Power, Profit, and Diversified Farming

By Lee Rinehart, NCAT Agriculture Specialist

I dreamed last night that it rained. It was summer, and the cosmos in the pollinator garden bowed to the morning under the weight of their growth and the air smelled moist, like Alaskan tundra in spring. I see red cherry tomatoes deep within the feral foliage in the plot opposite. The gray sky becomes obscured as I enter the fragrant jungle on hands and knees, fresh rainwater soaking through the back of my shirt. Here, the clover struggles for light beneath the overstretched vines, and crabgrass and small amaranth seedlings dream of sunlit meadows or the turnrows of a cornfield. What conversations do they have with the tomato plants when I am absent? What do the tomatoes say in return? I woke to reflect on their hidden dialogue, and I am off on a journey, meandering through the flora of memory.

I remember a warm summer day, the sun casting shadows of cornstalks on freshly tilled humic soil. Voices of farm workers, young people in shorts and muck boots and wide brimmed straw hats drift across the fields. I see myriad varieties of vegetable crops one after the other in planned succession–seedlings and vegetative and fruiting–and I can smell the musty earthiness of the compost pile in the center of the field plots. And the farmer, a veteran of the sustainability wars, tells me a story as she pulls quackgrass from the corn row.

She speaks of work that begins the night before in dreams. Of humid nights on sticky sheets when the numbers file by like tired soldiers. She tells me about young workers and volunteers and their energy expended overcoming an opportunity cost through conscious idealism. None of this is apparent in the vision before me. I see an array of plant families and varieties and colors.

Differences in canopy structure and function. “This is good farming,” I say as I scope the field borders where the tall grasses give way to a wooded tree line in the distance. “This is community,” I say as I consider the lives of the women and men bending over beds of succulent greens, wheeling carts of residue to the compost pile, laughing while the bees dance among the blooms of perennial berries. What’s missing? What, indeed, could possibly be missing? The answer, I think, is intimated in the farmer’s night visions, like a blight imposed on this pristine landscape from an ethereal fog, viscous and toxic.

She tells me she hasn’t turned a profit since the first rows were laid out and the virgin meadow soil was tilled. In the 20 years of filling the market table, the earnings have at best balanced the ledger. Instead, efficiency, frugality, and a division of labor and hours away from the farm to lighten the deficit limit her horizon. “The system is set against us,” she tells me as the sound of grass roots being pulled from the crumbly soil accentuates her story.

Reduce your inputs, they say. Focus on net income, they say. Become a savvy marketer. Decorate your farmstand, have a catchy logo, write a monthly newsletter, stand on your head and balance the world on your feet. Agricultural educators and consultants tell me farms must be profitable to be sustainable. And I look up the latest NASS figures and watch the farm numbers decline. These thoughts pass through my mind as I watch the farmer, quiet in her work, on hands and knees making her way down the corn row. I examine her gnarled hands as they squeeze and then pull the rhizomatous grass. Tell me, how do you quantify the effort, the time spent pulling weeds in a sweet corn field? How does the enjoyment of a summer cookout and the sweetness of biting into a warm ear of bicolor corn factor into a spreadsheet? How does the act of growing food and eating become transactional?

We get to the end of the corn row and it’s noon. The farm crew will break for lunch at the big kitchen table in the farmer’s house. One of the perks of working here. I watch them as they walk along the lane that divides the farm fields into verdant hemispheres. They are happy, and how can they not be? They don’t have the farmer’s night sweats, for one thing. I imagine their dreams are hopeful, and I am comforted by their cheerfulness. Like me before my conversation with the farmer they are immersed in the unity of the farmscape and the possibility it offers for their world, their future. But now, for me, the night dreams are center stage. In this landscape of diversity and abundance, a place of inspiration for true connection, what I think is missing is a deeper, more wide-spread sense of community that extends far beyond the gravel driveway that leads through the woods to this idyllic farm.

My thoughts return to my own garden where the rain wicked into my shirt from the tomato leaves. My baseball cap full of cherry tomatoes, their delicate green peduncles like small beneficent spiders. I emerged from the vines and reflected on the world where our tools, whether they be the financial system, chain grocery stores, malls, social media, the list goes on, have been modified into socially acceptable shackles to maintain the veneer of an artificial lifestyle. One we hold on to tightly lest we see them for what they are and rebel. And I think of how this system has relegated the small farmer, the community food provider, to the periphery of our common experience, ever concerned with staying viable. But viable is not the right word to describe a family subjected to land use pressures and economic dogmatism. I have come to understand that the small holder farmer is stuck.

Noam Chomsky once said working merely for profit, or even working within the profit structure, is degrading to human sentiment and the human spirit. It makes me think we need another measure of small farm viability. The missing element in our calculus of diversity is collective human action, of which the life-giving, subsurface connections between the plants in my garden are a metaphor. Mutual aid, shared resources, and cooperative farming may be the only way to unstick the small farmer. Take a look at the resources I’ve listed below and ask yourself, “What else can we do?” Tell me your thoughts at lee@ncat.org.

Related ATTRA Resources:

Feeding the World: Localism, Ecological Resilience, and Farmer and Community Agency

Feeding the World Part 2: A Tale of Two Worlds

Other Resources:

International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems

The Greenhorns

This blog is produced by the National Center for Appropriate Technology through the ATTRA Sustainable Agriculture program, under a cooperative agreement with USDA Rural Development. ATTRA.NCAT.ORG.