Loading ...This is the first in a series of posts about a few days visiting different farmers and producers in Iowa, including several from whom we’ve bought pork. Additionally, my perceptions are certainly informed from previous trips to the state, of a more social nature. Everything here is just my observation as an outsider; I’m sure I’m missing many subtleties and in several instances I may be just plumb wrong. Caveat emptor.
A Backdrop in Two Tones
What stands out more than anything about Iowa is how different it is than any other farming area I’ve visited. Different in appearance, different in what people talk about, different in emotional temperament.
Its physical distinction is the most obvious. For most intents and purposes, Iowa grows two crops and two crops only: corn and soybeans. The two crops make a useful rotation with each other (a patch of ground will grow corn one year, and soybeans the next year, which is less harsh on the soil than growing the same thing year after year on it), and complement each other in a nutritional sense (corn a collection of sugars/starch, soy a source of protein). But there’s something unnerving about driving across hundreds of miles and seeing only two crops, and meeting dozens of farmers and only talking about two crops.
Monoculture — or, in this case, duoculture — is a risky enterprise, in the biological sense. A single disease or a change in the environmental system can wipe out everything, since everything is invested in a narrow slice of the biological world. Monoculture is also risky in the economic sense — a whole state with its livelihood invested in two crops — and in a social/human sense — the farmers are all invested in the same economic indicators and farm-related social issues. In all of these aspects — crop stability, economic growth, social interaction — this area has been robbed of the benefits of simple, natural diversity of species, action, and interests.
Iowa hasn’t always been this way. Many of the people I talked with, people in their 50′s, remember clearly when these farms they grew up on had a variety of crops and livestock, and were farmed in traditional methods. That changed in the 1970′s, for one reason: the US goverment changed it.
Earl Butz, the US Secretary of Agriculture in the 1970′s who was ultimately forced from office in scandal, changed the farm laws during his time in office to ensure that, even in the face of inflation, American food would be plentiful, available, and cheap to the consumer. He did this by creating a subsidy system which rewards maximum production of corn and soybeans, at all times, by everybody. His goals — cheap food in the American supermarket — have been realized to an amazing degree. The only other shift required was a change in the definition of “food.”
Corn, as we’re discussing here, is field corn. Field corn, as harvested, is not really something humans eat. Field corn has to be processed in order for us to eat it. And processed it is. Pretty much every sweetend product on the mass market, such as sodas and candy bars, uses “high fructose corn syrup”, an output of corn processing. All those unpronounceable ingredients you read on the labels of crackers, cookies, bread, ice cream, energy bars, and so on — they’re all parts of processed field corn and soybeans.
Mr. Butz accomplished his goal. Amercian food is cheap and plentily available, as long it’s assembled from the byproducts of field corn and soybeans. Calories purchased in the center of the supermarket (processed food) are crazy cheap, as is meat from animals fed corn and soybeans. Fresh produce and naturally fed meat are much more expensive.
Leaving aside nutritional questions, this would seem to be an good situation for both consumers and producers: calories are cheap, no one is starving, and the farmers have a guaranteed source of income and can farm their land for generations.
But it doesn’t work that way for the farmers, because there’s a catch. Field corn is a commodity. It’s traded by the pound, and quality and taste doesn’t affect the price. Price is driven entirely by supply and demand.
With a commodity, increased production drives prices down. Which means that, farming for a commodity market, the principal way to make money is not just to increase your yield per acre, but to increase it more than your neighbor. This is because, as average yields increase, the price drops in general. To do well, everybody has to outpace the average increase in yield. And everybody can’t outpace the average. It’s a game where, for every winner, there has to be a loser.
Every farmer, then, is in a competition with every other farmer to do whatever it takes to outpace the mean increase. In this environment, the folks who make money are the companies who can help farmers increase yield, whether by selling certain genetically modified seeds, chemical fertilizers, equipment or so forth. Since, if your neighbor buys a yield-increasing device, you have to buy it, and probably more, just to stay at the median, which doesn’t even make for an increase in income.
Ultimately, the producer is working harder and harder to keep up, while the finacial gains of overall increased yields find their way to the suppliers of seeds, fertilizer and equipment.
In this environment, the average farmer would lose money if not for the government subsidies. These subsidies then cover enough make it not necessarily an overt cash loss for most folks. In fact the subsidies are clearly tuned exactly to make it just barely worthwhile for the maximum number of farmers to farm, without anyone actually doing well.
Faced with working ever harder and making no more income, farmers of course look for other ways to increase their income. Several options exist:
- Achieve economies of scale, also known as “get big or get out.” This is a recurring mantra as many farmers feel pressure to step up their scale to huge levels, or just quit the land their family has farmed for generations. I didn’t meet anyone totally happy with either option.
- Extract value from the land. This might, for instance, take the form of completely giving up on crop rotation (growing “corn on corn”) and risking extreme degradation of the soil; or allowing pollutants to accumulate on the land. Some folks have apparently been pursuing this option, to the profound disappointment of their neighbors who value the land as a common resource, and who don’t like living next to bottomless pits of manure and pig urine.
- Add value to the crops. The primary way that Iowans add value to their corn and soy crops is to turn them into meat. Specifically, pork. Thus, many farms have a small section set aside for corn processing units called “pigs”. Fortunately, the waste of these corn processing units (known as “manure”) is useful as fertilizer, and the amount of land can balance with the number of pigs. Of course, in this environment, where everything — pork and corn — is a commodity, and yield is everything, all economic incentives motivate each farmer to squeeze as many pigs as possible into the smallest space possible. And since meat quality isn’t important (and beating the average yield increase is paramount…talk about keeping ahead with the Joneses!) new technologies which allow more squeezing, and more meat from less corn, are widely adopted as soon as they are developed. If these measures require pumping the pigs full of antibiotics or cutting their tails off so that other pigs don’t eat them under stress, well, no matter. It’s a commodity…all pork is priced exactly the same.
The crazy thing about the pig business is that since it, too, is a commodity business, the same economic rules that rule corn farmers start to apply to their pig farming — increase yield more than the next guy, or go broke. So pork farmers are faced with the same options for their pigs: adopt economies of scales (building after building with tens of thousands of pig piled on a tiny footprint), extract value from the land (dumping huge amounts of toxic pig wastes), or add value to the pork (somehow bring it out of the commodity market).
Thus we arrive at the following situation: Hardworking people, attempting to make enough to keep their family’s land, farming only two crops they can’t eat and maintaining buildings packed with pigs they don’t want to eat, while their suppliers make good money. I honestly can’t say anyone I talked to in this situation really had much enthusiasm about it.
As a result, lots of farmers are trying to figure out how to get out of the commodity market and into a market that respects the value of doing things well. (Side note: this is where you, the Linkery diner, enter into the picture…as someone who can help, by caring about the ingredients you eat. I basically talk to a lot of farmers as a representative of a community that is willing to pay a premium for thoughtfully raised food).
On my visit, I learned firsthand of many approaches different folks are taking, in an attempt to move from producing commodities into what they call “niche” markets. Over the next five or six Iowa posts, I’ll introduce these people and relate these different approaches. Each person and approach is interesting and thought-provoking in their own right.
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