• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 685 0

his kitchen table, drinking coffee and talking about what farmers always talk about: lousy commodity prices; benighted farm policies; making ends meet in a dysfunctional farm economy. Naylor came back to the farm in what would turn out to be the good old days in American agriculture: Corn prices were at an all-time high, and it looked as though it might actually be possible to make a living growing it. But by the time Naylor was ready to take his first crop to the elevator, the price of a bushel of corn had dropped from three dollars to two dollars, the result of a bumper crop. So he held his corn off the market, storing it in the hope that the price would rebound. But the price kept falling all through that winter and into the following spring and, if you factor in inflation, it has pretty much been falling ever since. These days the price of a bushel of corn is about a dollar beneath the true cost of growing it, a boon for everyone but the corn farmer. What I was hoping George Naylor could help me understand is, if there’s so much corn being grown in America today that the market won’t pay the cost of producing it, then why would any farmer in his right mind plant another acre of it?

The answer is complicated, as I would learn, but it has something to do with the perverse economics of agriculture, which would seem to defy the classical laws of supply and demand; a little to do with the psychology of farmers; and everything to do with farm policies, which underwent a revolution right around the time George Naylor was buying his first tractor. Government farm programs once designed to limit production and support prices (and therefore farmers) were quietly rejiggered to increase production and drive down prices. Put another way, instead of supporting farmers, during the Nixon administration the government began supporting corn at the expense of farmers. Corn, already the recipient of a biological subsidy in the form of synthetic nitrogen, would now receive an economic subsidy too, ensuring its final triumph over the land and the food system.

NAYLOR’S PERSPECTIVE on farm policy was shaped by a story his dad used to tell him. It takes place during the winter of 1933, in the depths of the farm depression. “That’s when my father hauled corn to town and found out that the price of corn had been ten cents a bushel the day before, but on that day the elevator wasn’t even buying.” The price of corn had fallen to zero. “Tears always came to his eyes when he recounted the neighbors losing their farms in the 1920s and ’30s,” Naylor told me. America’s farm policy was forged during the Depression not, as many people seem to think, to encourage farmers to produce more food for a hungry nation, but to rescue farmers from the disastrous effects of growing too much food—far more than Americans could afford to buy.

For as long as people have been farming, fat years have posed almost as stiff a challenge as lean, since crop surpluses collapse prices and bankrupt farmers who will be needed again when the inevitable lean years return. When it comes to food, nature can make a mockery of the classical economics of supply and demand—nature in the form of good or bad weather, of course, but also the nature of the human body, which can consume only so much food no matter how plentiful the supply. So, going back to the Old Testament, communities have devised various strategies to even out the destructive swings of agricultural production. The Bible’s recommended farm policy was to establish a grain reserve. Not only did this ensure that when drought or pestilence ruined a harvest there’d still be food to eat, but it kept farmers whole by taking food off the market when the harvest was bountiful.

This is more or less what New Deal farm programs attempted to do. For storable commodities such as corn, the government established a target price based on the cost of production, and whenever the market price dropped below that target, the farmer was given a choice. Instead of dumping corn onto a weak market (thereby weakening it further), the farmer