In honor of NATIONAL AGRICULTURE DAY!
For 17 years, I lived on a farm and worked (along with my husband) to make that farm successful.
When we started, we farmed with his family — 500+ acres. His Mom and I both had laying hens; she had about 500 and I had 1300 and also an egg route in town. Our fields grew corn, beans, oats, hay, pasture; the hay and pasture were for our 100 head of stock cows and our farm yards were for feeding both their calves, additional feeders, and the hogs.
With continuing pressures from corporate agriculture, and just like USDA leadership told us, our operation got bigger. Earl Butz told all of us family farmers, “Get bigger, or get out.” Butz was the visible, serious, and continuing kick-off of corporate agriculture’s attack on family farmers.
We grew our farm … just like we were told. We bought out my husband’s family, and added acres and more live stock. By the time I left the farm in 1981, we were farming 1000 acres, still had our 100 head of stock cows, fed out up to 300 head of fats a year, and farrow-to-finished about 600 head of hogs.
It wasn’t enough. Family farms are even bigger now, and it breaks my heart — how hard farmers work and how all too often, how little compensation they get. It is not enough to merely appreciate them. We must understand how ag producers get such a tiny share of the food dollar while corporate ag gets fatter and fatter.
Farmers and ranchers are the backbone of America. Their, and our, big challenges include not only tackling the deadly competition of corporate vertical integration where profit can be take out at higher levels while the corporates put the squeeze on price for farmers but also many more difficulties — climate change, new and better practices for land management, building back the soil, and water conservation.
If we’re going to eat, we need farmers to succeed.
If we’re going to eat, we need the opponents of the Farm Bill to get serious. Times change. Our Farm Bill needs to catch up. This year there is opportunity. Senate Ag Chair Debbie Stabenow is committed to take advantage of the opportunity. She want to, “Move all those Inflation Reduction Act dollars into the conservation baseline and stretch that out and make it go even further. But we have to do it within the language that was put in [the IRA] around climate-smart agriculture.”
This is great news. The House Majority led by Speaker Mike Johnson needs to stop quibbling. Climate-smart agriculture is our future. Without it, we risk our land.
- PRESIDENT GEORGE WASHINGTON SAID IT LIKE THIS: “I know of no pursuit in which more real and important services can be rendered to any country than by improving its agriculture, its breed of useful animals, and other branches of a husbandman’s cares.”
In honor of National Agriculture Day, MY RURAL AMERICA thanks our many kinds of farmers and ranchers. We stand with you to support a Farm Bill which can help you all do your job of feeding America and our World.