Folks, my wife and I own a small piece of yesterday. It is only a few acres, but it has not been farmed or timbered. And it looks like things looked before we began bending the earth to our own needs.
The rest of the world has wars and hunger and water problems. Here at home, our country has bailouts and rescues, and there are job shortages and budget troubles in our country and state. We have education and health care crises everywhere. But this little piece of property doesn't know about all of this.
It does know about diapers though, and aluminum cans that somehow find their way to it. And it does know about humans. My wife and I, and a few friends, visit frequently but we leave it as much as possible, just as it was and is.
My parents owned this beautiful piece of the world from 1940 to 1955. At that time, it was part of a much larger tract. Today's "old-timers" and some young-timers played on the property when they were children, as did I. This, of course, was back in the good old days, before we placed our children under house arrest. This was back in the days when children left the house and disappeared for hours and hours and then came home just in time for supper.
A friend of mine who had played at this spot when he was a child mentioned that it could be commercialized. He was correct. People would pay to visit. Sometime after my wife and I are long gone that will probably happen.
The reason that I wanted to share this with you is that our country is changing so rapidly that it is hard to keep up with what is happening. I talked to a local couple the other evening who are reaching retirement and their family farm is going to have to cease operations.
Their farm has been farmed by this local family for five generations. This is not an unusual situation. I have seen reports that put the number of family farms being pushed out of business from 150 to 500 per week. The difference in the numbers is that some family farms are gobbled up by large corporations and are still counted as farms and some are lost to development.
I guess my question is, as we commercialize and industrialize farming, who is going to love the land? And who are going to be the leaders of our communities in the future?
As large corporations take over our food production and we lose the connection between producer and consumer, it would seem only logical that what we eat will be decided by a financial officer at a corporate headquarters in some glass and steel tower somewhere.
The Environmental Protection Agency states that about 3,000 acres of farmland is converted to other uses each day. We have now covered with concrete, in our country, an area about the size of Ohio. Progress.
So why can't farmers make a living when large corporations that deal with our farmers make huge profits? It is simple, corporations don't sell at prices below their production costs. Farmers are the last true free- market competitors. The buyers of their products are very small in number and because of this they can set the prices of farm products.
My brother and I figure that somewhere in the early to mid-1990s, our farm stopped taking care of us financially and we began taking care of it. We are willing to work off the farm, to support the farm. But will the next generation be willing to do this?
Loving the land is extremely important and it is hard for me to believe that large cold corporations will care for anything other than profit. A farmer's love for the land runs so deep that the thought of losing their farm is sometimes more than can be handled. Suicides among farmers are three times the national average.
The World Trade Organization forces farmers all around the world to compete with each other in a race to a finish line that eliminates farmers everywhere. A local farmer, the fourth generation on this farm, told me the other day that at their last family meeting all that was discussed was how they were going to stop the "bleeding."
Their farm operation has been losing money for several years now and they have not found a solution. I know these people well and they are good farmers. The media talk about the exports that our farmers ship to other parts of the world. But only a very small amount of those exports is actually shipped by farmers. The trade is done by just a handful of corporations and that is where the profit is.
Some people like to drive through Amish country and stop at their markets. The Amish are a reminder of our past, and they give us a fleeting connection to our roots. But I believe that even the Amish won't survive once their modern neighbors are gone.
The good news is that, for now, my wife and I have a spot of earth that is just as it was created. It is a place where we can go to put everything in perspective. For a few hours each week we can forget about the world's problems, realize what a small role we play in the big picture, and as a friend put it "listen to the deafening sound of silence."
Bill Horne is a professor of economics at Southern State Community College and a columnist for The People's Defender.
