PART III --- THE FAMILY FARMER

Urban life can be stressful. Competition is intense. Large densities of people are crammed into small spaces and the interaction results in frequent conflict. Many of those residents have roots in rural America or rural whatever country you can name. Many of those roots are generations back but recollections of the past are buried in the folklore passed from generation to generation. Sometimes folklore turns into myth and myth into an idealized vision of how things ought to be. This nostalgia and longing for simpler times has given forth to the rebirth of the idea of OLD MACDONALD’S FARM where the cows in the meadow and the sheep are in the corn.

The real life extension of OLD MACDONALD’S FARM is today’s farmers market. No one would question the premise that fresher produce tastes better or that locally raised produce rushed to market is preferred mode as advocated by the Localvores. The urban consumer’s need for food with a story behind it, created such a marketing opportunity that it brought forth all the scams found in a local carnival. Middlemen moved into the fray and all of a sudden you had an onslaught of people representing themselves as family farmers and their products as locally grown and organic. Because the venue would change and the instant shops would come and go, regulation was difficult. Misrepresentation was rampant.

The tools of the trade are fairly simple and limited. The seller of food at the farmer’s market must:

1. Pretend to be a family farmer to the consumer whatever that means.

2. Subscribe to notion that the foods that are sold are natural or organic whatever that means. The bonafides are frequently displayed on the tables in front of the stall in the form of acceptable literature and billboards.

3. Charge at least twice as much as the food sells for at the local grocery.

A visit by this reporter to a farmer’s market in La Jolla, California illustrates the point in this photo.

The steak is represented as grass fed and was sold by Sonrise Beef, one of the largest producers of grass fed beef in southern California. Any person, knowledgeable about beef, will immediately recognize the probability is almost 99% that this is grain fed beef.

So what is a family farmer? The answer is straightforward. The 200,000 families that produce 85% of the nation’s food are family farmers. Only 2% of our food is produced by corporations. Family farms come in all sizes. In the mind of urban writers, exactly when does a family farmer become a factory farmer? No one knows or can say, but chances are good that if your size is larger than a few acres, you are at risk of being called a factory farmer.

“Factory Farmer” as a descriptive term is meaningless. The processes used in production don’t vary a lot between sizes of farms. Certainly size does matter. Larger operations offer economies of scale and this is the feature of American agriculture that has pushed us to the forefront of efficiency in the world. Spreading the cost of overhead and management over 1000 acres of cropland is more efficient than over 100 acres. Looking after 1000 cows is more efficient that 100 cows. Both manpower and equipment are used more efficiently. Larger producers got to be larger because they are more efficient. A useful exercise for those who chose to label operations as factory farms would be to edit their articles or books to substitute “efficient” for “factory” in front of every farmer entry in the article or book.

The myth of the small family farm as the sole custodian of a caring, sensitive food provider is out of touch with reality. Many small farms are tended by owners with a primary job elsewhere. They are small tracts outside of town where the owner runs a few livestock or farms a few acres in their spare time. Other small farms are owned by rich people who have no understanding of production practices and often don’t really care. They are interested in a retreat and the tending to the crops whether plant or animal is never a priority.

At the core of production agriculture are the thousands of American farmers who make their living farming livestock and crops every day. They vary in size but share one common concern – the health and sustainability of the crops they produce –whether plant or animal. They fight the elements, the weather, the markets, and daily crisises of production agriculture every day of the year because it’s in their blood. They spend very little time and lose very little sleep worrying about whether they are a family farmer or a factory farmer.