Collapse_ How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond [36]
Steve Powell explained to me, “People used to expect no more of a farm than to produce enough to feed themselves; today, they want more out of life than just getting fed; they want to earn enough to send their kids to college.” When John Cook was growing up on a farm with his parents, “At dinnertime, my mother was satisfied to go to the orchard and gather asparagus, and as a boy I was satisfied for fun to go hunting and fishing. Now, kids expect fast food and HBO; if their parents don’t provide that, they feel deprived compared to their peers. In my day a young adult expected to be poor for the next 20 years, and only thereafter, if you were lucky, might you hope to end up more comfortably. Now, young adults expect to be comfortable early; a kid’s first questions about a job are ‘What are the pay, the hours, and the vacations?”’ Every Montana farmer whom I know, and who loves being a farmer, is either very concerned whether any of his/her children will want to carry on the family farm, or already knows that none of them will.
Economic considerations now make it difficult for farmers to earn a living at farming, because farm costs have been rising much faster than farm income. The price that a farmer receives for milk and beef today is virtually the same as 20 years ago, but costs of fuel, farm machinery, fertilizers, and other farm necessities are higher. Rick Laible gave me an example: “Fifty years ago, a farmer who wanted to buy a new truck paid for it by selling two cows. Nowadays, a new truck costs around $15,000, but a cow still sells for only $600, so the farmer would have to sell 25 cows to pay for the truck.” That’s the logic underlying the following joke that I was told by a Montana farmer. Question: “What would you do if you were given a million dollars?” Answer: “I love farming, and I would stay here on my money-losing farm until I had used up the million dollars!”
Those shrinking profit margins, and increasing competition, have made the Bitterroot Valley’s hundreds of formerly self-supporting small farms uneconomic. First, the farmers found that they needed additional income from outside jobs to survive, and then they had to give up the farm because it required too much work on evenings and weekends after the outside job. For instance, 60 years ago Kathy Vaughn’s grandparents supported themselves on a 40-acre farm, and so Kathy and Pat Vaughn bought their own 40-acre farm in 1977. With six cows, six sheep, a few pigs, hay, Kathy working as a schoolteacher, and Pat as an irrigation system builder, they fed and raised three children on the farm, but it provided no security or retirement income. After eight years, they sold the farm, moved into town, and all of their children have now left Montana.
Throughout the U.S., small farms are being squeezed out by large farms, the only ones able to survive on shrinking profit margins by economies of scale. But in southwestern Montana it is now impossible for small farmers to become large farmers by buying more land, for reasons succinctly explained by Allen Bjergo: “Agriculture in the U.S. is shifting to areas like Iowa and Nebraska, where no one would live for the fun of it because it isn’t beautiful as in Montana! Here in Montana, people do want to live for the fun of it, and so they are willing to pay much more for land than agriculture on the land would support. The Bitterroot is becoming a horse valley. Horses are economic because, whereas prices for agricultural products depend on the value of the food itself and are not unlimited, many people are willing to spend anything for horses that yield no economic benefit.”
Land prices in the Bitterroot are now 10 or 20 times higher