From GENE LOGSDON

Judging by the large number of thoughtful comments that followed my claim two weeks ago that farming is not a capitalistic venture and never was, I’d say more and more people are realizing how that boring old subject of economics rules over us all. While that remark echoed my opinion, it was almost a direct quote from Dwayne Andreas. Mr. Andreas is not a socialist, not a wild-eyed occupier of Wall Street, not a Zen Buddhist mystic, not a far out, left wing liberal. Now retired, he was the head of Archers Daniel Midland for many years, one of the largest and most successful agribusiness companies in the world. He made that observation about a decade ago and was widely quoted because the press was totally taken aback that a successful businessman like him would say something like that. If anyone could claim to be both a genuine capitalist and an informed expert on industrial agriculture, it was Mr. Andreas. He was also in a unique position to make that statement because he was known as one of the biggest contributors to our two major political parties—mostly to the Republicans but also to Democrats.As all capitalists know, (or socialists or whatever), it is necessary to play both sides of the political aisle to assure favorable legislation no matter which way the wind blows.

As many of the respondents on this website have pointed out, the so-called civilized world stumbles along on economic theories and theorems that partake of both socialism and capitalism. There is just no way in the real world to avoid doing so because whether a country is considered to have a more socialistic economy, like say, Canada or Sweden, or a more capitalistic economy, like the United States, all of the industrial world today practices economies that function on the idea that money can grow in value by manipulative interest rates.

I don’t hear anyone explicitly suggesting that the culprit in our economic woes is money interest even though all of our major religions, particularly Christianity and Islam, insisted for centuries that interest on money was immoral. ALL interest on money was usury. And supporting that view, philosophers and writers from every culture and era cautioned over and over again the folly of borrowing money. Wrote John Ruskin in 1866: “Borrowers are nearly always ill-spenders, and it is with lent money that all evil is mainly done and all unjust war protracted.”

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From GENE LOGSDON

One of my favorite people has farmed, with her husband, in both Ohio and North Dakota and lived to tell about it. Growing corn commercially in Ohio is hard enough but in North Dakota, it takes an infinite capacity for pure and undefiled optimism to make a go of it. She summed it up perfectly with only the slightest hint of a sarcastic smile on her face: “Well, actually, there is an advantage to growing corn in North Dakota. The snowdrifts hold the cornstalks up until a thaw and another freeze-up allows you in the field. In Ohio, the mud keeps you out of the field until the stalks fall flat on the ground and you can’t harvest them at all.”

This situation has been extremely pertinent this year. The weather has kept the ground wet through much of the Corn Belt but that mud doesn’t stop today’s machines of mass destruction when farmers get desperate enough to harvest anyway. They grind their way through the wet soil, leaving in their wake roiling, rolling gullies of ooze deep enough in the wettest areas to sink a Greyhound bus. In our county, we were visited this fall with the strangest scene yet: bulldozers scraping off the country roads thick layers of mud that massive farm implements had dragged out of adjacent fields. The fields were left looking, in the wettest spots, like battlefields crisscrossed with trenches and bomb craters.

I know many of you will think I am exaggerating because no one has previously had any idea of what happens when huge, powerful machines meet sopping wet soil. I am not criticizing the farmers for the enormous soil compaction that follows such meetings. They have to get the crops off any way they can and waiting for a freeze-up is too risky. They are caught in a situation few could have predicted. We always have had years of contrary weather during harvest but now the scale of the operation makes the scale of devastation so much worse. In former years, many more farmers with fewer acres each could limit the problem just because of that. With only a comparatively few acres per farmer, they could wait for the ground to freeze so they can get the crops harvested without massive soil compaction. When every farmer had only twenty acres or so of corn to harvest, and did it mostly with hand harvesting and horse power, mud or snow was not a soil destruction problem. Harvest just went on casually all winter long whenever conditions allowed.

The situation keeps getting more ridiculous. Much of North Dakota was never meant to grow corn in the first place. The season is too short for one thing. For another, parts of it don’t get enough summer rain for industrial corn production, and so mammoth irrigation canals have been built there to carry water to crops that sometimes don’t get planted or don’t get harvested. I once was interviewing a North Dakota farmer who told me, casually, that the field we were walking in had been five feet under water that spring. The land there was as flat as a table top, and when the snowdrifts melted fast, there was no place for the water to get away in a hurry. But now, in summer, the corn we were inspecting was suffering from drought.

Corn is still grown in this northern plains cattle country mostly because the demand for it from the subsidized ethanol market and from China keeps the price high enough (barely) to provide a chance of a profit. Or a farmer can buy as much insurance as the government allows and pray for contrary weather to destroy it But contrarily, the experts are now saying that under that land that is so difficult to raise profitable corn on, there’s enough gas and oil shale to render ethanol from corn obsolete if it isn’t already.

Meanwhile in Ohio, we are using snowplows to clean mud off our country roads, dragged there by farm machinery.

Surely there must be a better way.
~~

Bellevue Seattle Local Organic Food Grocery Market, Shop Local, Recipes, Small Farms, Family Farms, Blog

From GENE LOGSDON

Judging by the large number of thoughtful comments that followed my claim two weeks ago that farming is not a capitalistic venture and never was, I’d say more and more people are realizing how that boring old subject of economics rules over us all. While that remark echoed my opinion, it was almost a direct quote from Dwayne Andreas. Mr. Andreas is not a socialist, not a wild-eyed occupier of Wall Street, not a Zen Buddhist mystic, not a far out, left wing liberal. Now retired, he was the head of Archers Daniel Midland for many years, one of the largest and most successful agribusiness companies in the world. He made that observation about a decade ago and was widely quoted because the press was totally taken aback that a successful businessman like him would say something like that. If anyone could claim to be both a genuine capitalist and an informed expert on industrial agriculture, it was Mr. Andreas. He was also in a unique position to make that statement because he was known as one of the biggest contributors to our two major political parties—mostly to the Republicans but also to Democrats.As all capitalists know, (or socialists or whatever), it is necessary to play both sides of the political aisle to assure favorable legislation no matter which way the wind blows.

As many of the respondents on this website have pointed out, the so-called civilized world stumbles along on economic theories and theorems that partake of both socialism and capitalism. There is just no way in the real world to avoid doing so because whether a country is considered to have a more socialistic economy, like say, Canada or Sweden, or a more capitalistic economy, like the United States, all of the industrial world today practices economies that function on the idea that money can grow in value by manipulative interest rates.

I don’t hear anyone explicitly suggesting that the culprit in our economic woes is money interest even though all of our major religions, particularly Christianity and Islam, insisted for centuries that interest on money was immoral. ALL interest on money was usury. And supporting that view, philosophers and writers from every culture and era cautioned over and over again the folly of borrowing money. Wrote John Ruskin in 1866: “Borrowers are nearly always ill-spenders, and it is with lent money that all evil is mainly done and all unjust war protracted.”

Bellevue Seattle Local Organic Food Grocery Market, Shop Local, Recipes, Small Farms, Family Farms, Blog

From GENE LOGSDON

No figure is more endearing and enduring in agriculture than the lonely plowman out there on the horizon who raises himself by his own bootstraps to financial success. Only problem is, there is no occupation more dependent on the cooperation of society and nature to achieve success than farming.

We like to say that every farmer today feeds 155 people but to do that, he or she needs an army or two of support troops supplying the information, fuel, seed, fertilizers, pesticides, machinery and what have you, not to mention another army getting all that food transported and distributed to the consumer. Even then, we are totally dependent on the weather. Also, although we seldom think about it, maintaining a society where 155 people can afford to buy a farmer’s food output requires the work of the entire population. Even in pioneer times, when a farmer did supply many of his own inputs, he was far from lifting himself by his own bootstraps. He needed a wife to help lift too. Sometimes he wore out more than one of them on his way to “success.” He also often wore out a couple of farms— got rich because he took advantage of the virgin fertility of the soil without replacing it. But even in the best of circumstances, he was not the stalwart capitalist of the backwoods. For example, on the frontier he was inclined on all occasions to beg the government to build more forts and bring more troops to protect him from the “savage red man” whose land he, with plenty of help from the government, was stealing. When I study history, I come away completely baffled over why rural America has made such a righteous religion out of capitalism. Farming has never been a capitalistic enterprise and never can be.

A close acquaintance, very successful in farming by money standards, is much admired locally because “he made it all on his own.” What that means in this context is that he did not inherit much wealth, the usual way farmers get rich. But he will be the first one to tell you that he is not a self-made man, freely admitting with a big grin on his face that he is successful because he learned how to “farm the government” as well as the land. He is one of only a very few large-scale farmers I know well who usually votes the Democratic ticket because, he says, the Democrats almost always pass out more subsidies than the Republicans do. His honesty is so refreshing.I also enjoy the confidence of staunch politically-conservative farmers who are honest enough to admit, at least privately, that they are not self-made men. When one of them realized I was more sympathetic to his situation than he thought, he told me about his adventures in farming with such honest frankness that it left me astonished. He said things no one should tell journalists, but maybe novelists. I will omit the details, but on more than one occasion he and his partners made mistakes of judgment that nearly plunged them into bankruptcy. “All I can say,” he concluded, grinning wryly, “is that without government help, we would have gone under.”

“Self-made” successful farmers are a complicated bunch and that’s why I like them even if I don’t like everything they do. Neither the adulation they receive from conservative Farm Bureau types nor the criticism they get from liberal-progressive Farmer Union types does them justice. They sometimes sound ignorant because, not having gotten much formal education, they murder the English language when they talk. But they can outwit the collected brainpower of the entire Department of Agriculture. Sometimes they use bad grammar as a disguise to lull the suit and tie crowd into thinking they are stupid. As one rich farmer I worked for years ago in Minnesota told me in the broken German-English he used to fool salesmen and government agents: “Alvays let de udder guy t’ink you are dumber dan he is and you got him every time.”

Most historians see the astronaut in his spaceship vainly rocketing across the endless skies as the tragically heroic symbol of the century now passing. But when all the stardust has settled, I have a hunch a more appropriate model will be the industrial farmer in his monster tractor fruitlessly plowing across the endless acres.
~~

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From GENE LOGSDON

It says here in the paper that it takes 125,000 new jobs every month just to keep up with population growth. No wonder we have so many people holding down unnecessary jobs. There aren’t enough real jobs to go around and besides, we are replacing people with machines as fast as we can to do the real jobs. Rather than trying to eliminate pretend jobs for the sake of efficiency as is now being proposed (lots of pretension in that too), we should be thinking up better quality pretend jobs— imaginative new positions in useless work that are more beneficial to society than the usual run of useless work.

The famous economist, John Maynard Keynes, first thought of this approach many years ago. He proposed, as useless but harmless work, burying tin cans full of money all over the landscape and then letting people without jobs hunt for them and pocket the contents. He claimed this would keep the unemployed occupied and happy without causing any costly harm to society. He didn’t say it, but I suppose if the money were buried out in next year’s corn fields, you could get the soil worked up for planting without burning a whole lot of fuel. Also you could create another bunch of useless jobs hiring people to bury the cash.

Agriculture is full of examples of beneficially useless jobs. Many of the positions in the Extension Service no longer serve any real need or purpose and are finally being cut in the current wave of “austerity.” But if county agents and consumer educators merely repeat work already being done by the private sector, at least such jobholders are not doing destructive work like manufacturing bombs. For awhile, I had a job that paid me for checking newly-installed drainage tile systems to make sure they were put in according to Soil Conservation Service regulations. It never seemed to have occurred to authorities that farmers were not going to deliberately put in drainage systems that did not work. But my job surely contributed more to the social good than if I had been employed to check the operation of roulette wheels at casinos.

The ticklish part of all this is that one man’s pretend job is another man’s real job. The financial conservative today, intent on reducing taxes, generally defines a real job as one that people will willingly pay for (private sector jobs rather than public sector jobs). I believe that definition sanctifies prostitution as good business, doesn’t it? Growing corn is certainly real work, but what about growing corn to make car fuel while people starve?

In case you didn’t notice, the Senate just voted to end direct payments to wealthy farmers. Direct payments are those a farmer receives just because he or she is a farmer, no other strings attached. These payments are despicable, really, and it is high time they were abolished. But again, I am wondering if it is better to shower money on a food producer rather than on a bomb producer. More benefit might come from spreading the direct payment folly out to everyone willing to brandish a hoe productively. How about paying people a hundred dollars a bushel for backyard corn? Backyard corn won’t hurt the environment. People would happily stay at home and garden rather than get killed on the highways so often. And look at the jobs that would be created for the army of inspectors needed to make sure the corn growers didn’t cheat. Food prices would decline with all that corn on the market. There would be an increase of fresh, healthful cornmeal, corn fritters, popcorn, sweet corn, corn chips, pancakes, corn bread, parched corn, tortillas and good old fat-producing corn-fed meat. The countryside would blossom into a beauteous land of peace and plenty with hundreds of new, small farms.

Many parts of Europe have been doing this for years, literally paying small farmers to preserve an oasis of local food and a healthy rural environment. In New England, there are areas where imaginative local government actually pays farmers to keep cows grazing out in the pastures. It attracts tourists and the money pours in. That’s the way to go.

Okay, so I’m being a bit facetious. But underneath I am deadly serious. We should not allow the abstract dictums of money to rule the real world of human life, love and the pursuit of happiness. That means creating more pretend jobs, not fewer.
~~

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From GENE LOGSDON

When I wrote “Pope Mary and the Church of Almighty Good Food,” I thought I was proposing a rather preposterous idea. In my fictional story, the congregation of a church that was closed much against its will decided to turn their property into a sort of food center to grow and process fruits, vegetables, and grains for the neighborhood. But when Susie Sutphin visited us recently (Foodchronicles.net) she told about a closed church, St. George’s Lithuanian Church in Cleveland, Ohio, that was doing very much like what my fictional story described. The people turned their church building and land around it into what they describe as a “food hub” called Community Greenhouse Partners to grow food for the surrounding neighborhood. CGP is the brainchild of Timothy Smith who is its executive director. Can you imagine?

A few days later, Ed Searl, a Unitarian minister in Hinsdale, Illinois who was inspired to base a whole sermon on Pope Mary, gave me one of his annual Gannett Awards for my blog posted here a couple of weeks ago about how farming could increase jobs. (searlsermons.blogspot.com). When I thanked him and mentioned the Cleveland church, he told me of other churches turning themselves into “food hubs” including one in Youngstown, Ohio. He said maybe I was on the “forming edge of wave.”

I get nervous about being part of any new movement except maybe healthy bowel movements, but I confess to feeling very elated about this food hub idea and any part I may have played in it. For some reason, when I write novels that sort of make fun of organized religion, it is organized religion that seems most appreciative. Amazing. Mike Mather, who is pastor of a Methodist church in Indianapolis (www.broadwayumc.org) came to visit me too. He had a message we all need to hear. He and the people in his church are part of the new “food hub” wave, although he didn’t call it that. He just wants to encourage the people in his church to start asserting their food independence. But instead of going the usual route of venturing forth and trying to teach the people how to grow food, Mike decided to ask the parishioners themselves how to go about it. Much to his surprise, he found out that there were plenty of people already gardening and establishing their food independence in the neighborhood. What was lacking was any inclination to organize promotional efforts. Most gardeners and farmers do not really like to face the public. We are rather private people by nature and feel very ill at ease in public. (I think that is why communicating with each other on blog sites appeals to us— it is a way to be private and public at the same time.) So Mike and his church leaders took on the job of publicity and promotion. The gardeners stepped up and handled the rest.

I think there is a lesson here for all of us visionaries of a food hub future. Many people imbued with the missionary spirit ask me how I would go about converting more of society to food independence. They want to go into the schools and other institutions and teach gardening skills. Going this route is okay, but you generally find yourself dealing with idealists or first fervor types who like to talk about producing their own food but who have no idea of how much hard work is involved.

Instead, follow Mike Mather’s example. Go out and acquaint yourself with the people who are already gardening and farming because they love it. Help them find more land or empty lots. Get city officials to find a place where they can have a public market. If you are a large scale farmer and want to get involved, donate an acre or two to the cause.  Start supporting politicians who want to help the food hub idea, like Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown who hosted a meeting at CGP recently. Do all that legal beagle work that gardeners and farmers have no taste or talent for.

One thing I am sure of, even if I am somewhat of a heathen. If you get organized religion behind the idea that we can no longer let the likes of Monsanto produce our food for us, we’ll take a giant leap forward.
~~

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