Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, New York. This week Mark writes: After the bone chilling cold of a few weeks ago, we’ve rebounded and had some perfect autumn weather. Some of the fall crops, such as leeks, brussels sprouts and turnips, are doing exceptionally well, and we have hopes for another wave of cauliflower and cabbages. We are also setting up our greenhouse to extend the season, moving in artichokes, which are close to bearing, spinach, lettuces, swiss chard, turnip greens and various herbs. With this "winter garden" we hope to tide ourselves over as close to spring as possible. This weekend we also plan to set out our garlic for next year's crop.
With the advance of fall weather, unfortunately, comes another inevitable development—the increasing hunger of predators. Last week this resulted in an attack by coyotes on our smallest calf, who was later seen heading off into the woods and was found there, bleeding and weak, by Peter and Darlene after they had combed the area for much of the afternoon. Our trusty vet Elaine Tucker stitched him up and treated him. Now he’s recovering with the rest of the herd in a safer pasture adjacent to the barn, but it was a close call. This week, one of our white Chinese geese was not so lucky. Her headless body was found in the middle of a field, apparently the victim of an owl or raccoon. The surviving pair of Chinese ganders are now spending nights with the sheep by the barn as well. Keeping wolves from the door is not only a project but also, it seems, a good metaphor for small family farming these days. A couple of weeks back, Peter noted all the compromises and economic juggling that seem to pervade farm life. He didn't mention one of his favorite examples of "crop subsidy", which came to his attention when he lived in the Berkshires in the 1970's. It involved a farm neighbor, a descendant of one of the oldest farm families in the region. One evening Peter was surprised to find this neighbor, then in his seventies, standing at the front door, holding a "nickel bag" of pot. The mission of this aging Yankee farmer was to recruit someone he perceived to be a city-wise person into his distribution network. After politely declining the offer, Peter asked his neighbor why he was doing this? The unapologetic explanation: He and his son worked fourteen hours a day, seven days a week, year-in and year-out, yet only managed to clear $8,000 a year, at most, from their several-hundred-acre dairy farm. So he was interspersing his corn fields with marijuana plants to make some money. Apparently a life of crime, something we haven't yet considered, is another way of saving the farm. We brought our jobs and incomes with us into the farming life. Others, "traditional farmers", take on new jobs and income in order to keep farming. Whatever direction you come from, the reality is the same. Peter’s anecdotal observation that you can't have one without the other is borne out statistically. On October 3, The New York Times reported on a government study of family farms: “Net farm income is projected to be $54 billion in 2009, a drop of 38 percent from the estimate for 2008, according to the Economic Research Service of the Department of Agriculture. And the income of the average family farm household is expected to be about $76,000, off 5.2 percent from 2008. Most of the two million or so family farms in the United States are modest in size and don’t generate enough income for the farmers to support themselves. In fact, “the average family farm is forecast to receive 7.6 percent of its household income from farm sources, with the rest from earned and unearned off-farm income,” the research service says. That is why the overall financial situation of a vast majority of farmers will depend on the money they are able to raise off the farm, not on it.” This study estimates that the average family farm generates less than $6,000 per year in net income to the farmer. The farmer had damned well better have an outside income.
If any of you have seen Michael Moore’s latest diatribe against the more ruthless varieties of capitalism (he says it’s a general attack on the system, but he is really aiming at a particular brand of it), you will remember one of its most stirring moments, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s last State of the Union speech. Too ill to travel to the Capitol, FDR broadcast the speech on the radio and had recorded on film its central moment, the articulation of a second Bill of Rights, a new basis of security and prosperity for the American people. Once World War II had been won, he said our goal should be to establish: “The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the Nation; The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation; The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living; The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad; The right of every family to a decent home; The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health; The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident and unemployment; The right to a good education.” You don’t need Michael Moore’s movie to tell you how far short we’ve fallen of each one of these goals, and in fact how far we’ve receded from some of the progress we made between the time of that speech and today. But of all these goals, it struck me that the goal of farmers being able to sell their products at a return that provides a decent living seems perhaps the most ludicrously distant.
While the problem is easy to identify, the solution is far more elusive. You can’t just start favoring farmers financially at the expense of other goals, such as making sure everyone has enough to eat. But do Americans need to accept higher food costs as a larger part of their budget? Is supporting family farms with government payments, as they do in Japan, a solution? Should we simply rely, as we seem to now, on people taking up farming primarily for the joys of the activity, in spite of the dismal economics? Is there something about having to compete with industrial farming that puts the family farm at such a disadvantage? Does the solution lie, as Michael Moore would have it, in a complete restructuring of the economic system? What system would strike the right balance? I don’t pretend to know the answers. But it does make sense to occasionally sit back and ponder the question. And what better occasion to do it than over a lovely meal of fresh fall farm produce? —Mark Scherzer
