“The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.
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While having my morning coffee, this morning, I came across this article from CBS News: Farmers in America are killing themselves in staggering numbers. Not surprisingly, the whole piece is rife with errors, bias, and misdirection. You can read it for yourself and do your own deconstruction, but here are a few of the glaring issues with Irina Invanova’s work. Right from the start, she blames income inequality and a lack of universal health care for the fact that farmers commit suicide at five times the national rate (which is also up about 30% in the last decade). I wonder if she has a political bias? She goes on to blame the 60,000 recent Indian farmer suicides on “climate change”. After pointing out that 2018 farm incomes are projected to be 35% lower than 2013 incomes, she offers no clearer understanding or solution other than to blame interest raters and anticipated foreign tariffs then suggest more suicide hot-lines.
What she isn’t saying is that farm incomes are dropping because of the effect federal farm policies have on commodity markets. Subsidies to grow GMO corn, soy, etc. artificially lower commodity prices, sell the farmer on the game of buying round-up ready seed every year, and screw the tax payer when prices at harvest are lower than the cost of production. It’s almost like the executives from multinational ag companies have been running the USDA and the FDA for decades...oh, wait, they have! The reason all those guys in India drank round-up and killed themselves is not because of climate change, liar. They killed themselves, in that way, because Monsanto sold them GMO cotton seed, promising them double the yield. When yields were actually lower, and their fields were contaminated with herbicide, and they owed Monsanto for the seed and the sprays. They couldn’t go back to growing non-GMO crops, and they couldn’t pay Monsanto back. They drank the same poison that they had been tricked into ruining their farms with. Now, why does Ms. Invanova fail to mention this? Is it because CBS relies on ad revenue from Bayer and Monsanto (the two are merging, if you hadn’t heard)? Every other TV ad is for some new pill, and I’ve heard Bayer is big in that game. Could it be that CBS doesn’t want to offend the largest sector of it’s clientele by telling the truth about these horrors?
I find it amusing that Monsanto made that Bayer deal just as Round-Up is being proven carcinogenic. The way the deal is structured, the name Monsanto (soiled and widely vilified) will be abandoned. It has a negative market value, anyway. The only asset in the Monsanto portfolio not being acquired by Bayer is Round-Up. That product will be spun off under a new (not Monsanto) company. It will probably work, too. When the class action suits start piling up, I highly doubt the super villains at Bayer will be held accountable. The new Round-Up, INC. can be safely burned at the stake, along with all of those internal Monsanto memos proving an active campaign to hide the health damage caused by their products. Maybe they can just blame climate change.
If we look a bit deeper into what its like to be a farmer, in today’s America, we begin to see a far more dire catastrophe than 85 out of every 100,000 farmers killing themselves, every year. The age of the average farmer is 60. Now Ms. Ivanova would probably blame the lack of young farmers on lack of access to land and the 1%’s appetite for golf courses. She would be partially correct, in that suburban development takes place largely on agricultural land, driving land prices out of the reach of young farmers. However, the thing that is never said is that the millennials are simply too smart to fall for farming the way their folks and grandparents did. Would you accept a job offer that required you to work 100 hours a week, surrounded by deadly chemicals, sitting in a $150,000 GPS guided tractor, staring at a mono-crop of genetically adulterated corn, only to profit $15,000 from the $100,000 you grossed? I hope not. Modern farming is high risk, mind numbingly dull, dangerous, toxic, and doesn’t pay a damn. Of course the kids leave the farm. They have seen their parents get deeper in debt to banks to pay for the soil destroying garbage sold by “Big Ag”. Why are farmer’s killing themselves? I wonder…
So, given that our farmers are dying off, and no one is getting into farming, who is going to feed you? Don’t bet on robots. What would it take to make farming more attractive to younger people, and not soul-crushingly unpleasant for existing farmers? Here are some things that might help. Close the FDA and the USDA, and return farm policy to the individual farmers. Eliminate all regulations governing the behavior of direct sales farms under 40 acres. Eliminate income tax on farmers. Eliminate sales tax on food. Eliminate all agricultural subsidies.
Let me explain. The federal government, as discussed at length in earlier posts of this blog, used farm policy and the “Commerce Clause” of the Constitution to expand its power into the affairs of the shitizens of the individual states. This is in direct opposition to the spirit of the Republic. The “war on drugs”, standardized public school testing, and the EPA allowing pollution for a fee are all results of this legal precedent. The Feds have no legitimate jurisdiction over whether I sell you fermented yak bladder, or not. Constitutionally, they do have jurisdiction over my out of state sales, but local commerce is not under their purview. By eliminating these agencies, and the associated subsidies and certifications you now no longer have a penalty being paid by “organic” producers (in the form of certification fees and superfluous infrastructure), and a subsidy being paid to polluting industrial farmers. If Paul Wheaton is right, this would make chemical food five times more expensive than clean food. I think that’s a stretch but, food raised with costly seed, costly equipment, and costly chemical fertilizers, herbicides, fungicides, and pesticides, is bound to be twice as expensive as food raised from saved seed, in healthy soil, with only manure inputs. The natural desires and pressures of the market will make it stupid to farm in the extractive industrial model.
When I suggest eliminating all over site of small, direct sales farms, it is because it is unnecessary. If a farmer poisons his customers, he goes out of business, and isn’t a farmer, anymore. Farmers don’t need some unproductive bureaucrat up their asses to insure food safety. Food safety is the life blood of their business. If a young woman wants to raise lettuce in her neighbor’s back yards, without having to dunk it in bleach, she should be free to do so. Likewise, if old McDonald wants to process hogs on farm, and sell the meat to his neighbors, he has every right to do so without threats from the State.
The elimination of income tax on farm profits (tax on about $40,000 per farmer who are less than 1% of US taxpayers) would incentivize growth in the farmer population. It would also allow the farmer to charge less for his produce, offsetting the higher food cost associated with the end of subsidized factory farming. Food would cost more, with these suggested changes, but it should, and it wont make you sick, any more, so that’s cool. Elimination of sales tax on food, where such exists, will also keep it easy for people to eat, and allow the farmer more of the food dollar in his own pocket. Perhaps an interim step would be to tax only non-farm-produced, processed, or packaged foods. This would make whole foods more attractive, ending the dietary crisis of the industrialized world, perhaps.
In such an environment, farming would tend to return to an integrated, smaller model where each farm raises animals, fruit, and vegetables. The surpluses from the animal operations feed the plant systems, and vice versa. The farm produces value added products like cheese, bacon, and jam adding to it’s profits, and making efficient use of surpluses unsold as whole foods. Regional culture return to our communities. The farmer is engaged in a thoughtful expression of intellect and compassion for the natural world. She loves her soil, and spoils it like a grandparent. Generations improve the land for their children. The ecology improves. National health improves, reducing the cost of healthcare by 80%. Farming becomes fun, fulfilling, and fascinating, again. Food becomes safer, better, and fresher. Farm sizes shrink, as running a 5,000 acre GMO soy bean operation no longer pays, and there are benefits to being under 40 acres. This adds supply to the agricultural land market, reducing cost of access to farm land. Farmers would have a suicide rate half of the national average, and that would drop drastically as the national diet improved, and disinfectants are removed from the food supply. (If gut health is tied to mental health, and all of the food and water has bleach in it...just sayin’… )
I realize that these measures seem extreme to most people, and absolutely unacceptable to the pharma-fueled media and corporate sponsored elected officials. The reality is that extreme measures will be all that will ensure our food supply. My approach is free of coercion, improves health and environmental integrity. No government based solution will satisfy those criteria.