Season's Greetings From The Boys From Marketing!

[BlueTrain]

The idea of the self-sufficient and independent small farmer is part of the American myth. It wasn't even true when Jefferson talked about it. That isn't to say none ever existed, though, because they certainly did. A few still do. There was never any conspiracy against them, although the big farmer (or rancher) was never a friend of the small farmer, no more than big business is a friend of small business.

There are a couple of things worth mentioning. One is that farming in the South was dominated by slave-owning planters from the beginning. The Civil War was barely a hiccup in the system. But the other things was the opening of the prairies to large scale farming with machinery. I don't know, however, when the large farming corporations came into existence. The East simply doesn't lend itself to large farms the way the Midwest does. There are a few things about farming today that are bad from a national policy standpoint but don't expect any real changes for the foreseeable future. That is, provided Mother Nature is willing and you can't cut deals with Mother Nature. Don't worry about global warming; worry about drought.

 

[sheeplady]

To this day, I believe farming is - oddly as we all were farmers once - the one business that is much better off if individual owners sell out to large corporations. Farming can go through terrible years where weather, disease and commodity prices continually conspire against it. It takes a lot of capital in the bank to survive that and few individuals or "family farms" can maintain that big a cushion. But corporations can budget through all that and do.

I know there are many examples of family farms that have survived and thrived for centuries - and more power to them, I wouldn't ever force anyone to sell or buy a farm. But at a high-level, farming, IMHO, is better left to corporations that can take years of losses. Maybe "The Grapes of Wrath" scared me too much as a kid and my ideas on farming are all wet as I'll admit, other than the occasional look-see at a farm here or there, I have absolutely no first hand experience with farming.

The vast majority of farms are still family owned. Above 90- I believe like 98%- is the quoted level.

Some of this is mechanization. They have GPS enabled tractors that can plant rows, harvest, etc. This allows a farmer to plant a thousand acres- compared to 50. Other is changes in how we farm... no till seed drilling is less labor intensive (spray and drill, versus cultivating every month). Some of it is migrant and undocumented labor. Much of the US milk comes from states like Arizonia.

Consolidation first stated with mechanization in the 1930s, and it helped that large enterprises got land for cheap. There was a major farming recession in the 1970s and 1980s... lots of farmers took on too much debt trying to be the survivors of the next wave of mechanization. Now a "small dairy farm" is 500 cows or less.

I did my university degree at an agricultural college. One of my professors made fun of the farmers for Ben & Jerrys. He was the type who thought any farm of less than 3,000 cows was a "hobby farm." Before Ben & Jerry's got bought out, they required you to only have Jersey cows, less than 100 cows, you had random inspections... but they paid way more than you could get having 30 times as many cows. This professor used to mock those farmers and Ben & Jerry's customers.

I for one, am all for whatever farmers can do to make an honest buck.

 

[BlueTrain]

Is a family owned farm necessarily a small farm? If the farm or ranch is organized as a corporation, even though the ownership is in one person or family, does it make a difference? And if you sell most or all of your products to a single customer, how independent are you?

I'm surprised that much U.S. milk comes from Arizona. Something about the system works very well, though, if one can buy corn-on-the-cop and all sorts of vegetables like tomatoes and endless varieties of lettuce in January.

 

[BlueTrain]

I meant corn-on-the cob, of course.

 

[LizzieMaine]

A great many farms thruout American history have been simply subsistence farms. This was true well into the 1930s. And "corporate farming" is really a misnomer -- "industrial farming" is more accurate. We had a great deal of industrial farming here in the years after the war, focusing on poultry. There were two big poultry processing plants in the area, fed by a network of industrialized family farms using mass-production methods to raise broilers. While these farms were "privately owned family farms" in theory, in fact they were in thrall on one side to the banks that held the mortgages and on the other side to the processors who set the prices and controlled the market. The local demand for chicken was nowhere near enough to support the scale of farming that was being done -- it depended on the processors being willing to pay enough to the farmers for the farmers to be able to pay their mortgages. Other than those two processing plants, there was nowhere for the farmer to sell their birds.

And then in the late '70s, the industry collapsed. The energy crisis caused the price of fuel oil to spike, making it more expensive to heat the poultry barns in the winter. The processors decided that Maine chicken farming was no longer tenable, and decided to move to the South, where heating wasn't an issue -- and plant workers weren't unionized -- and that was the end of the line for the farmers. Most of them lost their farms, and many -- some of them elderly -- were left destitute. But I hear the processors made out just fine.

 

[HudsonHawk]

My grandmother once said about the Wall Street crash of '29..."Didn't much matter to us, we didn't have shoes before or after." She also told the story of one Christmas, when after many years of nothing, her parents scrimped and saved to buy her and her brother something at Christmas. It was a small bag of raisins. Neither of them had ever seen raisins before, and her brother got mad and threw them on the ground and said "who wants a bag of old dried up chinaberries?" Needless to say, they picked them off the ground and savored every last molecule.

 

[HudsonHawk]

A great many farms thruout American history have been simply subsistence farms...

I guess in the government definition sense my family were subsistence farmers. More accurately, they were probably "hunter-gatherers", living more on swamp cabbage and pokeweed than anything they actually cultivated.

 

[scotrace]

There are large chicken processing plants here, in East-Central Ohio. They are near, and fed by, amish farms, and the processing is done by a very large population of Guatemalan immigrants. The population of my county prior to the influx was about 80,000. 12,000 have been added by immigration in the last 15 years or so.

 

[BlueTrain]

I think immigration has always been an issue to some extent. We've really always been a wide-open country, and usually did not have the pressures that caused people to leave where they were born. Mostly those issues were population pressures, wars, food shortages, more wars, dictatorships and religious persecution. Migration within the United States is probably almost as significant as migration from other countries.

Typically there will be immigration to a particular region because there are new jobs there and not enough local people to fill the demand. Inevitably there will be tensions for a while and even more when the jobs dry up, for either economic or natural reasons. There's only so much coal in the ground, for example, and it's possible to dig it all up, provided the price of coal is right. It's difficult to do anything about the price of coal or other commodities but the cost of labor is something else. Labor is a cost, not a benefit.

 

[sheeplady]

Is a family owned farm necessarily a small farm? If the farm or ranch is organized as a corporation, even though the ownership is in one person or family, does it make a difference? And if you sell most or all of your products to a single customer, how independent are you?

I'm surprised that much U.S. milk comes from Arizona. Something about the system works very well, though, if one can buy corn-on-the-cop and all sorts of vegetables like tomatoes and endless varieties of lettuce in January.

It's a good question. If I was farming now, I'd want at least an LLC. I don't blame farmers for incorporating... there's greater protection of assets.

Small farms, unless you have some sort of "edge" are impractical. If you can grow some sort of specialty or make your goods into finished products (or both) you can survive. Of you are trying to do traditional agriculture, no.

I follow the Peterson Brothers (they are a parody group in Kansas who farm cattle). They farm thousands of acres- 4 kids and their father. Are they family farmers? Yes. Are they small farmers? No.

I think there is also a question of who supplies your input materials too. Lots of farmers (because of no till) are entirely reliant on round-up-ready crops. This, as you can imagine, could be problematic- not just because you have one supplier, but because of genetic diversity. But people got to eat, and no till is the only thing that's saved us from Dustbowl Part II.

 

[BlueTrain]

While I was trying to get across the point that economies of scale is what mattered the most when farming began in the Midwest, there continued to be and still is farming in the East. There is also a lot of farming in California. While the large farms in the Midwest grow chiefly grain, the farms in California and the East grow crops that require more labor than grain does, though even some of that has been mechanized. For a long time tobacco and cotton required a great deal of hand labor and as late as the 1960s, some kinds of tobacco still did. I know that because I worked on a tobacco farm one summer. It wasn't miserable hard work but it was still work and the pay wasn't much.

Most of the good land in the East was quickly taken up by large landowners who received grants of land from the colonial governments, which was also true in Spanish California. So the rest of the land that was not so great for farming was all that was left for ordinary people. And some of that land is still being farmed but not like it was a couple of generations ago. Some land is still owned by descendants of the original pioneers of a little over 200 years ago and in some cases, they're still living in the first houses built there. I know that because I lived in one of those houses.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Most of the good land in the East was quickly taken up by large landowners who received grants of land from the colonial governments...

"Self made men."

 

[BlueTrain]

You know what I like about America? This is a country where a man can become a multi-billionaire starting with just a measly $40 million.

Regarding the self-made men in Colonial America, including the French and Spanish parts as well as the English parts, they were in a sense self-made men. True, they were given a lot, becoming so-called "proprietors," but they didn't inherit much of anything. Their children did, of course. But one reason they came here was the English custom of the oldest child inheriting everything; the title, the land, the manor house or castle: the works. Practices differed from place to place, of course and I don't think that existed in Pennsylvania, New York or New England, but it certainly did in the American South. In all places the Indians came off the worst and ended up at the bottom. But largely the colonies reflect social conditions in the old country, not surprisingly.

 

[LizzieMaine]

And that's not even geting into the 19th Century west, and all the government land giveaways -- land, of course, that had been expropriated from the Indians under one pretense or another. But yeah, those hardy pioneers never asked Uncle for anything.

Northeastern old money tends to spread the inheritances around among the offspring, although the land aspects of those inheritances tend to be resource land rather than vast estates -- huge blocks of forest land, oil fields, rubber plantations in the South Pacific, etc etc etc. This all reflects the way in which Northern money became industrialized early on compared to the South, which remained a largely feudal economy well into the 20th century.

A lot of Northeastern old money goes out of its way to stay in the shadows. They don't want the rabble to know where they are or how much money they have and when you see them in public, they're usually wearing unpressed old clothes and driving ten-year-old Chryslers. It's only vulgar bourgeois arrivistes that build themselves flashy penthouses with gold toilet seats and fly around in private jets and such. The real American Aristocracy disdains such ones -- no matter how much money or power they possess, they'll never be "upper class." They're not much better than the Clampetts gathered round the table in the Fancy Eatin Room passing the dishes with pool cues.

 

[HudsonHawk]

...They're not much better than the Clampetts gathered round the table in the Fancy Eatin Room passing the dishes with pool cues.

Saying grace for the vittles, and hoping someday Jethro finally gets to shoot one of them elusive billiards (pronounced "billy-ards")

 

[tonyb]

...

A lot of Northeastern old money goes out of its way to stay in the shadows. They don't want the rabble to know where they are or how much money they have and when you see them in public, they're usually wearing unpressed old clothes and driving ten-year-old Chryslers. It's only vulgar bourgeois arrivistes that build themselves flashy penthouses with gold toilet seats and fly around in private jets and such. The real American Aristocracy disdains such ones -- no matter how much money or power they possess, they'll never be "upper class." They're not much better than the Clampetts gathered round the table in the Fancy Eatin Room passing the dishes with pool cues.

In the Seattle area, where you can't swing a cat without hitting at least half a dozen new-money gazillionaires (Microsoft, Amazon, etc.), there's many a private jet. But even these arrivistes know not to make a conspicuous display of their wealth -- for practical reasons, mostly. Rare is the true big-shot who gets around town in a stretch limo. For so doing is really just asking for trouble that's easily enough avoided.

 

[LizzieMaine]

It's that time of year again, and I guess if you can't beat 'em you might as well join 'em...

 

[2jakes]

It's that time of year again, and I guess if you can't beat 'em you might as well join 'em...

Thank You Lizzie !
Enjoyed hearing and seeing you.
Cheers,
Joe alias 2jakes