we're more the rule than the exception among small agricultural producers, regardless of what we call ourselves. There are 2 million farms in the United States today, 90 % of them smaller than 1000 acres. Yet the largest 20 % of those farms receive nearly 90 % of the market value of agricultural products sold. And even those big "success stories" are often barely getting by, themselves. Out of every dollar spent on food in this country, 19 cents go to the farmers who grew it, with the remainder profiting the whole integrated industrial chain of processing, packing, shipping, and marketing . At those wages, only half the country's farmers can make ends meet just by farming, and 40 % work off the farm 200 or more days a year .
Official spokespeople tell us that this degradation of farms and farmers is the unavoidable cost of feeding a hungry world. The truth is that the current trajectory of American agriculture exacerbates world hunger rather than easing it. The major commodity crops produced in the U.S. are bought, and sold abroad, for less than their cost of production . This bankrupts both domestic and foreign farmers, driving them into already-growing cities where they no longer have the means to grow food, for themselves or anyone else. Small farms, officially scorned as inefficient, actually produce more per acre than large ones , and their historical decline was anything but inevitable. Their marginality is the result of several decades of agricultural policy expressly designed to eliminate their inherent economic advantages over the industrial system of food production that has replaced them. And despite having the political deck stacked against them, many small farms are profitable.
Each time one of the part-time, semi-profitable small producers like me gets out of agriculture, it brings us all one step closer to total dependence on a none-too-kindly corporate food system. Until that system quits dictating agricultural policies with exactly that goal in mind, I'll use some other standard than profit to decide whether I'm a rancher. And when I say farming, I'll mean what Wendell Berry means: "Farming as defined by agrarianism as opposed to farming as defined by industrialism: farming as the proper use and care of an immeasurable gift ."
