Suck it Farm Nerds!

How America Lost Her Farmers

At the beginning of the year, when I was just beginning to write again and research for my own pleasure and knowledge, I thought that a refresher on America’s last 120 years and how we found ourselves warming our hands around the current dumpster fire would be an interesting endeavor. Per the norm, I underestimated the amount of work, and it has taken me a minute to climb out of the historical information pit I dug myself into and get this post thought through and written.

Really, just look at what humanity has been able to accomplish: two wars on unprecedented world-wide scales, the invention of modern medicine and vehicles, and who could forget about freaking SPACE TRAVEL!? For all that we have accomplished, I believe I can also show how we have allowed so much to be stolen without realizing it. In the last century alone the loss of the small acreage farm and invention of synthetic pesticides and fertilizers has directly allowed for a large portion of the current level of corruption, greed, and desire for absolute market control seen at both the corporate and governmental levels.

Hindsight, the double-edged beauty that she is, does provide a starting point as to how we reached this precipice in food freedom, and it is because of two primary reasons: the farmer at the turn of the 20th century received little to no financial support, and they also had little to no prospects for improving themselves. Picture being a twenty something in Virginia in the 1920’s and staying on your family’s farm to work for dollar(s) a week, whereas your buddy Milton left for D.C., and he is making triple what you do a week and living an exciting city life. It makes a lot of sense why it was so hard to keep young people on aging farms when booze and new, exciting people who don’t know your whole history are just a soon-to-be-fulfilled dream away.

Plus, Milton has running water and electricity. Suck it farm nerd!

If the roaring ‘20s were too long ago, how about the 1950s? The second war has been finished for almost a decade, and those fortunate enough to return and start families find the cost of raising a family on a farmer’s wage is a losing game. This, alongside drought, leads to a decrease from 20 million people on farms to half that by the 1960s, and from 5.5 million farms to just over 2.2 million in 2000, further down to two million as of 2022. With the advent of machinery, fewer people were able to do more, and no one saw the chem cloud forming because yields were increasing despite the dropping number of people on farms.

To reiterate, fewer people and more machinery, plus a booming bio-pharma industry that leeched itself onto agriculture to produce wide-spread pesticides, proprietary seed, and chemical-based fertilizers, spelled the beginning of the end in terms of chemically untainted produce. The rich and socially powerful in cities controlling rural land and the people who live on it is nothing new, but less than a century ago, they couldn’t poison the food, they couldn’t unnaturally manipulate the genetics of plants, and their greed had a natural limit in that land could only produce as much as the health of the soil would allow. Essentially, what we do to our soil now is juice it up like a Russian Olympian and expect that there will be no consequences, but with mega corporations like Bayer, Corteva, and Monsanto controlling vast holdings of both chemical and seed companies, I do not believe we would be told of the known consequences.

Leaves me feeling all warm and fuzzy

Look at DDT, a wonder ‘cide that was good at killing...well, everything. It was manufactured by the same and/or similar companies in their infant stages during the 40’s, and of course it came out that it was killing our planet, entering our atmosphere, harming waterways and children, and the list grows until it was banned in the US in the 70’s. Historically, if your health gets in the way of their profits, your health is the problem. They have the money and the politicians to fight back; we have short attention spans and are easily manipulated.

Thank goodness they learned their lesson though, and stopped making stuff they know is killing people.

‘bout time to Roundup this post, buddy

Yep, societal pressure is tough on everyone. On top of the increasing level of education amongst the population and the connectivity of the world with TV and telephones, there was also a lot of governmental pressure on small farms in the form of one Earl Butz, Secretary of Ag for Nixon in the 70’s. Historically, he is either reviled or praised as the man who made farms big, but to me, he is a man who chose to remove family farms expressly because they didn’t fit HIS future view of farming in America. His face should be in every Big Ag headquarters' board room. Speaking of board rooms, he was also on three boards for agricultural businesses, one of which was named Purina something. No way there could be conflict of interest there.

I know the correlation between the diminishing number of family farms and the increase in depravity of our leadership can sound a bit of a stretch, but by the 1980's, the inevitable farm bust happens, and another nail is driven into the coffin of the family farm. Whole swathes of towns and farms are wiped off the map as more and more farms are swallowed up by banks and then purchased on the cheap by mega farms and Ag congloms’. I don’t know what happened to the families affected by the bust, but the information shown in this post indicates they didn’t stay and work the farms; they left. Defeated.

I think I have reached my limit of reading how America has sold her soul and morals for a life of mental laziness and (what used to be) cheap burgers. I have no doubt I will pursue the 80’s, 90’s, and early 00’s and see much of the same decline in both our rural population and freedom from the government. As of the last census, 80% of people live in urban settings. That is 80% of our population dependent on a government that is anything but honest and capable, all jammed into a small footprint where they can produce more for less and are supplied free-range access to highly processed foods with hard to pronounce fillers…

Suck it farm nerds.