Only a century ago fully a third of us lived on farms, and half of us in rural areas. Today only a percent or two of us are farming. What happened and is happening still? Farming never was a business in the conventional sense, it was a way of life that provided a modest standard of living for the farm families and a future for the children. You bought or the government gave your farm family a quarter section, 160 acres more or less, and using basic skills, animals, and a bit of capital you built a home, produced most of your food, and hopefully had a bit left to sell. The same story was repeated in farm after farm, four farms to a section, across the 36 sections excepting the 2 school sections adding up to over 100 farms, enough kids to fill a couple small schools, and a population often pushing a thousand in most townships.
Then came recessions, a depression, mechanization, “get big or get out” farm policies, investors driving up land prices, and monopolized suppliers and processors driving supply prices up and crop and livestock prices down.
So if you want to become an average farmer today you’ll need around 500 acres of land and that’ll cost a couple million $$$ even for scabby land. You’ll need a tractor and a combine, and each of them will set you back several hundred thousand, by the time you get done buying implements and a big truck to haul your grain to market you’ll have at least another million in equipment. If you’ve got any credit left you’ll need working capital, those 500 acres suck up a lot of expensive seed and fertilizer.
So today’s farmer has a at least 3 million dollars and more likely 6 million dollars invested in a business that will annually maybe produce 200 four dollar bushels of corn an acre times 500 acres for a gross revenue of $400,000… That’s about the annual net income you’d get on average from making a 6 million dollar stock market investment instead and you wouldn’t even half to get your hands dirty. It gets worse- 4 dollars a bushel is about what it costs to grow and harvest corn. Yup, farming utterly sucks as a business!
So the section that a century ago was home to four farm families and twenty or more people is now home to only an empty nester 60ish couple as potential famers have been driven from the land by mechanization, high capital needs, and the near impossibility of earning a decent living. Farming isn’t a business, it’s a way of life, a proud culture with thousand of years of heritage, and we’re losing farmers.
So no surprise that the surviving farmers are getting rather testy to say the least. Being a misunderstood minority of only a percent or so of the population tends to make that minority defensive and defiant, longing for the better days of the past… No wonder farm country reeks of nostalgia and resentment. The party of the past, the GOP, feeds right into that nostalgia- And that’s our challenge as democrats.
Sassy Democrat 