By Liza Lin and Erin Foote Pursell, quotes Mary Hendrickson, PhD
Columbia Missourian
March 28, 2004
Fields of Dreams
As market forces threaten family farms, supporters pursue ways to keep an American tradition alive
Shouting and laughing, the boys ran through the woods and reached the hay barn, their favorite spot to spend an afternoon on their grandparents’ farm. It was that time of the day again. Time for a young Bryce Oates and his cousins to spend their afternoon playing hide and seek, time for building secret tunnels under bales of hay they put up months before, time for being kids on the farm.
The reality of farm life today is less idyllic. Jim Crocker, who farms on 1,000 acres near Centralia, spends his day working without seeing another person. His neighbors rarely make time to speak to each other, and many have second jobs in town to make ends meet.
Crocker’s wife, Deanna, has an off-farm job. Without her working, he doesn’t think his small farm would be able to make it.
The family farm has undergone dramatic changes in the past 20 years. It has evolved from being at the heart of rural employment to being a dying way of life. As technological innovations make smaller farms inefficient or less profitable, some Columbians fear that these farms may disappear completely.
Leaders and thinkers in the Columbia farm community may not always agree on the solutions to preserving the family farm, but their vision for the future of agriculture is unanimous: the belief and hope that the family farm, a bedrock of past communities, will play a pivotal role in the future.
This belief is the common thread that links Oates, now the communications director for Missouri Rural Crisis Center, and Crocker, a farmer who is president of Boone County Farm Bureau, with three others actively involved in the farming community.
Mary Hendrickson is an assistant professor in the department of rural sociology at MU. Margot McMillen owns a 45-acre farm and is a teacher at Westminster College. Jenny Czyzewski is a teacher at South Calloway Middle School. McMillen and Czyzewski also co-host the KOPN/89.5 radio program “Farm and Fiddle” every Wednesday night.
Rooting for the family farm
It has been many years, yet Oates still remembers those days of playing on the farm with his cousins. His desire to see the family farm prosper has led him to his work at the crisis center, an agency devoted to the promotion of an agricultural infrastructure that supports the existence of such farms.
Oates said he believes the family farm has been the key to a democratic economy in the United States. Family farms provide a range of opportunities for people who don’t fit into the mold of white-collar office workers, Oates said.
Hendrickson, who specializes in rural sociology, said she agrees. She defined a family farm as a farm where a majority of the capital, labor and management is provided by a single family. These farms can be important building blocks that enhance rural development, Hendrickson said.
“They make up the network for a strong local economy,” she said.
When farmers make decisions about their own small business operations, they can bring this expertise to the civic life of the community. Many volunteer for Rotary or Lions clubs, get elected to the school board or serve on a local church council, making up the backbone of rural communities, Hendrickson said.
McMillen said she believes the importance of family farms is largely underestimated. Family farms provide communities with a level of self-sufficiency that big corporations don’t, she said.
Although she does not condemn buying from big corporations, McMillen said she believes it is possible with a broad network of family farms for a community to be self-sufficient and take care of its own needs, or at least provide an alternative source for consumers to buy food.
“You can’t build your own computer, your own light bulb, but you can take care of some of your food needs in your community,” she said.
What stands in the way?
The outlook for family farms has become more dismal over the years. It is becoming more difficult for small farms to compete with agricultural companies thousands of times their size.
Across any segment of the farming industry, two or three “mega farms” dominate the market, Crocker said. He cited the domination of these “mega farms” as a failure of the government to enforce antitrust laws. He said he believes these agribusiness corporations are a direct threat to small farmers like him.
According to the Agricultural Statistics Service, the average farm size has been increasing since 1997, but the number of individual farmers is decreasing.
“The trend has been and will continue to be mega farms,” Crocker said. “I don’t necessarily agree with that. If things don’t change, it will lead to our downfall as far as our country goes. You eliminate competition, and you have problems.”
The costs involved in farming, especially the price of land, make it an expensive business.
McMillen is confident that if given the opportunity, many “part-time or weekend” farmers would love to farm full-time.
“It’s really hard when you start up with a debt, when you try to buy land and pay it off through your farming,” McMillen said. “So a lot of people take a job in town.”
Another reason family farms are less profitable is that some shoppers would never think to buy food from local producers. Jim Crocker and Oates said most consumers turn first to stores such as Wal-Mart. And it’s the “mega farms” that produce the foods that end up in Columbia grocery stores and on consumers’ shelves.
“Sometimes it seems like everything is against you,” Oates said of the difficulty of convincing consumers to buy local foods. “We still have to be realistic and understand that broad, whole parts of society today completely forget about what we are talking about.”
McMillen said it is important for consumers to know the source of their food.
She gave an example of a trip she took with her husband to Vietnam years ago. The Vietnamese advised the McMillens not to buy fruits and vegetables off the street that they could not peel. These foods came from China, where farmers use DDT, a pesticide banned in the United States for its harmful effects on humans and the environment.
“Americans don’t know about it,” she said. “We can’t take for granted that all the same standards that apply here apply to all other countries.
“We have to get into the habit of asking, ‘Where did this come from? What chemicals were used? How was it treated?’” she said.
This problem, she said, would be easily solved if consumers bought local produce.
But the biggest setback of all, Oates said, is that even when consumers buy local produce, farmers aren’t earning enough.
“Most of the time it’s a real challenge to make money doing direct selling,” Oates said.
Hendrickson held a similar view, saying that many local full-time farmers have turned to producing single commodity crops for a shrinking market and for shrinking margins.
Several paths to a common goal
Preserving the family farm means changing the way farmers do business and the way consumers view their food. For some this means developing niche products. For others, it means a regional farming cooperative. However, at the root of all of the solutions is a strong desire to see a better connection between farmers and consumers.
“You have to have consumer demand, and you have to have places where people can actually buy products from farmers they know and trust,” Hendrickson said.
“That’s why it’s so important to have farmers markets, groceries stores, restaurants and school services that feature products from local farms. You’ve got to pull it through the market system, through it by demand,” she said.
Crocker said he and his wife plan to start selling their pork and beef at farmers markets in the area this summer.
Czyzewski, McMillen’s co-host on “Farm and Fiddle,” said farmers should try to combine farming with other operations, such as making jams, jellies or other value-added products.
Oates said he believes he has an answer to help farmers become smarter businesspeople and connect with consumers — a regional farming cooperative. Farmers in the cooperative could come together to sell their products and make large purchases together, such as feed or fertilizers.
He said the development of a cooperative would start in the “hills and valleys and hinterlands” around Columbia. He sees a cooperative helping to create an infrastructure where farmers could sell eggs and cream and meat together to Columbians.
But for Hendrickson, the outcome of the family farm ultimately rests with the consumer.
“Consumers have to say, ‘I want to support this kind of landscape around Columbia; I want to see these kinds of families around; I want to support these kinds of communities,’ ” Hendrickson said. “They have to put their money where their mouth is and buy good food.”