Seeds of change

Two perspectives on the shifting social economy in farm country

Bioengineering has hit Midwestern fields. And it will have profound implications for farming and for the global food supply

Artwork courtesy of the Tarble Arts Center, Eastern Illinois University

Bill Lambrecht, a Washington, D.C.-based reporter who writes about environmental issues for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, received the Raymond Clapper Memorial Award in May for global coverage of genetic engineering issues. Since last year, he has traveled to four continents to explain the spread of genetically engineered crops and food. His last article for Illinois Issues on this subject appeared in November 1998.

By Bill Lambrecht

Summer days detasseling corn in central Illinois stretched on forever. When you're 13 or 14, time passes slowly, depositing oversized color snapshots in your memory.

Cornfield scenes I recall: A crew boss in army fatigues rooting for the Vietnam War to begin; detasselers dizzied from forbidden cigarettes; lunches of salami and fat tomato slices; and cussing a man named Gene, whose family owned the local seed company that employed us.

What did Gene do? He played golf, that's all, while we trudged miles through steamy fields, snapping pollen-laden tassels from stalks so corn plants couldn't have sex with themselves. At least we suspected Mr. Seed Company played golf all day, seeing as how he was city champion. And here we were, golfer wannabes in the corn desert, covered with sweat and pollen, reeking of salami and smoke.

These days, one of the problems in farming is knowing whom to cuss. And things are getting more confusing by the day. The seed company owned by the rich golfer? It was acquired by another, bigger seed company. Then, a couple years back, the bigger seed company became part of an agriculture giant, Swiss-based Novartis.

Agribusiness consolidation is one of two trends bringing change to Midwestern farm fields. The other is genetically engineered crops, which were sowed this year on more than 80 million acres in the United States. These changes have profound implications, not just for farming but for the global food supply.

SEEING LIFE ON THE FARM The vast Midwestern landscape has always encompassed diverse artistic visions. Grant Wood's grim-faced farm families on their stark homesteads are neighbors to Jennie Cell's brightly remembered people and places. The crowded intimacy of the Primitives live close by the sparest renderings of the Regionalists. Both are hollering distance from the muted nostalgia of the American Impressionists. And all reside at the the Tarble Arts Center at Eastern Illinois University in Charleston. That center's collection incorporates American Scene prints, with representative works by Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton, and paintings by such Midwestern Impressionists as Paul Turner Sargent of Charleston and Robert Marshall Root of Shelbyville. Unique to the Tarble, though, is the collection of contemporary works by east-central and southeastern Illinois folk artists, including Jennie Cell and Elma Richey. The Editors

There aren't many hometown seed companies left in local hands. In the last few years, Monsanto Co. of St. Louis has acquired or is in the process of buying at least eight seed companies around the world. DuPont purchased seed giant Pioneer. Dow has acquired at least six seed companies, Novartis four, German-based AgrEvo three, and Zeneca of Britain two.

These six multinationals have something in common beyond hunger to own food at its source: Each was primarily a chemical company that has redefined itself as a "life science" corporation and invested heavily in genetic engineering, which for them means manipulating the DNA of plants. Now these companies are racing one another to establish footholds up and down the

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To understand what happens next down on the farm, meet the Terminator. No, not the seemingly immortal robot in the body of Arnold Schwarzenegger. This Terminator is a three-gene construct patented last year by the U.S. government and a Mississippi seed company being acquired by Monsanto. When engineered into the plant, this Terminator — known properly as the Technology Protection System — renders the seeds of plants sterile, for the purpose of preventing farmers from gathering seeds from each new harvest for their next crops. In other words, farmers would be precluded from enjoying savings from the seeds they might grow themselves.

Globally, seed-saving is a time-honored practice, especially in the lands of subsistence agriculture. In India, soon to be the world's most populous country, 70 percent of farmers gather seeds, trade them in markets and experiment with them in their quest to get the most from thin soils.

Besides the specter of unwanted control, the Terminator poses another threat. Even Gordon Conway, president of the biotechnology-friendly Rockefeller Foundation, wondered aloud recently what happens if a farmer living crop to crop winds up

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with a bag of these "suicide" seeds. The New York-based foundation, which has invested $ 100 million in genetic engineering, recommends that the Terminator be terminated before it becomes commercial in a few years.

"October in Illinois," 1923, by Robert Marshall Root of Shelbyville (1863-1937). Root, best known for his 1918 painting of the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debate in Charleston, also painted landscapes. He gained some national attention. Here in Illinois, Gov. Henry Horner attended his funeral. Nevertheless, few of his works are known to be in public collections outside of Shelbyville.

By then, we're likely to see genetic tools even more powerful. Multinational companies won't tell you much about it, but they are working in their labs on genetic applications that use chemicals to control gene expression in their newly engineered seeds. Sooner or later, they will be selling bags of genetically altered seeds whose traits can be activated only by the proprietary chemicals sold along with the seeds. The genetic era already has brought seed-chemical systems to the farm. Since 1996, companies have sold corn, soy bean and cotton seeds genetically altered for herbicide tolerance. Farmers who buy Monsanto's Roundup Ready seeds spray Monsanto's Round Up Ready herbicide liberally on corn and soybean fields without fear of killing the plants.

To understand how fully integrated agriculture works, consider the poultry industry, controlled by a handful of rivals from start to finish. They provide the chicks to contract growers, who must invest hundreds of thousands of dollars to construct chicken houses longer than football fields. The companies provide the feed. They pick up the chickens or turkeys and ship them in company- owned trucks to company-owned slaughter houses where they are packaged in company labels.

Growers wanting to buck the system can't find anyone who'll sell them chicks or feed out of fear of company retribution. There's no independent slaughterhouse. And banks won't lend to them in the first place because of the uncertainties. I've talked to growers in Missouri and Maryland who make a good living from the way things work. I've talked to others who feel trapped, like the woman who said she and her husband don't consider themselves farmers anymore. "We feel like what we have become are chicken-house janitors," she said.

Similar concentration, in which production is controlled by large companies from piglet to slaughter, is visible in the factory hog farms in Illinois and other states.

In the United States, agriculture has been split between animals and crops.

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But that may change as more genetically altered grain is grown for animal feed. With such genetically modified crops, farmers must pay to play because everything is patented. Besides tacking on "technology fees" of $20 and more to bags of seed, companies require farmers to sign contracts promising not to save seeds from their harvests. To make sure farmers toe the line, Monsanto has deployed Pinkerton agents, 1-800 snitch lines and even satellites.

I'm glad they didn't use satellites in the 1960s, or they might have caught our detasseling crew sneaking cigarettes in the cornfields.

"The Harvesters," 1918, by Paul Turner Sargent ( 1880-1942). Sargent was born and died on the name Coles County farm. He studied at Eastern Illinois University, where he later taught, and the Art Institute of Chicago. He was primarily a landscape painter. His style ranged from realism to impressionism with a romantic view of nature.

I thought about how those Illinois corn tassels felt in my hands while standing recently in another farm field, this one in the rural English countryside, near Oxford. As a police helicopter floated above, hundreds of protesters in masks and white, protective suits attacked a test field of AgrEvo's genetically engineered canola, stamping at the thigh-high plants and yanking them from the ground. Helmeted bobbies flattened a few plants themselves while arresting six saboteurs. Farmers throughout the world are growing accustomed to the destruction of gene-altered crops, which are primarily in the experimental stage outside the United States. Near London earlier in the summer, protesters gave new meaning to a Monsanto "demonstration plot" of genetically modified sugarbeets: They demonstrated there and destroyed it. In Ireland, France and Germany, among other places, incidents of sabotage also have occurred.

When I was in India 10 months ago, farmers I talked to feared the implications of the Terminator. A few days after I returned home, I learned the farmers I had met in southern India took torches to two fields of genetically modified cotton being grown experimentally by Monsanto.

American farmers could scarcely imagine such a spectacle. But outside the United States, a debate rages over genetically modified food, which Americans eat routinely. Proponents of genetic engineering argue that it has begun to reduce the use of insecticides and one day might yield more healthful foods and even drought-tolerant crops to help feed people. Right now, most of its power is harnessed for the short-term profits

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of herbicide tolerance. But Europeans question the safety and the morality of re-engineering the building blocks of life. Perhaps most of all, they fear the power over their food chain by a few multinationals — the same "life science" companies buying up seed companies in Illinois towns.

When they took off their masks, two of the people who emerged from that field near Oxford this spring were Chris and Dorothy Cussens, a computer programmer and a dietician, both past 60. They looked like none of the protesters I've interviewed over the years. "We do not like having this technology imposed on us," Dorothy Cussens told me.

This opposition is being felt by American farmers, too. The barriers to genetically modified food erected by the European Union already have cost American farmers $400 million in lost exports, losses that are almost certain to ignite a trade war between the United States and Europe starting later this year. Now there are signs the debate over genetic engineering is coming to the United States. "How can we stop it?" Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman remarked in his Washington office recently.

U.S. environmental advocacy groups and the foundations that support them are beginning to follow the lead of their European counterparts. And major American news outlets have begun focusing on genetic engineering for the first time. America's introduction to genetically modified food is likely to proceed without Europe and India's uncontrolled fury, and safety studies underway in the states might mollify anxiety. But there will be an American debate, one in which consumers increasingly demand that genetically modified food be labeled, as in Europe. That debate likely will usher in an era of separate food supplies — one that is genetically modified and one that is not.

In the middle are American farmers. Protesters might begin traipsing across their fields. And they are caught — or are soon to be caught — in a maelstrom of consolidation, international trade anxiety and fateful choices about what to grow.

If they get a choice.

Their options are basically three: Go with the changes, fight them against strong odds or quit. I don't know what my grandfather in central Illinois would have done if confronted by corporate consolidation and brave new seeds. I do know that if he were alive today, plowing would be tough indeed.

In the middle of the field he farmed sits a TGI Friday's restaurant. 

Dan Guillory is the author of two hooks about Illinois culture, Living With Lincoln:
Life and Art in the Heartland and When the Waters Recede: Rescue and Recovery After the Great Flood. He recently wrote the introduction to Tramping Across America, a collection of Vachel Lindsay 's travel writing available from Rosehill Press next month. And his poetry will he included in a new anthology, Illinois Voices, to be published next year by the University of Illinois Press. He resides in rural Shelby County and teaches at Millikin University in Decatur.

In the shift to 'precision farming' producers are winning higher yields for their crops. But they're losing a rural culture

By Dan Guillory

Many of the first visitors who came in the 1830s to the great grasslands of central and northern Illinois weren't farmers or homesteaders at all, but literary types and roving observers.

In 1833, a young Scotsman by the name of Patrick Shirreff rode from the village of Chicago, heading south through the prairie and marveling at the clumps of sunflowers and the waving stands of bluestem as tall as a man on horseback. Two years later, Eliza Farnham, early feminist and social reformer from New York, arrived in Tazewell County and gloried in the muddy vistas and skeletal trees of late winter, impressions she recorded in her 1846 classic, Life in Prairie Land. But the most famous writer came from Massachusetts to visit his two brothers, then living in the central Illinois town of Jacksonville. William Cullen Bryant was so taken by the landscape and the flora that he set to work composing "The Prairies," published in 1833, a long poem in which he refers to "the gardens of the Desert."

Those with a less literary imagination, however, driven by the urgent need to put food on the table, quickly discovered that those "gardens" were virtually impossible to plow. The typical instrument of the day, with its old-fashioned wooden mold-board, made little headway against the tightly meshed roots of such indigenous plants as prairie dock, big bluestem, buttonweed, velvet leaf, goldenrod, lamb's quarter and cocklebur.

But a remarkable pair of mechanically creative immigrants, also arriving from the east, quickly solved impediments to improved agricultural production.

In 1836, John Deere came out to Grand Detour, 111., from his native Vermont, and the next year he invented the first practical steel plow. By 1847, he was selling more than a thousand a year, and the quick adoption of the Deere plow made Illinois a model of agricultural efficiency for the entire world.

Yet if breaking soil was one intractable problem solved, there still remained the back-breaking chore of reaping the grain. Essentially, plowing and reaping had not changed since Neolithic times, some 8,000 years ago. But when John Deere's revolutionary plow was paired with a mechanical reaper invented by Cyrus Hall McCormick, who moved to Chicago in

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1847, Illinois assumed a preeminent position in the effort to pull profits from sod, blessed as it was with good black soil, a plentiful labor force and a new technology that allowed for a smallscale, self-sustainable agriculture that seems primitive, certainly less practical in an increasingly specialized farm country.

Were they to return today, those early wanderers and settlers would notice the loss of far more than the prairie state's tall grass.

"Washing and Fishing," 1976, by Jennie Cell (1905-1988). Cell, who was horn in Coles County, didn't take up painting until she was 50. She said she couldn't find a photograph of a relative's home, so she painted a picture of it with the materials she had at hand: shoe polish and cardboard. Cell's paintings were recognized as outstanding examples of "primitive" art and she won awards at the Illinois State Fair Art Show. Her work then attracted attention outside of central Illinois, resulting in exhibitions at the Smithsonian Institution.

Most farmsteads in this state, especially those in the central section, were settled between 1840 and 1870. One can still glimpse this Golden Age of Agriculture — and a vintage McCormick sidebinder — by visiting the Buck Farm in Monroe County in southern Illinois, presided over by 95- year-old Emma Buck. Her great-grandfather, Christian Henke, settled the place in 1841, shortly after emigrating from Germany. He built the threshing barn, blacksmith shop, smokehouse, butchering house and outdoor oven, all of which are still in use. In fact, the Buck Farm is one of the few self-sustaining farmsteads operating in the state. The Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois keeps watch on the Buck Farm because it is something of a museum, jammed with usable artifacts of every kind, including butchering tools, a grinding wheel, a Civil War jacket and a sleigh. There's good reason to keep an eye on these 80 acres. This last relic of Midwestern self-sufficiency is under siege, too, threatened by powerful new technologies and the ever-growing acreage required to sustain them.

The Buck Farm was typical of the most persistent and stable form of Illinois farm culture. Small farms of 80 to 120 acres were the norm until about World War II. Hybrid seeds and dieselpowered tractors with larger and larger engines began to appear in the latter years of that long, predictable period. In the 19th century, and in much of the 20th, traction was provided by horses and mules. Corn was picked and later husked or "shucked" by hand. Forty acres of corn and wheat translated into cash income; another 40 acres provided animal fodder, with some ground set aside for a kitchen garden and perhaps a small orchard. Farmers put little reliance on herbicides, pesticides, fertilizers or hybrid seeds.

And everyone in the farm family had

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a role to play. Threshing of wheat was an annual ritual that included wives and children. Community life became paramount as farmers depended on one another, and on the nearby towns and villages. A steam-propelled threshing machine appeared on each farm at the end of the harvest season, and for a day or two all hands forked grain onto a conveyor belt that fed the grain into the mechanical innards of the thresher. Women competed to provide the most bountiful lunch or supper for the workers. Typically, they served lemonade, chicken and dumplings, homemade noodles, fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, green beans, corn on the cob, apple pie, and huge pots of coffee. This labor-intensive farm necessitated these high-calorie meals, but all of the food was grown on site.

What marked this farm most distinctively was its community life and its power of self-sustainability. Butter, cheese, ham, sausage, steaks, vegetables, fruits, eggs, milk and bread were all products of this farm. And the producers were also the consumers. Any surplus was sold to nearby villagers and townspeople. (Today, the few remaining Amish farms in Douglas County around Arthur, Cadwell and Arcola are the last of such self-sustaining agricultural enterprises, though even the Amish have had to turn to producing quilts, cabinets, and other items for the tourist trade.)

The center of the archetypal farm, of course, was always the wooden barn, usually painted red or white. It was the focal point of the business end of husbandry and an icon of farm culture, as suggested in the 1997 documentary "Weathered Secrets," a film underwritten by the Illinois Humanities Council and the National Endowment for the Humanities. And when most people hear the phrase "family farm," the barn and the homestead are what come to mind.

But in reality, the isolated glow of an onboard computer screen is likely to be more representative of the operation of a late 20th-century farm.

"Autumn," 1975, by Elma Richey (dates unknown). Richey, a self-taught artist from Charleston, began painting in the mid-1960s after raising six children. Most of her compositions are of scenes remembered from childhood, farm landscapes and rural people at work.

The end of the traditional farm occurred in the years immediately following World War II. And with it, the end of traditional farm culture. Until about 1950, even small villages with populations of a thousand or less could boast two or three cinemas, and an equal number of gas stations, restaurants and general stores. Why? Because on Saturdays farm families came into "town" to sell or exchange eggs for groceries and to shop for "store bought" items before taking in Shane or High Noon at the local Bijou or Roxy. When farmyard chickens and pigs disappeared, so did the barter system and the archetypal farm with its red barn and white gabled house.

This point was underlined by cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead in 1978 during a visit she made to Illinois. Mead drew a sharp contrast between the 1920s Illinois of her memory and the state she beheld at the end of the 1970s. She found the newer farms sterile and antiseptic — no goats, no sheep, no crowing roosters. In particular, she expressed shock at how large the farms of the late 1970s had grown, a disconcerting result of the drive to take advantage of larger machinery and "economies of scale."

But such economies ripple through the countryside. Bigger machines mean fewer people are needed on the farm. And fewer farmers mean less shopping and socializing in the small towns.

That little white farmhouse, with a few chickens pecking in front of the barn, is nothing but a memory for the farmer of the 1990s. With a cell phone stuck in the back pocket of his jeans, he climbs aboard an air-conditioned John Deere tractor like the Model 9400 (list price $135,000) or a new John Deere combine ($200,000). In his office or den, a computer hums around the clock, displaying market rates, including speculative futures. There is an online brokerage service for the farmer just as for the ordinary trader. And the United States Department of Agriculture maintains no fewer than five web sites for farmers to tap into. If that is not enough, the farmer can sample one of the nearly 8,000 agricultural web sites by simply keying in www.farm.

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Indeed, one of the more obvious differences between this contemporary farmer and his grandfather in straw hat and bib overalls is the immense amount of information to be processed on a daily basis. Like everyone else in the 1990s, the farmer is surrounded and bombarded by data.

Those new farm machines only outwardly resemble their more recent 20th- century predecessors, let alone the steel plow and mechanical reaper. Like the cars of today, they are really navigating computers. They sample, record and analyze their environment in ways that slightly resemble the scanning abilities of submarines and modern jet fighters. They cost dearly because they contain sophisticated onboard computer systems, linked to banks of sensors.

This allows contemporary farmers to practice precision farming by accessing computer-drawn grid-maps of each field under production. Farmers can then utilize this Global Positioning System, GPS for short, to get a satellite-oriented fix on each field. As this modern high-tech farmer harvests each block on the grid, he receives a precise read-out of the yield for that portion of the field, allowing him to adjust the amount of fertilizer needed to optimize results the next year. Such GPS farming depends on Department of Defense satellites that are accurate down to the foot, so farmers in the 1990s are plowing and planting with the finesse of surgeons as they wheel around in vehicles the size of locomotives. The net result of this precise technology is ever-increasing production.

As the new millennium approaches, the competitive Illinois producer is a player in a global game predicated on ever-advancing technology and production. But it's a game more Illinois farmers are losing.

The results are frighteningly clear. Allowing for vagaries in the weather and the fluctuations of overseas markets, one season's bin-busting supply often means the next season's bank-busting price. U.S. net farm income soared to a high of $54.9 billion in 1996, plummeting to a current $43.8 billion, a 20 percent drop, according to the federal Economic Research Service. Commodity prices in Illinois seesawed as soybeans dropped from a high of $7.62 per bushel in July 1997 to around $4.00 in the summer of 1999. Corn prices dropped from $4.70 per bushel in July 1996 to about $1.75 in mid-July 1999. No other industry, certainly not automobiles or computers or aircraft, could sustain these kinds of declines and survive.

From the headlines... New York Times reporter Tim Weiner argues the latest push for federal emergency aid for the nation's farmers "has little to do with this summer's drought, and a lot to do with Washington." In "It's Raining Farm Subsidies," an analysis that appeared August 8 in the Midwest edition of the newspaper, Weiner writes that federal farm policy is creating bigger farms and fewer farmers. That's because most public subsidies go to large industrialized operations, rather than to the traditional small farmer. The end result is an ever-increasing concentration of land and markets. And rising production. When there's an oversupply, of course, per bushel commodity prices drop. And it's the farmers who get hurt. "The agribusiness giants," Weiner argues, "like overproduction because it keeps [their costs] down." Meanwhile, according to Weiner, the number of small farmers nationwide has declined 75 percent since the 1960s, while the size of farms has grown. Five percent of landowners, he writes, now own 50 percent of all farmland. "There is a farm crisis, but it seems to be that the market, supported by the government, is forcing America's small farmers to get big or get out." The Editors

Meanwhile, implement dealers like Tom Sloan of Assumption in Christian County are bracing for a 35 percent drop in sales during this, the worst agricultural slump in 30 years. Real estate agents anticipate steady erosion of farm ground prices.

Not surprising, farmers are choosing to quit, lease their land or hire out to larger producers. Though Illinois remains a top agricultural producer, the number of working farms is down to 79,000, from 200,000 in 1870. The Farm Aid organization estimates that 500 farms nationally are folding every week of 1999, a figure that could easily rise as the full effect of the summer drought is revealed. As rural writer Wendell Berry of Kentucky recently observed, losing a farmer is like losing a trained musician. Another one can't just be picked up on the street.

Those farmers who will survive will have to farm smarter because the competition will be bigger.

The 80-acrefarm is now history Like Emma Buck, Eileen lived the life of a farm wife. Now 85 and in a nursing home, she shares her memories about the hard times in the '30s when she and her husband burned ears of corn in a pot-bellied stove rather than sell them at a loss. And once, while driving toward the county seat, late for a doctor's appointment, her speech keeping time to the snowfall, she recited the names of all the family farms that used to line the highway—"Pruitts lived there, and there the Marshalls, and the Uphoffs, and the Pogues"— going through the roster until the car reached the edge of Shelbyville. Today, even her memories are vanishing from the ravages of age, like the windmills and barns she remembered vividly not so long ago. 

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