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Fate of family farming { June 6 2004 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/06/books/review/06BROWNIN.htmlhttp://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/06/books/review/06BROWNIN.html
June 6, 2004
The Embattled Farmers
By Dominique Browning
THE FATE OF
FAMILY FARMING
Variations on an American Idea.
By Ronald Jager.
244 pp. University Press
of New England. $26.
I LOVE food. I know nothing about farming. That most Americans would put these two sentences together shows how divorced we now are from our rural heritage. We might know a good tomato when we see one -- but we have very little idea where it comes from. What's worse is that our children may not even recognize a good tomato -- or like it. Too much juice, too much flavor, too many spots. Today, food is cheap (prices have been dropping since 1947), fresh (in its newly expanded definition, fresh only means it doesn't come out of a can -- though it might have come out of the ground in New Zealand weeks earlier) and abundant (thanks to the ever more powerful agribusiness). But it isn't necessarily good, or good for us.
To further complicate matters, as Ronald Jager relates in ''The Fate of Family Farming,'' we are in the midst of a national malaise, which he traces not only to our alienation from the land but to our collective irresponsibility in sustaining a culture that has made it impossible to have a significant population of farmers thriving among us. For a book that doesn't venture more than a couple of hundred miles from the writer's home in New Hampshire, ''The Fate of Family Farming'' covers a lot of ground. This is an ambitious work with a moral imperative. Jager lets the agrarian writer Louis Bromfield state it: the farmer is ''the fundamental citizen of any community, state or nation.''
In drawing larger lessons about farming and democracy, Jager, a former professor of philosophy at Yale, makes a sweep through the history and literature of American farming. He carefully prepares the ground for his pressing conviction that there is a connection between a healthy agriculture and a healthy democratic society. He introduces the reader to the powerful contemporary agrarians Wendell Barry and Victor Davis Hanson. But he also makes his case for the moral importance of the agricultural life by going back through centuries of writings by Cicero, Cato, Jefferson, Adams, Crèvecoeur, Emerson and Thoreau. What's good for the farmer, in Jager's view, is and always has been good for the country: conditions that breed resilience, independence, skepticism, strength, endurance, patience, responsibility, faith and not a little crankiness.
These days you have to make a distinction between the real farmers and the factory owners. Factory food is homogenized, tasteless and comes from animals raised in sickeningly brutal conditions. Today, 1 percent of farmers account for more than half of all farm income; that's how big those factories are. Ninety per cent of all farmers earn less than $20,000; that's how small those family farms are. And what's a real farm? ''Any place that raises for market a thousand dollars' worth of produce,'' Jager says. In other words, farms can produce anything from angora goats and bison to eggs, yams and zinnias. Niche farming is one of the hottest trends in the agricultural world. But you have to wonder if it's being subsidized by baby boomers' inheritances or investment banker cash-outs.
Just as you must work the difficult New England soil Jager writes about, you have to plow through some dry, rocky patches in his book to arrive at fertile ground, but it is worth the effort, especially if you find yourself harboring fantasies of chucking city life and retreating to a home with goats, chickens and pigs. This'll sober you up, though I don't think that is the intended effect. The most vibrant part of the book is the section in which we visit four New Hampshire family farms. There's nothing like touring farm country with a writer who has the soul of a farmer (indeed, Jager grew up on a family farm in Michigan). I've always thought there were mountain people and ocean people -- and the twain do not vacation together -- but now I understand there are pasture people and woods people. Woods people are ensorcelled by the mysteries that live among noble giants. Pasture people drive along New England roads peering melancholically into the acres of woods threaded with tumbledown stone walls. For Jager, farms are ''scenic islands of green encircled by wave upon wave of predatory forests.''
This book is enormously useful. It is difficult to get through the morning paper without reading about genetically modified foods, or E. coli or cholesterol; Jager is efficient and entertaining while giving us the context for the news.
It is spring, and we arrive at a maple farm owned by the same family since 1929. In 1939, the farm produced 600 buckets of maple syrup. Today, the farm is boiling sap from 40,000 taps and the buckets are relics in antique shops. We learn, among other things, about the strange and complicated tree hydraulics that send sap down, up and sideways. For those of us still harvesting at the supermarket, it is useful to know that the fanciest syrup is the lightest color, made from sap less than a day out of the tree. For generations, the Bascoms have had to contend with bacteria and pests; they now contend too with ''a packager you never heard of'' who will buy ''a million small syrup jugs . . . fill them with Canadian maple syrup, and deliver them to Sam's Club.'' Bruce Bascom has his own buyers -- in Oklahoma, Florida, Spain and Japan. This is the good side of the global market. The flip side: China now has more apple trees than the United States, and the Chinese ''own the world's apple juice concentrate business.''
Forget cows on the dairy farm Jager takes us to; the family is worth a study. The original farmer adopted a young relative, who grew up to run the farm; his girlfriend in Switzerland joined him and they married; their two sons have taken up farming the same land; they married and built houses within sight of the farm; their wives are farming too, as well as raising children. ''Four generations are actively involved on this farm; they all live within a radius of one mile, and today I spot one or more from each generation in a single glance,'' Jager says. There is no more than a hint of wistfulness to enlighten us as to the family farmer's role in the health of America's marriages, though I suspect, from the strenuous working conditions, that the institution has taken a beating among farmers as democratically as it has among the rest of us.
By the time we have visited the chicken and egg farmer, and the apple farmer, as I suppose I must now call him (but really, this is farming? ''More like . . . gambling,'' an apple picker says), we understand how you get metal to settle at the bottom of a cow's stomach (''feed her the magnet'') and how the metal could have gotten there in the first place; and that broodiness in hens is hormonal -- aha! Just as I thought! -- and must be prevented, as it makes them unproductive, of course. Jager is charming on the disparaging nature of our language when it comes to chickens; he muses about henpecked and eggheads and old biddies.
''The Fate of Family Farming'' is sweetly moving; you really do end up understanding why it matters. Jager concludes with reasons to be optimistic, among them the news that women appear to be entering farming in surprising numbers. New Hampshire leads the nation, with 17 percent of its farms headed by women. But I wish Jager had focused on one of those new enterprises; for all I know, the women are growing zinnias. As for the link between the farmer and the nature of today's democracy, Jager's provocative book sacrifices rigor for romance. We never see his family farmers moving in a larger community; we never hear them talk about politics or the movies. We don't see how the characteristics that make them good farmers also make them good citizens. Finally, Jager's survey of agribusiness seems biased (why not mention the potential benefits to genetically modified crops, like a rice that is a better source of vitamin A?).
The paradox of the family farm is that its survival is linked, one way or another, to global markets, government subsidies, national retail chains, high-tech breeding, corporate-scale distribution and complex transportation systems. And no one has to be a farmer anymore; historically, whenever people have had a choice, they've streamed not from cities to farms but in the opposite direction. As Jager makes clear, people who get their hands into the soil do so because they love it. I read just the other day that the scion of a well-known California wine family, Jim Fetzer, is selling his multimillion-dollar gated estate. Why? He's spending most of his time working on an organic-vineyard-and-resort. I can see it now: Aromatherapy Merlot. That's one way to keep 'em down on the farm.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company |
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