AgriCulture bloggers Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week, Mark writes: I’m not usually a Wall Street Journal reader, but yesterday on the subway a nearby passenger’s paper caught my eye with an article entitled “From the Field to the Food Pantry.” The subject of the article turned out to be an anti-hunger program started by Howard G. Buffett, the middle son of Warren Buffett (of Berkshire Hathaway, and Buffett Rule fame), encouraging farmers to support rural food banks. The younger Mr. Buffett is a major philanthropist. His $225 million foundation supports agricultural development projects, primarily abroad but with about 10% of its funding allocated for use in the U.S. He and his foundation also own 3,780 acres of farmland in Central Illinois, where he farms corn and soybeans. He put up $3 million for administrative and promotional costs for the new project, which seeks to get farmers to donate one acre worth of crop proceeds a year to support 53 rural food banks run by an anti-hunger organization, Feeding America, primarily in the Middle West. The farmers will, in essence, be funding food banks in their own communities.
Using what it says is a “conservative estimate,” the Wall Street Journal article pegged the value of a one-acre produce donation, at current corn prices of $6 per bushel and a yield of 150 bushels per acre, at $900. The program will be promoted in partnership with agribusiness giant Archer Daniels Midland, a grain processor for 80,000 farmers who on average farm 1,500 acres each. The program will also serve to educate these farmers about the ubiquitous problem of hunger in their own communities. Mr. Buffett’s effort is significant and worthy, and will help struggling charitable institutions. It also helps remind farmers, even agribusiness farmers who produce a commodity that is processed and then reprocessed before it reaches the consumer, that their endeavor is ultimately all about feeding people. But I hope, in a number of respects, that it’s only a first step. Let’s start with where the benefits flow. It is great that Feeding America’s 53 rural food banks will benefit from the program. But what about the nearly 150 other food banks run by Feeding America? Located in urban or suburban areas, they undoubtedly serve even larger populations of hungry people. We must remember that the community of which farmers are a part includes consumers in urban areas as well. You can see this in tangible form every week at farmers’ markets in major cities, but the urban, rural bond is just as much a reality for major agricultural commodity producers. The bulk of their profits come from the vast majority of the population that lives in urban and suburban areas. These farmers are in a symbiotic relationship with the big metropolitan areas, and should recognize that they are part of that larger community.
Let’s also consider the amount of the contribution. The average Archer Daniels Midland farmer described in the Wall Street Journal article would, according to their conservative estimate of crop prices, have about $1.35 million in crop revenue this year. Is $900 really a significant donation for that amount of revenue? Our tiny farm, with less than 3% of that revenue stream, has given roughly that amount of food, at its market value, to a local food pantry in the past year, and I would suspect that many similar farms give at least that much. Maybe you have to start small, but I would hope they’d set their goal higher than $900 a year for higher-revenue farmers. Finally, let’s consider the issue of why there are so many hungry people in these rural areas. By all accounts, the agricultural Midwest is thriving. Other articles in the past couple of months have described rising farm property values (up nearly 6% last year) being driven by high commodity crop prices. Pension plans have begun investing in such farmland, as have Japanese investors, helping to drive up values. Indeed, some economists believe that the Midwest is in a nascent property bubble, similar to the housing bubble of the last decade. Farmers are borrowing large amounts against their inflated crop and land values, and if those values burst they will be underwater, just like homeowners in Las Vegas and Phoenix. We can only hope their banks don't go into a similar free fall.
But right now these rural Midwestern areas are thriving. Why are there so many needy people in the midst of this prosperity? In part, it seems, the poverty is the result of a continuing process of mechanization that requires less and less labor to produce the agricultural plenty. A single farmer with a large combine and tons of pesticides and fertilizer can manage a huge spread. We know about the environmental consequences of that type of agriculture but we should also consider the human consequences of displacing so much labor. Perhaps Buffett's foundation is already addressing this issue, but one hopes that as part of its agricultural development program it is considering developing other models of agricultural productivity that are less industrial in nature and require greater dedication of human expertise and labor. Since the article appeared in the Wall Street Journal, I thought I’d take a look at the comments on the paper’s web page, to see if its readers were asking the same questions I was asking. Perhaps I should not have been surprised that their reactions were quite different from mine. For some Journal readers, Mr. Buffett’s project proved that we don’t need government coming in and taxing people in order to give poorer people enough to eat. Apparently their perception is that voluntary charitable activities of the richer folks can take care of the problem. Of course none of these responders addressed the limitations of depending on such voluntarism apparent in the Buffett project itself. If we transitioned to a voluntary safety net system, what would happen to the urban poor for whom nobody has established a similar program? Are we supposed to have faith that the generosity of farmers will be contagious? If charitable giving is so effective, why do we still, five or so years into a recession, have so many hungry rural people, many of them even living in areas of agricultural abundance? Assuming full participation by all the target farmers in the Buffett program, how far will $72 million go in alleviating hunger, even just rural hunger?
In researching the history of our house and going through town meeting records at the Columbia County Historical Society a few years ago, I was interested to see, in the late 1700s and early 1800s, that one of the things voted on in the Germantown budget was a local tax to house and feed the poor. Even in that idealized time of American liberty, our local governments realized that help for the poor among us could not be left entirely to voluntary gestures. True, the government was not the federal one, but society was then organized on an entirely smaller scale. Peter similarly remembers that in the 1940s and '50s in Hinsdale, Illinois, an affluent Chicago suburb, the old community center had on its attic floor apartments for indigent families. To my mind, getting farmers to contribute part of their production to local food banks is a laudable idea. It would be even more meaningful if the contributions involved edible produce itself rather than commodity produce translated into money. A gift of actual food, like the sale a farm makes to a paying customer, is an exchange which creates a real bond. But we cannot pretend that programs so limited in scope, modest in contribution, and voluntary could ever be more than a supplement to the sorts of assistance only government, with its power and resources and obligation to treat all equally, can effectively provide. —Mark Scherzer
