farm, on the other hand, disperses the ecological risks involved in food production. A good farm not only disperses these risks, but also minimizes them. On a good farm, ecological responsibility is inherent in proper methodologies of land management, and in correct balances between animals and acres, production and carrying capacity. A good farm does not put at risk the healthfulness of the land, the water, and the air.
The ecological differences between a factory farm and a farm may be paramount in a time of rapidly accelerating destruction of the natural world. But there is also an economic difference that, from the standpoint of human communities, is critical.
A factory farm locks the farmer in at the bottom of a corporate hierarchy. In return for the assumption of great economic and other risks, the farmer is permitted to participate minimally in the industry’s earnings. In return, moreover, for the security of a contract with the corporation, the farmer gives up the farm’s diversity and versatility, reducing it to a specialist operation with one use.
According to one company’s projections, a farmer would buy into the broiler business at a cost of $624,275. That would be for four houses that would produce 506,000 birds per year. Under the company’s terms, this investment would produce a yearly net income of $23,762. That would be an annual return on investment of 3.8 percent.
I don’t know what percentage of annual return this company’s share-holders expect to realize from their investment. I do know that if it is not substantially better than the farmer’s percentage, they would be well advised to sell out and invest elsewhere.
The factory farm, rather than serving the farm family and the local community, is an economic siphon, sucking value out of the local landscape and the local community into distant bank accounts.
To entice them to buy Kentuckians’ work and products so cheaply, our state government has given the animal confinement corporations some $200 million in state and federal tax “incentives.” In gratitude for these gifts, these corporations now wish to be relieved of any mandated public liability or responsibility for their activities here.
I don’t know that the arrogance and impudence of this have been equaled by any other industry. For not only have these people demonstrated, by their contempt for laws and regulations here and elsewhere, their intention to be bad neighbors; they come repeatedly before our elected representatives to ask for special exemptions. But in that very request they acknowledge the great risks and dangers that are involved in their way of doing business. Why should the innocent, why should people with a good conscience, want to be exempt from liability?
It is clear that the advocates of factory farming are not advocates of farming. They do not speak for farmers.
What they support is state-sponsored colonialism—government of, by, and for the corporations.
III. SUSTAINABILITY
THE WORD “SUSTAINABLE” is well on its way to becoming a label, like the word “organic.” And so I want to propose a definition of “sustainable agriculture.” This phrase, I suggest, refers to a way of farming that can be continued indefinitely because it conforms to the terms imposed upon it by the nature of places and the nature of people.
Our present agriculture, in general, is not ecologically sustainable now, and it is a long way from becoming so. It is too toxic. It is too dependent on fossil fuels. It is too wasteful of soil, of soil fertility, and of water. It is destructive of the health of the natural systems that surround and support our economic life. And it is destructive of genetic diversity, both domestic and wild.
So far, these problems have not received enough attention from the news media or politicians, but the day is coming when they will. A great many people who know about agriculture are worrying about these problems already. It seems likely that the public, increasingly conscious of the issues of personal and ecological health, will sooner or later force the political leadership to pay attention. And a lot of farmers and grassroots farm organizations are now taking seriously the problem of ecological sustainability.
But there is a related issue that is even more neglected, one that has been largely obscured, even for people aware of the requirement of ecological sustainability, by the vogue of the so-called free market and the global economy. I am talking about the issue of the economic sustainability of farms and farmers, farm families and farm communities.
It ought to be obvious that in order to have sustainable agriculture, you have got to make sustainable the lives and livelihoods of the people who do the work. The land cannot thrive if the people who are its users and caretakers do not thrive. Ecological sustainability requires a complex local culture as the preserver of the necessary knowledge and skill; and this in turn requires a settled, stable, prosperous local population of farmers and other land users. It ought to be obvious that agriculture cannot be made sustainable by a dwindling population of economically depressed farmers and a growing population of migrant workers.
Why is our farm population dwindling away? Why are the still-surviving farms so frequently in desperate economic circumstances? Why is the suicide rate among farmers three times that of the country as a whole?
There is one reason that is paramount: The present agricultural economy, as designed by the agribusiness corporations (and the politicians, bureaucrats, economists, and experts who do their bidding), uses farmers as expendable “resources” in the process of production, the same way it uses the topsoil, the groundwater, and the ecological integrity of farm landscapes.
From the standpoint of sustainability, either of farmland or farm people, the present agricultural economy is a failure. It is, in fact, a catastrophe. And there is no use in thinking that agriculture can become sustainable by better adapting to the terms imposed by this economy. That is hopeless, because its terms are the wrong terms. The purpose of this economy is rapid, short-term exploitation, not sustainability.
The story we are in now is exactly the same story we have been in for the last hundred years. It is the story of a fundamental conflict between the interests of farmers and farming and the interests of the agribusiness corporations. It is useless to suppose or pretend that this conflict does not exist, or to hope that you can somehow serve both sides at once. The interests are different, they are in conflict, and you have to get on one side or the other.
As a case in point, let us consider the economics of Kentucky’s chicken factories, which some are pleased to look upon as a help to farmers. The Courier-Journal on May 28, 2000, told the story of a McLean County farmer who raises 1.2 million chickens a year. His borrowed investment of $750,000 brings him an annual income of $20,000 to $30,000. This declares itself immediately as a “deal” tailor-made for desperate farmers. Who besides a desperate farmer would see $20,000 or $30,000 as an acceptable annual return on an investment of $750,000 plus a year’s work? In the poultry-processing corporations that sponsor such “farming,” how many CEOs would see that as an acceptable return? The fact is that agriculture cannot be made sustainable in this way. The ecological risks are high, and the economic structure is forbidding. How many children of farmers in such an arrangement will want to farm?
Some people would like to claim that this sort of “economic development” is “inevitable.” But the only things that seem inevitable about it are the corporate greed that motivates it and the careerism of the academic experts who try to justify it. On May 28, the Courier-Journal quoted an agribusiness apologist at the University of Kentucky’s experiment station in Princeton, Gary Parker, who said in defense of the animal factories: “Agriculture is a high-volume, high-cost, high-risk type business. You have to borrow a tremendous amount of money. You have to generate a tremendous amount of income just to barely make a living.”
The
