The professor walked briskly to the small lectern in the third-floor classroom where only the chalk dust had changed in fifty years. “Boys,” he announced as he settled into position, “this is Agricultural Economics 220. Farm Management. Take a minute to make sure you’re in the right place, and then we’ll begin.”
He was right; we were, in fact, all boys. There were few women studying ag economics, or even agriculture, at the University of Illinois in 1974. None of us looked like 1974, though. There were no beads, beards, or bell-bottoms anywhere. We were fresh off long summers on our home farms, so we were well-tanned, well-clothed, and well-fed. And most of us—if asked—would have admitted that we were a little uncomfortable being indoors on such a perfect August afternoon. At home, our fathers, mothers, uncles, aunts, grandparents, brothers, sisters, and hired men were chopping corn silage, baling hay, cleaning grain bins, milking cows, feeding hogs, butchering chickens, grinding feed, repairing machinery, canning garden vegetables, or doing any number of late-summer chores to prepare for the always too-short harvest months and, soon enough, the always too-long winter months.
We, however, were in a sunny, warm classroom light-years away from the sweat, dirt, and hard sleep of the farm. Our job was to learn “agriculture,” and that was more important than any work we might have been contributing to the farm or the family’s success. Many of us already knew “farming”—when to plant, when to harvest, what ailments might strike a milk cow or fat hog. Few of us had been introduced to the ever-growing science behind all that planting, harvesting, feeding, and sweating. And ag economics? Farm management? Not a chance.
Our new leader cleared his throat. “Ready for the two most important lessons you’re going to hear this semester?”
Of course we were ready; we opened our spiral notebooks and clicked our mechanical pencils to transcribe the first two secrets of the brotherhood of farm management.
“Lesson one: You can marry more money in ten minutes than you can make farming in ten years.” Pencils paused, but the professor plowed on.
“Lesson two: Your father may not know this, but farming isn’t a way of life anymore, it’s a business, and it’s about to be a big business.”
The instructor stopped and looked at us as if measuring the ripples his two pebbles had made in our small ponds. “You following, boys?” he asked.
We did more than follow. Over the next fifty years, we remade America’s small farms and small towns into an industrial food juggernaut. Our farmers and ranchers would feed and clothe the nation—and, we would immodestly and erroneously claim, much of the world—even as the percentage of personal income spent on food by all Americans fell by 11.5 percent.
It wasn’t a miracle; it was a balancing and rebalancing of science, politics, and money. A lot of money, in fact. Mostly taxpayer money. Together, this most-American trinity built the most productive—and most unhealthy—food machine in history’s one hundred centuries of agriculture.
That ever-cheaper food carried another, even steeper price. In two short generations, as agriculture became more industrialized, most of rural America’s small towns, schools, churches, Main Streets, and factories were either consolidated, downsized, or erased. Others just dried up, drained of talent, capital, and people by the remorseless advance of heady globalization and the dictates of capitalism. The onslaught, in fact, was foreseen in 1973 by then-U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz, who urged farmers to “get big or get out.”
Butz was later forced out of the Ford administration for making a crude racist joke, but by then his go-go, feed-the-world advice to American farmers and ranchers had already elevated him to hero status among them. They worshiped him and his rock-ribbed belief in “fence row to fence row” production. For decades, he packed American Legion halls and school gymnasiums whenever he was asked to speak in rural America. Oh, he had his critics—loud ones—but old Earl’s usual reply was just a toothy grin and an exaggerated wink.
In the end, though, he got the last laugh. When he died in 2008 at the age of ninety-eight, he had lived to see his “get big or get out” vision come true. American agriculture had become more industrial, more science-reliant, and more government-dependent than ever before. Meanwhile, as people got out, communities went into decline. Bringing high-quality food to the populace was never the point.
The “F” Word
Every ag student nowadays learns about crops and livestock, soils and biochemistry, as well as economics and finance. Also, if the students don’t know it already, they will soon learn the language of farms and ranches: bushels, pounds, hundredweight, grades, dress weights, carcasses, leanness, breakeven, futures, ethanol, cash bid, “the grid,” “the matrix,” dockage, and a hundred more industry-specific terms.There is food in these millions of acres and billions of bushels of corn, too;it’s just a long ride up the food chain before it gets to you.What many will never learn and never talk about, however, is food—because today’s farming, what we call agriculture, is rarely about food. Even most dictionaries leave out the “f” word when defining agriculture. Most just go with some variation of “the science and art of cultivating the soil; including the gathering in of crops and the rearing of livestock.”
The “farming-is-food” construct is common, but it’s as far from the truth as Iowa is from Antarctica. For example, the number one crop grown in the United States is corn. And not sweet corn but “commercial” corn used primarily for two purposes, animal feed and alternative fuels. In 2023, U.S. farmers, according to recent estimates by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), will plant ninety-four million acres of corn on land about equivalent to the size of California, or four Indianas combined. And, if Mother Nature is kind, farmers will harvest around 15.3 billion bushels of corn this year, a record.
But you won’t see one kernel of this bounty—outside a bag of birdseed perhaps—in your local grocery store. Instead, 37 percent of it, or about 5.7 billion bushels, will be used to feed livestock—mostly hogs, cattle, chickens, and turkeys. Another 5.3 billion bushels will be used to make ethanol, the alternative fuel that farmers love, environmentalists hate (it’s not seen to have any positive effects in fighting climate change), and most U.S. drivers would never buy, if not for federal blending mandates that require its use. Another 2.1 billion bushels will be exported to foreign buyers like China and Japan, where it, too, will be used mostly to fatten livestock and poultry....
....MUCH MORE
