Took the kids over the weekend to one of our local “Visit the farm, take a hayride and more!” places. It was nice, though a bit pricey, but the little boy enjoyed the corn maze and the baby girl was thrilled when the sheep came up and licked her hand.
Visit Lancaster County! And bring disinfectant!
Anyway, at one point there was a little show being put on, and the farmer launched into a bit of a monologue about how we folks in the audience don’t know how good we’ve got it, how we’d be up the creek without the hard work of farmers and a lot of our food comes from China these days and if they put lead in their paint guess what might be in their food! And if you get behind a tractor on the road or the odor of the pigs wafts your way, remember that the harder you make it for the farmer, the more food you’ll probably have to get from those leaden Chinese.
It was, in other words, rather preachy - and mimicked almost exactly what we’d heard during our hay ride at another farm a few weeks ago (which itself was the exact same thing we’d heard at that same farm last year).
And in a sense I can understand it. I can understand how local farmers, particularly those who have had to turn to the entertainment/tourist trade to make a few bucks, can feel put upon. At the same time, though, I think: If it’s so rough, you know, maybe you should get out of the business and do something else.
We’ve got a strange relationship with farming in this country; always have. There’s a pragmatic attachment to it, for obvious reasons; but there’s also an emotional attachment to it, sometimes a sanctimonious attachment to it. And sometimes that emotion drives policy.
I am not, for example, a fan of farm “preservation” programs. They don’t make ecnomic sense to me. I understand how those of us who live next to farms might prefer that the land remain cornfields rather than a new housing development, but farm preservation programs in effect funnel taxpayer money to people who, if only through the value of the land they own, are already relatively wealthy; and preservation funds are specifically designed that they might resist the market forces that determine that the “best” use of their land might be to develop it rather than grow corn on it.
I don’t see how that jibes. In the long run, what we’re doing is spending money for aesthetic purposes; because we like the idea of a rural community, we will pay farmers to keep on doing what they’re doing. Who else gets money from the government to just keep on keeping on? Yet this is policy; and indeed, here in Lancaster County, there’s no shortage of people who think we should spend even more money on this policy.
But even preservation funding, even farm subsidies - much maligned and deservedly so in that they go primarily to the biggest, “richest” farmers - do not seem to have really alleviated the pressures faced by small farmers. In that way, they are no different from the guy who runs the neighborhood hardware store and sees a Lowe’s moving in down the street. Overall economics of scale make life tough for small farmers, as they make life tough for small merchants, small anything. And certainly I can understand how those running a small shop or those running a small farm might resent these economic changes that threaten their own livelihood.
But this is the inevitable end product of our system, isn’t it? If small farms are good then big farms that can produce more food at a lower cost are better, more efficient. And stripped of the economic rationale, the only thing that protects small farmers is the emotional rationale. Farming as a way of life; farms as a buffer against urbanization. There’s some legitimacy in those arguments. I just have a hard time determing how much tax money it’s worth.
