
          As We Have Sown: The new struggle is the same old fight to make
enough to survive
          By Ritchie, MarkMark Ritchie
          Vol. 9, No. 5,  1987, pp. 5, 7-11
          
          History is a good place to begin. The important thing about
agriculture in the United_States from the beginning of European
colonization is that from the moment this country was founded,
small-scale subsistence farming was everywhere. That is how we think
of our nation-as a nation founded by small farmers.
          We were about 99 percent small farmers and somehow it has declined
to about 2 percent now. We get the image of an inevitable natural
process. However, agriculture in the U.S. until about the mid-1890s
was pretty well split-the rural people who were small subsistence
farmers, farming for themselves primarily and maybe a little trade,
and the farming that today we call commercial agriculture. From the
very start of European colonization, the latter was formed into very
large-scale industrial units: chattel slavery and the plantation
system in the South, Spanish land grants with huge haciendas in the
West, bonanza farms. Not until the mid-1850s did families begin to
control land and to farm in a commercial way-where farm families
themselves could build their productivity to produce crops large
enough to be sold on a more commercial basis.
          From almost the first moment when families began being the dominant
unit of commercial production, family farmers and the family ranchers
of that time entered into the same kind of struggle that we face
today, a struggle between the high prices of things they needed to
live on the farm and the low prices they could get for their
products.
          At different times between the 1850s and the early 1900s that
squeeze was enough to cause what we call a depression but was then
called a panic, a much more useful term. We had five or six panics
when what farmers were getting for the crops was too little to pay
what they owed their creditors. In each panic rural people reached a
point of desperation. Then they began to get organized. Sometimes they
came together into cooperatives to defend themselves. Sometimes they
came together into political parties-the Greenbacks, the Populists.
          By the early 1900s it became clear that it was going to take more
than just farmers getting organized locally to defend
themselves. Farmers began seeing that they had to move nationally with
federal legislation if they were to 

begin leveling the playing field
between the monopolies that were providing them with everything they
needed to live and the monopolies they were forced to sell their
products to on the other end.
          In the 1920s, following the collapse of farm prices after World War
I, farmers entered probably the most serious depression they had faced
up to that time. They organized nationally and passed-three different
times-federal farm legislation called the McNerry-Halgan bill. Three
times that legislation was vetoed-once by Coolidge and twice by
Hoover-with a pretty blatant public comment that they needed to keep
food prices down so they could keep wages down. In each instance
farmers knew they had to come back and keep pushing. Farmers were
discouraged just as they are discouraged now. But they kept coming
back and pushing and pushing and finally in the early
1930s-unfortunately not until after their depression had rolled into
the cities and brought real misery to urban areas, too-they passed and
made the President sign federal farm legislation to begin giving some
security back to rural people, to farmers and ranchers.
          That first farm legislation, often called the parity farm
legislation or the Roosevelt farm legislation or the New_Deal farm
legislation, was based on three principles. First, prices in the
marketplace had to be high enough so that farmers 

could pay their
bills and keep their families alive. The Roosevelt farm legislation
through the Commodity Credit Corporation put a floor under
prices. Second, that legislation tried to bring supply and demand into
balance. Things would occur-the weather, insects, all kinds of
issues-that farmers as individuals were unable to control but that
influenced supply and demand for them as a group. The legislation
effectively allowed farmers participation through national referenda
and voting on establishing supply management that would help them keep
supply and demand in balance. The third principle was protection for
consumers. In the thirties we also had some droughts and dust bowls
and all of a sudden we would find ourselves with the grain in the
hands of the grain companies and a big shortage on the farm. Prices
would suddenly skyrocket. Under the Roosevelt farm legislation, when
prices rose to a certain level national reserves were released into
the market to bring the prices back down so that they were kept within
a fairly narrow range to make it possible for farmers to keep their
families going but to keep prices from skyrocketing for consumers in
the cities as well.
          The farm programs that started in the thirties rested on these
three bases for a long time. These programs were not without their own
problems. The first programs were declared unconstitutional because
there was a tax on the processors. Some of the benefits were not
passed to the sharecroppers and tenant farmers. The same racism and
discrimination that prevailed in this country was felt through those
programs as well. But there was a struggle throughout the thirties to
make those programs right, to find the formula, as in all of society
we were looking for different ways to solve our economic crisis. By
the end of the 1930s people had really settled into a good solid
pattern of federal farm legislation that was to serve our nation well
through the early fifties.
          THESE PROGRAMS WERE a big success for a lot of people. They held
farm prices to a fair level and consumer prices were also very low. We
had a strong comeback for young farmers coming back onto the
land. Farmers who had been foreclosed on in the thirties were able to
come back onto their homesteads and continue farming. We had an
explosion in soil and water conservation programs. The founding of the
Soil Conservation Service and putting a few 

dollars back into farmers'
pockets made it possible to begin terracing land to recover land and
fix some of the things that we had done that had caused the great dust
bowl.
          The other place the programs were a success was for the
taxpayers. Because the programs were based on getting a price for
farmers out of the market the farm programs themselves actually
generated profit. The farm program from 1933 to 1953 on storable
commodities made about $12 million for the federal_government. Now
that is not much money, but if you compare it to spending $32 billion
last year on the federal farm program you can see a pretty big
difference between the programs of those days and what we have
today.
          Some people didn't like those farm programs. We should be clear
about this. In the same way that in the 1800s and the early 1900s
farmers had to struggle with the people that were supplying them and
the people they were selling to, those were the same forces that were
opposed to the parity farm programs in the thirties and forties and
early fifties. On the one hand the chemical fertilizer-seed companies
felt that if farmers were imposing supply management, that if they
were not planting every acre fencerow to fencerow, then the companies
were selling less chemicals and less seed. Which was probably
true. Somehow the companies did not notice that farmers needed to make
a profit to be able to pay their bills. It turned out we had very very
strong opposition from the agri-chemical and machinery companies as
well.
          On the other side we had opposition from the companies that were
buying from the farmers. The cotton ginners, grain corporations, and
meet packers felt that if the farmers had government assistance to put
a floor under prices, that the commodity buyers were not going to be
able to get those commodities at lower and lower prices, which is the
way they thought they were going to build bigger markets. Also the
speculators felt that if the government intervened to keep prices
fairly stable, then this cut into their action quite a bit. 
IN FACT, IT CUT INTO the action of these corporations so greatly that
they organized to repeal the parity farm legislation, for the most
part, by the early 1950s. The corporations argued that cheaper food
was needed to build industry. These arguments took place in the
context of the McCarthy era when everything was defined in black and
white and when racism and red-baiting were rolled together into one
national hysteria. They were able to argue that the farm programs that
were helping the family farmers were somehow communism or bolshevism
or socialism. They were able to say that things that were keeping
black farmers on the land were somehow anti-American. They rolled that
sentiment together into a successful national lobbying effort to
repeal laws, especially those on grain crops and some of the crops
that were heavily developed in the midwest.
          (I point out to Yankee friends that because the South had strongly
organized itself in Congress, the crops that the South was very
dependent on at that time-tobacco, peanuts, sugar, dairy products, and
fruits and vegetables- were able to hang on. In fact, they have been
defended until today though they are certainly under assault
now. Tobacco companies are importing all kinds of tobaccos in order to
break the tobacco program. There is an assault on the peanut program
every time it comes up. But in the early 1950s when major parts of the
parity farm legislation were being repealed, Southerners in Congress
were able to keep some of those programs for some crops in the
South. The effect is seen in the more stable conditions that some
farmers in the South have had. A state like Kentucky that still has
115,000 farms is able to hold on to them because of the small tobacco
quotas. Some of the success in Georgia has been that people have been
able to hang on to those programs.)
          From the late 1950s and early 1960s there was chaos in agriculture
because these programs were being taken away. There were some
production increases because when farmers saw their prices being cut,
they intensified production to make up for what they were losing. Big
surpluses built up so bad the government would then shut down whole
counties and the soil bank was a really big program. Whole regions
were shut down.
          The 196Os were also a time with a lot of industrial development in
this country. We were kicking a lot of people off their farms. It was
an especially intense time for small black farmers being kicked off
their farms in the South. There was the pull of the urban area and
urban jobs, the 

auto industry and the steel industry. In some ways the
farm crisis of the late 1950s and early 1960s was masked by the
ability of people to move to industrial jobs.
          By the early 1970s the crisis, particularly for the Northern grain
farms, wheat and corn and soybeans, became pretty intense. In the
early 1970s, in Des Moines, Iowa, farmers were marching down the
street and on the one side were anti-war demonstrators because Richard
Nixon was in town, but on the other side farmers were throwing
pitchforks at Nixon. By the 1970s federal farm legislation had forced
down prices so much that many family farmers were in a
rebellion. Nixon and Congress chose a solution consistent with the
Great Society notion of that time, which was not to challenge
corporate power but to throw some money at the problem to keep people
quiet. Don't make corporations open up jobs, instead make them give a
little bit of money to a summer youth employment program. In 1972,
Congress developed a new approach to farm legislation in which we had
a floor under prices at a very low level and we provided farmers with
what was called a deficiency payment. How about that for language?
          For the first couple of years the low prices and the deficiency
payments were enough for farmers to survive. But when Congress started
this program-in the midst of the Vietnam war and our trade deficits
and everything else in the early 1970s-they asked how much farmers
need in a deficiency payment to come out okay. Soon they started
asking how much they could afford to give farmers this year. It did
not take too long between the Vietnam war and the rest of our
foolishness to not have enough money to give the farmers. Soon, the
low market price and the deficiency payment to farmers were not enough
combined to cover the cost of production. Then we began rolling into
the crisis that we face today.
          WE HAD ONE MORE trick up our sleeves to keep this whole crisis
covered up. The nation was on an inflation binge so farmland prices,
like everything else, were moving up rapidly. You could go into the
bank at the end of the year and say, "I lost money on my corn this
year," and the banker would say, "That's okay. You lost money
on your corn but your land went up another ten percent this year. By
golly, I can just loan you more money-by the time you retire  you'll
be a millionaire. Don't worry about losing money on your corn 'cause
you're going to be a millionaire pretty soon."
          Year after year people lost money on their crops but borrowed money
on their land. Farm debt went from around $20 billion in the early
1970s to a peak of $225 billion by 1983-a thousand percent increase in
farm debt in a little over a decade. Not because farmers were being
greedy and expanding, but because they were borrowing money to make up
for what they were losing. They were borrowing money to pay for
tractors that were doubling and tripling in price in the course of
three or four years. They were borrowing so much money that by 1983
about a million farmers held a debt that was twice the foreign debt of
Brazil. At the end of the decade, as land prices began to fall, the
first young farmers who had borrowed to the limit were not able to
borrow any more money, so their banks sold them out. Other farmers saw
their land values go down and banks would tell them they no longer had
enough collateral in their land and move them out.
          The crisis of the 1980s has been that downward spiral land values
have fallen 60 percent in my state. U.S. farmers have lost $300
billion.
          As in other times when we have had crises farmers have begun to
respond and get organized. Farmers in Tennessee in the early 1980s did
a sit-in at a FmHA office and farmers from around the country came
with them. Nationwide there has been a movement of farmers re-entering
the political process to find a solution. Enough people were concerned
about this in 1984 that although Ronald Reagan swept the country in
some states, Democrats who took a strong position on the farm crisis
were able to stand against that tide and get elected.
          By 1986 farmers had organized enough so that the farm crisis was a
motivating factor in moving millions of people to the polls. In
Georgia 10 percent of the people who voted in 1986 said the reason
they went to the polls and the reason they chose to vote was the farm
crisis. I think that is the tip of the iceberg that is beginning to
develop now.
          Farmers are not only getting out voters but they have been in
Congress writing legislation for new ways to approach the debt
problem. They are also trying to reestablish those successful farm
programs that put a floor under prices that was fair, and those supply
management programs like you still have on peanuts and tobacco that
kept supply and demand in balance and that were good for keeping rural
populations on the land so they are not being forced into the
cities.
          The concerns of farmers today have moved beyond their own
situations and their own financial problems. Farmers are looking at
the environmental effects of legislation. If you are being paid a
subsidy on each bushel you are forced to make the land grow more and
more. Farmers know that is tearing us up. We also know that these low
farm prices hurting our farmers here have ruined agriculture around
the world; when we put rice at $3.50 here, you can imagine what that
does to rice growing in west Africa and other parts of the
world. Farmers are also concerned about where this 

rolls into our
trade legislation. We talk about "free trade."
What that means is turning over the world's food system to that
half-dozen corporations who control it now. We are talking about free
trade with Canada. That means moving all our meat packing jobs to
Canada. President Reagan is talking about removing subsidies for
farmers worldwide. What they really are talking about is wiping out
farmers around the world so that the crisis we now face here now will
be worldwide.
          It is not only that we have had a farm crisis but it is also a
social crisis. The farm crisis has brought farm people back into the
mainstream of the social justice movement. Farmers are worried about
the same issues that urban people are. We need to bring that coalition
together concretely, realistically, politically-not just to solve this
farm crisis, but to solve the national and international crisis of
human spirit and of health and safety.
          We need to bring these people together to address those crises as a
political coalition because that is the only way we will solve
them-together. 
          
            Edward Pennick is director of the Emergency Land
Fund. Mark Ritchie, a native Georgian, is an agricultural policy
analyst with the Minnesota Department of Agriculture.
            The articles by Pennick and Ritchie are based on remarks they made
recently in Atlanta at the conference, "Urban Connections to the
Rural Crisis," sponsored by the Federation of Southern
Cooperatives and the National Council of Churches.
          
        
