Illustration by William Crook Jr.

POTEMKIN FARMS The family farm is dead. It has been for a long time. Advocates left, right and center ought to give it a decent burial and plead their cases honestly by Harold Henderson

Illinois native William Jennings Bryan was barnstorming the country on the Democratic/Populist ticket. Responding to the suggestion that urban dwellers might oppose some of his policies, Bryan replied, "The great cities rest upon our broad and fertile prairies. Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country."

Bryan was the greatest anti-corporate champion the family farmer ever had, and he lost decisively that fall to conservative Republican William McKinley. The 1896 election set the pattern for the future. Historian Ray Ginger summed it up. "To the question: Can farmers and wage earners and reformers unite to win control of the Federal government?, the answer was no."

Perhaps Bryan could have changed the course of history if he had been elected, perhaps not. But social and economic forces since then have diminished his core constituency to the vanishing point.
• When Bryan campaigned, there were more than a quarter of a million farms in Illinois. Now there are fewer than 80,000. There are as many teachers in the Chicago public schools as there are cattle farmers in the entire state.

www.uis.edu/~ilissues Illinois Issues October 2000 . 36

• When Bryan campaigned, agriculture made up very roughly a quarter of the American economy. In 1960, it was about 4 percent and in 1997, 1 percent. None of this is necessarily bad news. Many fewer farmers working slightly less land are producing more food and fiber than ever, with the rest of the economy growing even faster. On the face of it, we seem to be employing both human labor and natural resources more efficiently than in 1896. That’s good news because we have other uses for both.

Ask anyone who is still trying to run a labor-intensive small farm these days, and they’ll tell you it’s almost impossible to find help. Vanishingly few Americans today are willing to pay what producing food that way is worth, and even fewer want to do the hard physical labor themselves. Hence machines and chemicals for most operators, and incredibly long days and nights for the faithful few.

As for natural resources, in February, The Nature Conservancy bought 7,500 acres of rich farmland just across the Illinois River from Havana. Instead of raising corn or

37 . October 2000 Illinois Issues www.uis.edu/~ilissues

Bryan’s rhetoric is now only half true. If we had a 100 percent world-wide crop failure, we’d be in desperate trouble. But if we had a 100 percent urban failure, today’s farms would also be in trouble. Besides, these days hypothetical apocalypses come by the dozen: a 100 percent shutoff of oil or a 100 percent loss of tread on all tires in use would be almost equally catastrophic. Our interdependent society is more like a woven blanket than a ball balanced on a single point.

Still, farming is revered in a way that no other industry is. “To curse a farm,” writes Garry Wills, “is like desecrating the flag.” To curse a new subdivision or factory, on the other hand, is all in a day's work. In Green Bay, Wis., paper mills have been subject to stringent pollution controls, but the water still isn't clean enough. Now, the Chicago-based Joyce Foundation is backing a pilot “watershed-trading” project there in which a paper mill might get credit for pollution reduction “by paying the costs farmers would have to incur to divert animal waste, reduce pesticide use and take other steps to protect the water.”

Controlling farm runoff might benefit water quality more than additional controls on the factory, and might cost less, too. But the foundation offers no reason why one polluter should pay to clean up another's mess, except to say, “what’s too much for a farmer may be very affordable for a paper mill.” What other polluting industry gets this kind of service from environmentalists?

Partly it’s just sentimentality, the true religion of 21st-century America. One cure would be to re-read Farmer Boy, a fictionalized but fairly realistic account of life on a late-19th-century farm in northern New York state. Near the book’s end, 10-year-old Almanzo Wilder goes to town with his father. There, a local wagon maker approaches them and offers to take on Almanzo as an apprentice. That evening, when Almanzo’s mother hears of the proposal, she becomes irate. “A pretty pass the world's coming to, if any man thinks it’s a step up in the world to leave a good farm and go to town! How does Mr. Paddock make his money, if it isn’t catering to us? I guess if he didn’t make wagons to suit farmers, he wouldn’t last long! ... Maybe he’ll make money, but he’ll never be the man you are. Truckling to other people for his living, all his days — He’ll never be able to call his soul his own.” Wilder, who was writing in the early 1930s, is describing a world far distant from our own.

Sentimentality aside, though, I suspect the myth of the family farm lives on because it offers cover for so much political wildlife.

The farm industry itself hides behind the myth in order to fend off pollution control measures. Fortunately, the larger and fewer farms become, the easier the logistics of regulating them will be. The need for regulation is obvious. In the September issue of the Heartland Institute’s Environment & Climate News, the American Farm Bureau uses data from the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency in its defense. But even after the bureau’s careful massaging, its presentation of the numbers shows agriculture to be the sole cause of more stream miles of impaired water quality in Illinois —15.1 percent — than any other single polluting activity.

Sprawl-fighters hide behind the myth, in some cases because they suffer from the urbanite’s delusion that farming is “natural” because it is sometimes scenic. In fact, expanding suburbs don’t fragment the natural landscape much, they just redivide already fragmented farmland. The victims of landscape fragmentation are birds that nest in deep woods, not those that flourish in farm fencerows. In order to help them, we need to buy up and reforest large tracts of land — a strategy that is only conceivable because farming has become so efficient we can spare the acreage.

Anti-corporate activists hide behind the myth, probably because it’s easier to bash big business for ruining the family farm than for taking over small autobody shops or funeral homes. The main reason big business takes over is because it can deliver good enough products more cheaply. Whether they acknowledge it or not, advocates of the family farm are in fact advocating for either higher food prices or higher taxes for farm subsidies. If more people were willing to pay the price for organically grown, essentially hand-made food, more of it would get produced. But few of us are.

Conservatives trying to get rid of the estate tax hide behind the myth because people are more likely to sympathize with a “family farm” having to be sold to pay the tax than with most of the beneficiaries of abolishing that tax. In truth, repeal of the estate tax will make little difference to anyone other than the extremely wealthy who neglect to manage their estates.

Jeffersonians lament that the demise of the family farm will mean the end of democracy. They believe that only someone with an independent livelihood can stand up to government and corporate power. But they, too, are a century or more late. None of us is independent in that sense — we can’t go home and live on what we grow in the back yard. Today, independence can only mean (as individuals) being resilient and having economic alternatives, and (as a society) having a strong constituency for civil liberties. There may be pleasure and satisfaction in growing enough rutabagas to last out the winter, but that doesn’t mean freedom if the government is, meanwhile, intercepting e-mail or allowing big farm corporations to fix prices.

The family farm is as dead as William Jennings Bryan. It has been for a long time. Advocates left, right, and center ought to give it a decent burial and plead their cases honestly. .

Harold Henderson, a staff writer for the Chicago Reader, regularly examines environmental concerns. He has written for Illinois Issues on endangered species protection and the genetic diversity of feed grains. His most recent essay, “Good sprawl,” appeared in June 1999.

www.uis.edu/~ilissues Illinois Issues October 2000 . 38