Where do we go from here?
The media is now awash with sober analyses and weighty predictions about the way forward for us in the era of the pandemic. Parts shortages and shipping bottlenecks have stalled production. Strange gaps appear on supermarket shelves. Workers are quitting in the thousands to seek other occupations. Houses are unaffordable. Car lots have no cars and machinery dealers have no tractors. Inflation is everywhere and leaders appear powerless to do anything about it. Paste this experience on top of melting ice caps, rampant wildfires, rising sea levels and it’s no wonder that the population reports the highest levels of stress and anxiety in the modern era.
What is to be done?
I don’t see why I shouldn’t be allowed to add my own two cents worth as it relates specifically to small farms. My qualifications are modest, but they include an arts degree in economics (1974) with a smattering of ancients and moderns. Apart from that, I have watched farmers farming in various settings in different countries for a half century now. And I have been tinkering at it myself on a 40-acre farm with a small flock of sheep for most of that time. That makes me an expert, by my own exacting standards. So here goes…
The race to concentrate the means of food production in the hands of fewer and fewer people has never stopped in my lifetime and shows no signs of slowing down. It lurches from crisis to crisis in a pattern that was first identified by the classical economists Adam Smith, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill and others under the title of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall (TRPF). Sometimes TRPF gets going so dangerously that whole societies come under great stress and collapse. Every generation of economists since then has tried manfully (they were all men with modest resumes like myself) to write a theory proving why this always happens, but none of them has succeeded.
Karl Marx picked up where the classical guys left off and tried his darnedest to prove that the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall was the fatal flaw of capitalism. He, too failed. But he might have come closer to a sound theory if instead of hiding out in the British Museum scribbling Das Kapital he had got out in the fresh air and run a combine for a few seasons. Anyone who has tried cash-cropping in the last fifty years for any length of time always comes away with the sneaking suspicion that selling commodities into an undiversified market is a race to the bottom. Because it is.
Like a lot of things, Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall was invented on the farm. As steel plows, seed drills, reapers and binders drove workers away and into the city, the price of staple crops fell dramatically, putting enormous pressure on people like the fictional Earl of Grantham on the Downton Abbey series who gets horrible news about his declining rents and crushing taxes in every episode. His thousands of acres of rich British farmland aren’t turning a profit anymore and he needs to turn to his wealthy American wife for relief.
My prediction is that falling profit, rising land prices and robotics are going to put commodity production firmly in the hands of corporations within the next ten or fifteen years as the present generation of farmers (now pushing average age 60) retires. Practically no one I know in farming today has a kid who wants to take over a cash crop operation or an intensive livestock barn. (The entry level for a chicken farmer in Canada now requires an investment of $3 million.) The cash cropper is just as exhausted and dispirited as all those restaurant and hotel workers who exited the hospitality industry this year in unprecedented numbers. The safety net allowed them to quit jobs they hated and gave them the breathing space to find something better. (I have three of them in my own family.) A surprising number have migrated to small acreages growing fruit, vegetables, livestock and trees. None of them has any interest in buying a combine.
The Small Farm Gift
Which leads me to my other big prediction. Small farms will continue to enjoy a remarkably stable position, feeding somewhere between 60-70% of the world’s population. While it is true that, without the industrial food system, cities would wither very quickly, small farmers fill just as important a role for all rural areas of the planet. That will not change any time soon.
The bumper sticker that reads: Farmers Feed Cities would be more accurate if it were a little longer:Industrial Farms Feed Cities – Small Farmers Feed Pretty Much Everyone Else.