A couple years ago I returned to my great grandparents’ farm after half a century, and barely recognized the place. The log barn was gone, the chicken coop gone, as was the machine shed. Pastures, garden, windmill … all gone. All that remained of the farm in western Wisconsin where my grandmother was born and raised was the ruins of the house (which had replaced the original cabin).
Thanksgiving is a season for gratitude. I’m certainly grateful that Ole and Ronnaug Fladten emigrated from Norway to Wisconsin, back in the 19th century and started a dairy farm. In 1886 they became my grandmother’s parents. Without them I wouldn’t be telling this story.
When I was a kid in the 1950’s it was an adventure to visit the farm. Gramma’s younger brother, Glen, kept the place going. He milked a few dozen Holsteins, kept hogs, a flock of geese, and had chickens running around. They raised corn, and had a huge garden. He and his wife were able to make a decent living selling milk, meat, eggs, and corn, and also raised 5 of my cousins. It was there that I learned how to milk a cow, escape from a feisty goose, and catch free ranging chickens. My brother and I even smoked corn silk. Where we got the idea, I don’t remember, but Dad’s cigarette smoking was a factor. We also messed around with the cows when the adults weren’t looking. But we were impressed with these beautiful animals.
On the way home we stopped in Menominee, Wisconsin. The lady at the motel was lamenting the loss of Menominee’s beautiful lake. She said that because of the influx of manure into the water, swimming and fishing were no longer possible. The origin of this fecal fouling was something of which we had been blissfully unaware. Just upstream there are factory farms raising hundreds of thousands of chickens and turkeys. These animals produce prodigious piles of poop.
Like my great grandparents’ farm, traditional agriculture itself is declining. Scattered throughout the countryside these days, there are large factory farms and “concentrated animal feeding operations” (CAFO’s) that can house chickens, turkeys, cows, or pigs. Thousands of animals are crammed into large sheds. They are kept indoors around the clock, in these crowded cramped claustrophobic conditions. It is necessary to administer growth hormones and antibiotics in order to combat the inevitable diseases and maximize economic growth. But that’s not the only problem. My wife referred to CAFO as a “concentrated animal feces operation,” for a rather obvious reason. When you bring in feed from a vast area to support several thousand animals in one spot, the waste products accumulate and need to be dealt with.
Like ‘clean coal,’ or ‘common sense,’ ‘factory farm’ sounds like an oxymoron. These words are in opposition. My picture of a farm is more Norman Rockwell than industrial design. The smell of CAFO liquid manure sprayed, sloshed, and strewn over vast acreage is unrelated to the farm smells I remember. There’s a strange acrid quality to it that is repulsive. By contrast the smell of a barn with a few dozen head of cows has familiarity.
Giant feed lots are another matter. It isn’t often that a breeze can make your eyes water, throat sore, stomach nauseous, and lungs reluctant to accept another breath. When we travel out west, this olfactory insult almost always announces a feedlot. Breezes shouldn’t permeate the landscape with a palpable and stifling stench. But it isn’t just the assault on fresh air. Ground water near huge concentrations of animals is in serious jeopardy. Once ground water is tainted, it can be unusable for centuries.
Too often our current brand of capitalism includes a strange sort of socialism. We have privatization of profits, in which a few benefit, but socialization of costs, in which the rest of us are simply stuck with the mess, often including the costs of cleanup. The air, the streams and lakes, and the landscape are simply expected to absorb the result of corporate irresponsibility and greed. Even as a teen this struck me as unfair. I never bought into the fallacy that we should just accept this as the cost of doing business. Even in kindergarten we learn to clean up after ourselves.
Walter Goldschmidt, an anthropologist working for the U.S.D.A. in the 1940’s, revealed that the economy and cultural life of communities where small family farmers thrived were “vigorous and democratic.” For Goldschmidt the family farm was “the classic example” of American small business. He was convinced that it “laid the economic base for the liberties and democratic institutions which this nation counts as its greatest asset.”
My wife’s hometown of 300 people served family farms and had a thriving middle class. Within the past couple decades that has all changed. The once thriving community no longer has a grocery store, bank, cheese factory, or Church. Even the Convenience Store has closed. Towns which became surrounded by industrial farms according to writer, Jerry Viste, “did not share in the prosperity of agribusiness. Its schools, churches, economic and cultural life were impoverished. Its residents were sharply divided in terms of wealth. Only a few of them had a stable income.”
Real farming (known today as “organic farming”), has become much less profitable, despite being much more efficient. There is little financial incentive for farm families to continue the family farms which have always been the foundation of the American economy. Within the last few decades the agricultural community has been seeing the same kind of economic shift that is threatening the future of the middle class in general. Today less than three percent of farmers make more than 63 percent of the farm revenue, including lucrative agricultural subsidies.
Somehow we need to reinvent American capitalism. It needs to answer to share holders, but also to “stakeholders,” those of us left holding the bag, as it were. Perhaps farm subsidies could concentrate on local organic family farms. Then we can be truly grateful at Thanksgiving that American agriculture is back… as the foundation of our entire economy.