E-I-E-I-O

E-I-E-I-O

    What the heck?  Most of you will likely recognize the title's meaning simply by saying the letters aloud, at least this being the current variation of the children's nursery song now so popular worldwide.  But despite our visions of this simple, almost idyllic small farm, the vast majority of today's agriculture comes from massive plots of land harvested with massive machines and massive business entities (for the most part) running them.  Farming has become an agribusiness with emphasis on the word "business."  Many of us still picture rolling fields of perfectly spaced rows, a small house in the back, a few sheep peacefully grazing, thinking as we drive by that it must be nice to be a farmer.  But quite quickly, British author James Meeks wakes us up with this bit or reality: To the traveller passing at speed, even to the hiker or dog-walker, farmed fields are anonymous elements that contribute to a pattern.  It’s the landscape the eye seeks, not any of the fields making it up.  Most fields have no individuality to a stranger; at best, a fine oak in the middle, or a pretty horse grazing.  Few can tell crops apart, or estimate a field’s size in acres.  Visitors to the countryside see farms without seeing them.  They see the odd farmyard, and they see a mass of fields.  A passer-by can’t connect a field to a particular farm...Besides, in Britain, a walk in the country is a constrained experience.  Most fields – that is, most bits of the lowland countryside – are forbidden to outsiders, by legal, physical and practical barriers.  The biggest barrier is purposelessness: even where a right of way exists, why use it?  To walk from one village to another?  We have roads and cars for that.  Few who live in ‘the country’ – that is, in villages – stray from metalled roads except along a handful of known paths for ramblers and dog-walkers, often through woods or along waterways.  Most of the vast mosaic will never be entered by any human being except the farmer, a trickle of contractors and, once in a while, a government official.  Not that such people are often to be seen.  Away from the roads, the space between human habitations in lowland Britain has acquired a ghostly quality.  It is rare to visit the countryside or travel through it and see someone at work in a field; the occasional tractor, no more.

    The farming life that I read about today is indeed a remote one (again, for the most part and definitely not firsthand for I think that I would personally find farming either way too expensive, way too much work for such meager returns and way too difficult to keep profitable), a sight best left to aerial photographers who can capture the big harvesting machines steadily making their way down fields of soybeans or wheat or corn.  As Bloomberg Businessweek put it: A self-driving John Deere tractor rumbles through Ian Pigott’s 2,000-acre farm every week or so to spray fertilizer, guided by satellite imagery and each plot’s harvesting history.  The 11-ton behemoth, loaded with so many screens it looks like an airplane cockpit, relays the nutrient information to the farmer’s computer system.  With weather forecasts and data on pesticide use, soil readings, and plant tissue tests pulled by various pieces of software, Pigott can keep tabs on the farm down to the square meter in real time without ever leaving his carpeted office.  Welcome to the world of digital agriculture.  As one farmers says in the article: "We can take our data, walk right into the fields with an iPad or iPhone, pinpoint exactly where we are in the field, and see what the planting rate is, what the amount of nitrogen is, and figure out what we should be doing with each parcel of land...If we have a performance issue in a certain area, we can do something about it.”

    But factor in a farmer's cost of nitrogen/potash/phosphate fertilizer, some sulfur or other chemicals, pesticides, the machinery and finally the labor costs and there's little if anything left.  As prices and demand for crops drop, farmers begin storing their surpluses, hoping that prices will increase.  The U.S. now is at a record 5-year high for stored wheat, and held storage of corn and soy are higher than a year ago.  In Egypt, no such luck on prices paid to farmers as demand for Egyptian cotton is again predicted to fall, this time by a huge 35%.  But we need to eat, we need to make fabrics for clothing, what happens now?  And how can papayas from Mexico and Vietnam (with both sold in Hawaii) still be cheaper than those of the local papaya farmers on the island?  The answer (still) is both government subsidies and tariffs.  As James Meeks wrote in his London Review of Books article: Farmers, accordingly, were subsidised by British taxpayers, but food from abroad could be imported duty-free.  Once inside the EEC, a golden age for farm incomes began.  Not only were British farmers plugged into the bountiful subsidies of the Common Agricultural Policy, which paid them on the nail for whatever milk, meat and grain they grew, whether there was demand for it or not; they were also sheltered by Europe’s tariff barriers. A lthough they had to compete tariff-free with their fellow European farmers, they were protected from full-on global competition.  The CAP isn’t quite so generous today.  In the latest version, subsidies aren’t based on how much farmers produce, but on how much farmland they own, and payments to the biggest farmers – companies and wealthy landowners – have been trimmed by 5 per cent.  It still gives out a lot of money.  In 2015, British farmers received slightly more than £3 billion. The U.S. gives out substantially more...in Britain, one farmer received over 330,000 pounds subsidy, and the larger farms in the U.S. can easily receive that amount or more (these are mostly the so-called "corporate" farms).  In addition, governments can impose tariffs on imported foods, all in an effort to make a fair system for their own growers.  But even these practices might not be enough to cover a local farmer's --especially from that of a smalller family-run farm-- costs and expenses (you've likely already read about the earlier surge of foreclosed farms and a rash of farmer suicides when this cycle hit some 30 years ago).

     Why is all of this concerning?  Because the perfect storm might again be brewing, families ready to hand over the reins and the children not wanting that life (or the reverse with the kids ready but the family not wanting  to cede control), the debt and costs piling up and becoming too much to overcome, the drought or a fungus or a disaster hitting crops or stored surpluses, a change in market demand (Brazil is especially feeling the pinch as demand for soybeans continues to hit a saturation point), even the agricultural power roles shifting (the U.S. just dropped to third place in wheat production, having already given up the lead in soybean exports earlier this decade; wheat is one of the last grains not to be benefiting from the surge in genetically modified crops).  And governments are also now taking a second look at this expense of providing subsidies (in Egypt, the government has decided to eliminate cash subsidies for cotton altogether).  In the U.S. the $4.5 billion once given strictly as cash subsidies has now shifted to a sort of insurance in which farmers have to choose between a guaranteed crop payment (against weather or disease) or a paid protection against falling crop prices.  Guess wrong on your crop (peas, oats, corn, flaxseed, crambe, rice, peanuts and a host of others) and it could mean a tough financial burden or even the end of your farming days.  With Brexit, the new government in Britain is also pondering such decisions...keep, reduce, or eliminate subsidies and tariffs for food (Britain had also initiated a subsidy for farmers to restore the "old" style of farming with rows of hedges and more natural environments to attract insects, birds and other wildlife back to the fields, one which has so far proven quite beneficial to wildlife, the farmer, and the viewing public...but that format is also now in question).

    To lump farmers into one group is wildly unfair, for they and the crops and animals they grow are as varied as you or I; some farmers are indeed corporate giants with the latest digital machines doing the work, while other farmers are indeed just a small operation struggling as they have for generations to try to just make a living.  But whatever the size, life on the farm is generally not an easy one, likely never has been.  Farmer Anthony Bush, with 1400 acres, summed it up nicely when he told Bloomberg Businessweek: I look for a period of pretty tough times.  I need to borrow money in the spring to cover the costs I pay off in the fall, so when you're buying your seeds, your fertilizer, you have to take on your debt all at once...We may not have cheap interest rates.  But we'll still have to eat...If you want to stick in this business, you have to be an eternal optimist.