Down on the Farmer

THE BIGGEST news magazine in the country has a message straight from the mouth of Earl Butz for America's farmers: Get bit or get out. Though Time counts on its readers to forget that writers (and editors) with opinions bang out its byline-less features, the author(s) of its Nov. 6 cover story, "The New U.S. Farmer," had obviously studied up on his Adam Smith economics and his Department of Agriculture (USDA) statistics in preparation for this defense of U.S. agriculture, "the productivity wonder of the world." Couched in Timese idiom, readers might almost be lulled into believing this bland prose. But beware -- it is really a simplistic, inaccurate polemic dressed up as objective journalism. It is Time at its myth-making best.

The argument runs like this: Small farmers are an anachronism in the computer age. Because they lack "technical expertise" these vestiges of a past era are fast selling out to the farm "manager" who "reflects wistfully" that he spends more time in a three-piece suit than in his fields. The new archetype of the farmers "who make U.S. agriculture the nation's most efficient and productive industry" is Pat Benedict, who has $3.5 million in assets, 3,500 acres planted in wheat and sugar beets, and who averages a return of 3.5 per cent on his investment. Pat runs his farm with calculators, computer print-outs and "precise operating schedules."

This new farmer is smarter as well as richer than the farmers of an earlier time. One man says, "It used to be that if you had a child who wasn't too bright, you'd say, 'Son, you're going to be a farmer." But things are different now.

In fact, Time doesn't believe that 70 per cent of the 2.7 million people classified as farmers by the Census Bureau deserve the name. The individuals who gross $20,000 or less "should not be classes as farmers at all" because they combine a working-life in the city with one on the farm.

The heroes of this rural drama are the "big and efficient farmers" who "are giving the nation a lesson in Adam Smith economics." They calculate and compute and invest to pile up ever more profits like "Smith said capitalists should." Time fails to note that most farmers could make more money by stashing their assets in a bank vault and living off the interest. According to Time, the results of free market competition have been innovation, growing production and "reasonable costs to consumers."

With the confidence of an experienced con artist, Time presents these articles of faith as facts and buttresses them with an impressive array of statistics and testimonials. Practiced in the arts of obfuscation and misrepresentation, Time has created a masterpiece of disguise.

Myth one: Big is better. In Time's view, efficiency and productivity are the highest economic values, and big farms are the best way to achieve them. There's just one catch--they're dead wrong.

Time managed to overlook one USDA study conducted by economist Frank R. Baily. He comments that "we are so conditioned to equate bigness with efficiency that nearly everyone assumes that large-scale undertakings are inherently more efficient." But after a survey of farms in different regions of the country, he concluded that most economies of scale "are achieved by the one-man fully mechanized farm. While the most efficient farm size has increased in the last decade, due mainly to tractor improvements, this 1973 report found that most farmers need a much smaller acreage and capital investment than Pat Benedict. For instance, a vegetable grower in California produces at his maximum potential on a farm of 200 acres with less than one-fifth of Benedict's investment in machinery, and a corn farmer in Indiana on a farm of 800 acres. This point is born out by the "postage stamp" farms of Italy which produce 50 per cent more than the average American farm.

Time's contempt for part-time farmers exemplifies its disdain for small, independent endeavors. In European countries, where part-timers make-up as much as 55 per cent of the farm population, the creative combination of working on the land and in small rural communities has enabled many people to maintain a cherished way of life.

WELL, you might ask, if small farms are actually more efficient than big ones, why are they being gobbled up by the likes of Pat Benedict, who in the past few years has aquired four farms? The article reports that "in three cases, he razed and burned the houses, uprooted graceful shade trees and returned all the land to crops." Time might call that progress, but the dispossessed farmers probably called it robbery.

Myth two: Adam Smith was right. Time's archaic assertion that small farmers are to blame for their inability to accumulate profits is about as accurate as saying a high unemployment rate is the fault of lazy welfare cheats. The forces putting farmers under have virtually nothing to do with their own efficiency, and everything to do with barriers to competition that would make Adam Smith very unhappy. Not only do farmers have to overcome drought, locust plagues, hail storms, and an uncontrollable international food market, but the numerous, relatively unorganized and competitive farmers also have to buy from and sell to aggregations of vast economic power in the shape of oligopilistic farm machinery companies, food processors, packagers, distributors and retailers. Worse still, all these steps are integrated in one killer firm.

According to Business Week, the four biggest tractor firms control over 80 per cent of the market. And William Shepard, in his book Market Power and Economic Welfare discovered that the four top firms in any given food product line control an average of 55 per cent of the market. And both the farmers' suppliers and buyers average profits three to four times greater than the farmers'.

Time dicounts the importance of agribusiness, using USDA figures which indicate that corporations have only 2 per cent of U.S. farm sales. But the USDA does not include the corporate farmers like Del Monte and Tenneco who produce food for their own processors and packagers because they make no farm sales.

Even more important, as Jim Hightower points out in his book on the food industry, Eat Your Heart Out, "the question is no simply who owns the farm, but who owns the farmer." Because they lack market power, farmers have been forced to sign contracts which commit the farmer to grow a certain crop for a certain price. If a farmer has had a bad year and goes into debt, a common occurance in such an unpredictable business, the corporate contractor can step in and tell the farmer how to run his farm.

Another study that Time chose not to cite found in 1970 that 22 per cent of the U.S. food supply is produced by corporate farmers and by contract. The American Agriculture Marketing Association predicts that by 1985 corporations will control 75 per cent of our food supply in one of these two ways. And even the USDA admitted in a 1973 report that only cash grain and forage crops, and range livestock will be controlled by independent family farmers in 1985. Pat Benedict, a wheat farmer, is the exception, not the rule.

Farmers are certainly not the ones making a killing at the check-out counter. Time notes that 87 per cent of food price increases take place after the farmer has received his share. Time laid the blame for these price increases on the consumers, with their "insatiable desire for even fancier processing and packaging" and American labor with their ever increasing wages.

THE Federal Trade Commission put the blame elsewhere in 1972, when it found that monopoly power in 13 food industries had cost consumers $2.1 billion. And with just a little common sense, anyone could figure out that Proctor and Gamble didn't manufacture Pringles potato chips because hundreds of people wrote in demanding them, but because they have a shelf life of a year, and can be shipped over long distances and bring more money into P & G's coffers.

Time inadvertently drops clues to the solution of the Case of the Hard-pressed Farmer. One man says, "Each acre produces so little profit that all you can do is go for bigger acres." Another man who started a farmers cooperative says, "The market is so crazy these days that if you can't get access to the price you want at the moment it is offered, you might as well give up... We were at the mercy of people who just were not concerned with our needs."

Time may have twisted most of the evidence to fit its biases, but the farmers' words, though often buried in irrelevant paragraphs, tell a different story.