AgriCulture bloggers Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week Mark writes. It has turned into a tough summer for growing, although by contrast to regions further south and west, which have been beset by searing heat and devastating drought, we would seem to be relatively well off. We haven’t had nearly enough rain, and many vegetables are stagnating, but stagnation is something from which we can recover. Whoever thought that waking to a gray and dreary morning, with steady rain pelting down, could feel so good? Farm economics have been much in the news as the result of the widespread drought, but it has also been the subject of much discussion between Peter and me of late. We each have ideas about where we’re putting too much effort and where we’re not putting enough. Does it make sense, Peter asks me, to have such a large vegetable garden, when it is so labor intensive and the dollar volume of sales, as compared with that of meat, poultry, or even berries, is so relatively small? Does it make sense, I retort to Peter, to feed and maintain our massive and hungry bull, Titan, and our equally outsized, big-eating boar, Vernon, all year round to impregnate, respectively, just three cows and three sows?
We’ve had these discussions before and made small, incremental adjustments to address each other’s concerns. In the vegetable garden, I’ve gone along with establishing beds of perennial edibles – asparagus, rhubarb, horseradish, sorrel etc. – that reduce the overall labor required. In our animal breeding program, we’ve tried to keep our revenue more in balance with feeding costs by selling off the young we produce right after they’re weaned, rather them raising them all to market size ourselves. And by culling our sheep herd down by half as we approached winter. We sold our entire first spring litter of purebred Ossabaw piglets that way, and now have a new litter of nine, soon to be weaned, available. (Any takers out there?) In each case, we are experiencing a major challenge inherent in small scale agriculture. The revenue generated from each individual item we produce, say from a single head of cauliflower, is so low that you profit only if you produce a high volume. If you produce on a small scale, production sometimes isn't enough to cover costs. Yet if we suddenly find that we have an abundance of some product, the size of our market demand doesn’t necessarily expand to meet our supply, limiting profit in another way. (Where are you, additional buyers for our "glut" of nine new piglets?) It is rare to hear of the confluence of circumstance that leads to huge prosperity for the small farmer. The story in last week’s Times about the sudden flow of wealth to small farmers in Rajasthan who grow guar beans (hard little beans that we most often encounter as guar gum, a thickening agent listed on the label of ice cream containers), a commodity with few sources and a sudden surge in demand, is not often heard. And while reading about all the encouragement being given to Indian farmers to switch from other crops to guar, one couldn’t help but anticipate, as an undercurrent to the good farm news theme, the tragic stories we will be reading a couple of years hence about the bursting of the guar bubble, and about all the farmers who bought fancy tractors with their guar bonanza having to sell them in desperation when guar prices fall back through the floor.
In this case, in fact, though I am happy for those guar-growers and wish them all the best, I anticipate the bursting of the bubble with some degree of pleasure. The reason for the sudden spike in demand is guar’s usefulness in thickening water for purposes of fracking for natural gas, a practice that threatens the integrity of water supplies not very far away from us. One can only hope we find a better way to satisfy our energy needs as soon as possible. The guar-growers will suffer far worse when the bubble bursts if they all turn their entire production to guar (like American farmers have at times turned to corn) and abandon their other traditional crops. Moving from a traditional, diversified form of agriculture that characterizes peasant cultures around the world to industrial style monoculture exposes the farmer to boom-and-bust cycles in a much more acute way. Like corn growers in Iowa, they will have left behind one of the chief challenges of small scale growing (not enough units of production) but also one of the strengths inherent in the small farm: the flexibility to turn production around, and having a buffer if one crop or its market fails. In the spate of stories about the drought on NPR this week, I was struck by the contrast between two farms, featured on two successive nights. One farm, a pretty large-scale beef-raising operation (64 bulls, which could mean they raise more than 1,500 cows), had spent years developing “the genetics” of its herd. If the drought continues into the fall, and the herd ends up being liquidated for lack of feed, that entire investment is at risk of loss, making it likely that the farm will have to go out of business. The other farm, a pretty small operation in Ohio which looks like it’s going to lose its entire 22-acre planting of sweet corn, was not so totally dependent on one product. As the dire shape of the corn became clear, they turned and did a quick late planting of tomatoes, which they could irrigate, to sell at farm markets. And they set up hoop houses for other vegetables and began selling shares for a fall CSA season in addition to their usual summer one. It looks as if they will come through the drought in some reasonable shape.
This is not to say that small-scale diversified farmers have solved the problems inherent in small scale production. This brings me to one last item from the news of late, a rather breathless article in the Times a couple of weeks ago about how important a role in our food-supply system small-scale agricultural producers are now playing. That small-scale producers can play an important role should hardly be news. Back in 1937, in its more enlightened days, the U.S. Supreme Court held that a small-scale farmer who wanted to grow wheat for use on his own farm was, by doing so, having an effect on interstate commerce, because he would not be buying commercial feed for his pigs in the marketplace. This effect on commerce justified government regulations that prohibited him from growing wheat. The actions of every individual small farmer, the Court recognized, add up. But that the proportion of the market occupied by small farmers is growing is good news indeed. The Times described this growth as a “new model” of agriculture involving a lot of idealistic new entrants. It suggested that this "new model" was enabling small-scale producers to compete. But then, at the end of the article, it profiled one of these new producers implementing the new model: a couple of urban refugees, who are content living in a trailer without even internet access, surviving on their agricultural revenue of $1600 a month. I had to wonder whether this “new model” was simply replicating an old model — that of agricultural peonage in which our food producers live in poverty. Is it possible that the only thing new about the model is that these new producers are motivated by the pleasure they take in the direct physical production of food, rather than being born into peonage?
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I can’t help think that there are yet other, better ways to get the many benefits of a food-production system based on small-scale producers who love their work than simply to put them at the mercy of market prices. We could, of course, look to Europe and Japan for some of those models, in which government takes a major role in supporting those small-scale producers, not just massive agribusinesses, as is the case here. But then, I would run the risk of being accused, as President Obama is these days, of trying to turn America into a European socialist state. Heaven forfend. — Mark Scherzer
