My Point of View, By Jennifer Vogt-Erickson

It seems like preserving rural values is important to people in this community. The term doesn’t mean the same thing to everybody, but it often includes characteristics like strong family bonds, dense social networks, religious affiliation, hard work, self reliance, attachment to the land, and a slower pace of life.

Paeans like Paul Harvey’s “So God Made A Farmer” have special meaning here because so many people can directly relate to it. I can too. I grew up on a farm, as did my parents and their parents (and so on).

Farming has changed a lot in a short period. As young men, both of my grandfathers farmed with teams of horses. Mechanization rapidly replaced most horses with tractors, and by the time my dad and his brothers were boys, they had enough spare parts around the farm to rig up a working tractor of their own. One of his older brothers took over that farm at age 16 when their dad died, but my dad had farming “in his blood” so badly that my parents bought a farm from a nonrelative. He’s still taking machines apart in his shop and making them into other things he needs, but newer equipment has precision technology.

Lots of people have farming “in their blood” but don’t get a viable chance to farm. People, especially in rural areas, lament that farming as a way of life and rural values are disappearing. A significant problem, ironically, is that they go into the voting booth and unwittingly “X” farmers off the land.

Fewer and larger farms aren’t inevitable, they are a policy choice.

Laws can favor keeping farm families on the land, limiting corporate farms, and helping young farmers get started. The key to keeping more people on the land is to create the circumstances in which farming can generate enough income to support a family on a small or medium scale. Some countries have done this. For example, in Norway, only 6 percent of farms had over 125 acres according to a 2007 European Commission report.

On the other hand, here’s what has happened in Freeborn County since mid-century. USDA ag census data shows that the number of farms decreased from 3,004 in 1950 to 1,222 in 2013. Average farm sizes went from 145 to 340 acres.

Far fewer of the farmers are full time now. In 1949, only 278 farmers indicated working 100 or more days off the farm, or about 9 percent  of the total. In 2013, 500 principal operators worked 200 or more days off farm. This is about 45 percent of farmers, and they worked double the time off the farm compared to 1949.

Besides that, the definition of a farm is not very meaningful anymore. The USDA considers a farm “any place from which $1,000 or more of agricultural products were produced and sold during a year.” That level was set in 1975, which was a low bar even then (about $5,000 in today’s money), and it hasn’t been adjusted for inflation since then. As one of my rural sociology professors used to quip, “That’s a good sized 4-H project.”

There are many hobby farms, but not a strong core of medium-sized farms like the ones we may still picture as typical family farms. Almost 70 percent of the gross value of sales in 2010 were from farms that had $1 million or more in sales. These large farms represent just 4 percent of all U.S. farms, or 88,000 operations.

Thus, voting against “centralized government” has inadvertently helped promote “centralized agriculture.”

The main thing that has driven farmers off the land in Freeborn County and across the U.S. is policies that prioritize maximum production and cheap food. Subsidies have favored large farms over small- and medium-sized farms, and now they’re mainly what we rely on to produce our food.

Other legislation and policies favor larger farms as well. Raising the number of animal units before an environmental review is required favors large farms. So-called “death taxes” haven’t broken up a family farm yet, but abolishing the estate tax would give the elite sliver of affected families even more leverage over other farmers to buy up additional land. Patented seeds stop farmers from legally saving seeds from one year to the next, and digital copyrights can prevent farmers from repairing computerized equipment themselves.

Much legislation that is done in the name of making agriculture profitable has actually helped make large farms larger, forced farmers out who can’t expand, and kept potential young farmers from entering the field. It is speeding the disappearance of the rural way of life.

We’ve made some trade-offs in pursuit of cheap food, but we don’t have to keep making them. If people want to stick to this pattern, though, declining population and fading of rural values are a cost of this choice. These outcomes are related.

Jennifer Vogt-Erickson is a member of the Freeborn County DFL Party.