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November 2009
What Does the Future Hold?
Dear Friends,
I was recently asked a tough question, one that I would have liked to skirt around, rather than answer directly. But the question was valid, and I had asked myself this question many times.
“What will farming look like down the road?” If you read between the words of the question, you might also ask, “Who will be doing the farming?”
No one has a crystal ball. No human person really knows the answer to those questions. We have only the “experts” to fall back on. As we’ve discussed in this space many times, the structure of farming has changed significantly on the local level, and the national level. The number of acres, the number of head, the types of livestock raised and the types of crops grown, and how they are grown, have all changed so much in the past ten, twenty and thirty years.
What we know of as an average family farm has changed starkly from the days of my grandparents in the 1930s. In those days, rural populations in our counties were at an all-time high. This was the “high-water mark” for rural life. I believe most rural counties in our part of the world reached their top populations between 1930 and 1936. It was all downhill from there.
In the 1930s, farmers might have owned or leased a quarter section of land. They might have had a few milk cows, a few hogs, a few sheep and a few beef cattle. They might have raised corn and oats and probably a little hay. They probably had large families and larger gardens. They probably enjoyed the fruits of their orchards and spuds from their potato patches. They canned and preserved their produce.
All crops in those days were basically raised “organically” or without help from chemicals that were still to be invented. But farmers were learning about plowdown green crops and the benefits of manure on the soil and shelterbelts around the farmstead.
Yet, tillage was hard on the soil. The moldboard plow dried out the topsoil in the drought of the 1930s, and hybrid seed corn was still on the horizon. Life in a horse drawn rural America was quite different from what we know now.
Unfortunately, our rural counties have been losing population since that time. Farmers continue to get older and some rural communities continue to get smaller. Towns that thrived along main railroad routes in the 1930s, are now shadows of their former selves.
If we like the doom and gloom talk, we might extrapolate these trends out a few years and believe that our rural way of life will not exist a few decades from now. We might believe that our small towns will be gone, along with our fine schools and churches. We might think that the big corporate types will be farming all of the land, and that livestock will all but disappear from our farmsteads. We might just believe all that, except for one thing – we are fighters out here.
Those early settlers who put down roots in our area were not pansies. They were a tough lot of people, and although we know that the challenges for many communities and family farmers are many, we also know that we have been pretty smart over the years and have figured out a few solutions. We know that many families can now work the land together and farm enough land and raise enough livestock by working together, that they have reinvented the meaning of the family farm. We also know that farmers can go back to their local food roots, raising their own food again, at least for their own families and maybe for a few neighbors too. Farmers also know how to do a lot of different tasks, so many farmers are able to earn extra income and still maintain their farming lifestyle.
The “doomsdayers” might write off our rural livelihood, but I am betting on the folks who call rural America home. We are just too tough to give up easily.
Talk with you next week.
W.K. Kellogg Foundation
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