Tom Bauer T and D Feeds
Organic Farms: Agriwisdom
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November 24, 1989
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At a time when we celebrate the bounty of our farms, we might give thought to farmers. My friend Tom
Bauer, who farms 1,000 acres of deep prairie loam out in central Missouri, east of Kansas City, applies nitrate fertilizer and chemical herbicides to his grain and soybean fields before he plants them. Although he hasn't used pesticides for 10 years, many of his neighbors do. ''The label said to burn my work clothes afterward,'' Tom told me recently, ''and I just decided I didn't want to be around anything that deadly.''
Such practices alarm city people, who worry about contamination of their water supply and toxic residues in their food.
In fairness, we ought to place the blame for chemically intensive agriculture where it belongs: in Washington, with the politics of farm subsidies. The National Research Council concluded in a recent report that changing Federal programs to encourage farmers to farm more organically would be better husbandry for all of us in the long term, improving the quality of the nation's soil and water and protecting the purity of its food supply.
Neither Congress nor the Bush Administration has rushed to implement the council's recommendations. Doing so would shift farming away from dependence on chemicals and artificial fertilizer, profitable inputs that large agribusiness corporations - chemical, grain and oil companies - supply.
The farmers I know are just as concerned with their health and their stewardship of the land as the rest of us. They'd like to work toward a more renewable agriculture. But agribusiness is collectively the largest industry in America, with corresponding political clout, while there are fewer than five million Americans left living on farms.
When I was a boy, living on a farm outside Independence, Mo., studying vocational agriculture in high school, I wondered why farm subsidies were based on limiting the number of acres a farmer could plant. Aggressive technological innovation was on the horizon in the early 1950's. My classmates and I were taught to admire the ingenious new chemical technologies whereby a farmer could boost his per-acre yields.
If old-fashioned Farmer Jones managed to grow 100 bushels of corn per acre by traditional methods, we learned, Farmer Smith down the road, alert to technology, could push his yield on similar land to 150 or even 200 bushels by pouring on the chemical fertilizer, by planting his corn rows closer together - so close that he couldn't cultivate by machine any more but had to apply herbicides to keep down weeds - and by using pesticides to eliminate bugs that thrived in his crowded fields.
It was obvious even to a 15-year-old that these acreage controls encouraged intensive farming practices that weren't necessarily good for the land in the long run, nor did they reduce surpluses. If we really wanted to limit surpluses, it seemed to me, we ought to limit not the number of acres a farmer could plant but the number of bushels he could sell at supported prices.
I understood that the farm subsidy program was illogical, but I was too innocent of politics to understand why. The reason why is encapsulated in an unkind saying that came into vogue a few years ago among organic-farming advocates: ''A farmer is someone who launders money for a chemical company.'' In fairness to the Tom Bauers of America, I would add that the farmer does so under economic compulsion. Sally Bauer's accounting books illustrate the point.
The Bauers grossed $152,090 in 1986, a typical recent year. Their largest single expense was feed for their cattle and hogs. But fertilizer and chemicals took second place at $22,345. Add $17,910 more for machinery repair and fuel, and the Bauers' purchases from agribusiness are the biggest overall expenditure.
In exchange for idling about 10 percent of their land, they earned some $11,000 in Government subsidies. Agribusiness pocketed all of those dollars and $29,000 of their unsubsidized gross income besides. The Bauers cleared only about $19,000 for their year's labor.
Government programs skew farming in another direction as well. The No. 1 rule for any farmer who wants to survive economically in farming today is to keep up his crop base -never to plant less acreage to a given commodity that he planted in previous years, a number on which his subsidies are based. If he planted 100 acres of corn each year for the past three years and plants only 95 this year, then his subsidies will be correspondingly reduced. He is effectively penalized for growing less surplus than he has grown in the past.
On the other hand, one of the best was to reduce pest infestations and to prevent depletion of soil nutrients is to rotate crops - to plant a field in different crops from year to year, renewing the land biologically rather than chemically.
Conservation-minded farmers like Tom Bauer recognize the benefits of crop rotation: Tom applies the practice to keep pests down without pesticides. But they understandably draw the line at encroaching on their crop base; rationally enough, they put economic survival ahead of conservation practices. Conservation correspondingly suffers. Many farmers with robust crop bases have given up crop rotation entirely.
If the independent farmer were on his way to extinction, then furthering the industrialization of farming with Federal subsidies to agribusiness might make sense. In fact, the 1980 census discovered only 7,140 corporate farms in the United States, only a small fraction of the nation's total. The rural depression of the Reagan years drove hundreds of thousands of farmers out of business, and about one-fourth of those left are in serious trouble today. But the more numerous three-fourths are finding themselves in better shape than they have been for a decade, with a better debt-to-asset ratio than most industries.
A Federal farm program directed toward sustainable agriculture would limit production of surpluses, encourage soil and water conservation and begin moving farming toward less dependence on chemicals and more reliance on crop rotation, mechanical cultivation and biological controls. Such a program would help farmers make a living, as current programs do. But because a larger share of transfer payments would end up in farmers' pockets, it would cost less.
Subsidizing agribusiness makes little sense, especially when farmers have had to take the rap for the damage to natural resources that such subsidy promotes. Competitively, agriculture is one of the last world-class industries left in America. Tom Bauer and his neighbors will keep it that way organically if we let them.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1989/11/24/opinion/organic-farms-agriwisdom.html
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