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By Root 1419 0

of eating around the world. But I have left out perhaps the most critical lesson of all: how the production system that mines our resources also undermines social values we cherish. We have been taught that our production system rewards hard work and efficiency while providing abundant food for all, but it actually rewards waste, wealth, and size—and the hungry go without food no matter how much is produced. This is the most painful lesson I have had to learn in the last ten years.

The Blind Production Imperative

In our production system, farmers’ profits are in a continually tightening squeeze—between rising costs of production and falling prices for their crops. Their profits are squeezed because farmers are largely price takers who must confront price makers both when they buy what they need to make the land produce and when they sell their crops.

The first price makers are the manufacturers of farm inputs. Tractor manufacturers, for example, can pass on their rising costs to farmers in the form of higher prices, because farmers must have tractors and there are only a handful of manufacturers. The same holds true for fuel, pesticides, fertilizers, seeds, and other farming inputs. Farmers, however, cannot pass on their higher costs, because in selling their crops farmers meet the second price maker: the marketplace. Farm commodity sales may be the last truly competitive market, with thousands of units competing against one another. Farmers have to take whatever price they can get from relatively few major buyers. Going prices are determined largely by supply and demand, not by the farmers’ costs of production.

Because they are at the mercy of price makers both in buying farm inputs and in selling their crops, farmers’ profits per acre fall steadily. By 1979 profits per acre in real terms had sunk to one-half the level of 1945.1 Because of their greater volume of sales, many large farms can survive these lower profits per acres, but smaller farms, even if more efficient, may not survive while receiving the very same price per bushel. Thus, ever lower profit margins favor size and force the smaller farms to try to become even larger. Moreover, simply to maintain the same income all farmers must try to increase production and lower production costs, regardless of the ecological or human consequences.

So Earl Butz’s infamous “Get big or get out” was not a snide crack—it was sound economic advice. But who has the opportunity to “get big”? Only those farmers whose operations are already quite large, particularly those who have considerable equity in their land. They have the advantage when it comes to taxes, government payments, and marketing their crops.

But control of the land is key. Because of this incessant pressure to expand, the most limiting factor in production—land—steadily inflates in value. “Thus, simply owning land comes to be rewarded more highly than producing food on it,” Marty Strange, co-director of Nebraska’s Center for Rural Affairs, told me. “In other words, unearned wealth is a bigger factor today in farm expansion than earned income from farming.” (For example, a typical farmer with 80 percent of his land paid for had an annual net income of $18,500 in 1978, but the value of the land itself increased by $34,600 that year, according to a 1979 government study.2) As the wealth of those with considerable equity soars, they have the collateral to buy out their neighbors down the road. By the mid-1970s almost two-thirds of all farmland sales involved the expansion of existing farms, a reversal of the 1950s, when two-thirds of farmland sales resulted in new farms.3

In this process, over four million farms have gone out of business in the last 40 years. Of those remaining, the top 3 percent now control almost half of all farm sales. By the year 2000, if trends continue, this 3 percent will control two-thirds of all farm output.4

In place of owner-run farms and widely dispersed control of our land, we see the possibility of what former Secretary of Agriculture Bob Bergland called a “landed aristocracy;