Roadkill Commentary - Death of the Family Farm

The Stovebolt Page
Home \| FAQ \| Forum \| Swap Meet \| Gallery \| Tech Tips \| Links \| Features \| Search \| Hoo-ya Shop


J.C. Milliman
Death of the family farm

"Alas poor Yorick! Aye, Horatio, the doings and undoings THAT poor rogue could tell!"

I'm not sure whether generators or the fancy air-conditioned in-door lumberyards we buy them from represent the death of our culture.

Let me back up.

Going from draft horses to tractors started us on the path to Heck. Yes sir, that's where it all started. Actually, it really started one step earlier -- going from oxen to draft horses. More, better, faster, cheaper was, and still is, the not-so-holy grotto our culture worships in, isn't it?

If we hop in the Waybach Machine and go way back to 1804, we were a young agrarian nation, full of hope, ambition and "Manifest Destiny." Families worked plots only as big as could be hacked out of the old-growth forests that stretched unhindered across the Blue Ridge and Appalachia to the plains, punctuated only by the Big Muddy. Big acreage plots (say, bigger than 10 acres or so) would severely tax the physical resources of the typical 8-child farm family. More acreage could be farmed if the family had more kids, but more than 8 to 10 kids would severely tax the average farm mom. They had to do with what they had.

Working the ground (removing trees, breaking and turning the soil, seeding, cultivating and harvesting) required a sturdy draft animal of some sort -- usually an ox. The family horse, although good for the trip into town, was hardly up to the task being such a frail thing compared to a sturdy ox.

The ox, of course, was the product of keeping the milk cow lactating. Afemale calf was another milk cow, a bull calf was castrated and put in harness. (Or eaten.) As a whole, the system worked! Folks who had shed the yokes of indentured servitude and tenant farming in Europe literally hacked this country out of the pristine wilderness and gave us character. Working hard from dawn to dusk, they developed calluses and sore backs together. They prospered, even.

Once the family farm was self-sustaining, they could grow a little extra to take to town. Not everyone farmed, though. The farmer needed blacksmiths, harness makers, glass blowers, fabric weavers (Mom, in between pumping out more farm labor, could only do so much herself) and the local hardware store for the supplies he couldn't fashion himself. He was busy cultivating the world's breadbasket and didn't have time to tinker with such trivialities as "goods and services."

And that's where the trouble began.

Farmer John (no relation) went to town one day and there they were -- two gorgeous, stunning blondes with long legs and huge muscles. He stopped in his tracks, jaw agape, transfixed by their sheer size, beauty and majesty. The draft horse (in this case, a team of Belgians) had arrived in his part of the New World.

Suddenly, everything that had seemed so right and sufficient before now wasn't enough anymore. Subsistence farming with oxen on a 10-acre plot, using his 10 kids to the point of exhaustion everyday (much like he had done for his land baron back in feudal Europe), became unbearable in the time it took for his brain to interpret what his eyes were seeing. Long, muscular legs meant speed, big-barreled chest meant power, and wide hoof meant traction (no hoof, no horse, remember?).

With the slow (but powerful) oxen, he could only cover so much ground in a day, hence the limitation on his acreage. But that was okay -- all the other families were farming with oxen too. An agrarian status quo was achieved and the economic tide was raising everyone's boat at the same, albeit slow, rate. The draft horse threw a big rock into that tidal pond and the ripples rock the boat even today. 'Ole Farmer John immediately grasped the potential these leggy beauties possessed.

With their greater speed (whether or not they represented greater power and endurance is still the matter of heated debate between horse and oxen teamsters), he could farm more land with the same amount of children (labor). Farming more land meant he would have more excess crop to sell or trade. A novel concept to this former indentured servant -- one that gripped him by his very soul.

This was all very fine until his neighbors converted to draft horses, too.

Ten-acre farms had to become 100-acre farms to remain competitive. America's nascent heavy industry responded with implements designed to exploit the horse's increased productivity over the ox. Riding plows, multi-row cultivators and the like soon were pouring out of new factories from makers like John Deere, McCormick and others.

Cycles have a nasty habit of returning sometimes, so too with the cycle of agrarian dissatisfaction. Farmers grew restive with their 100-acre farms -- just like all their neighbors. Again, industry responded. This time, with a fire and smoke-belching creature called a "tractor." Self-propelled, it didn't need any forage or grain save a little petroleum in the form of gas, oil and grease (LOTS of grease!) that a new industry born in Pennsylvania was only too happy to provide.

We're currently in the end stages of the Tractor Cycle. Indeed, the tractor gave the American Farmer (and consumer) such an ability to open vast tracts of land to cultivation that today the farmer doesn't even need a large family to farm 10,000 acres.

Two hundred years ago, American farmers were barely even feeding themselves. Today, we feed the world. Something, certainly, to be proud of. But it has come with a price. Draft horses, followed by tractors, allowed fewer farmers to put exponentially more land in production, freeing the rest of us for other pursuits. Arts, sciences, international relations, space faring -- you name it, we're doing it. And in so doing, farms have become corporate conglomerations. Farms that aren't tens of thousands of acres are not competitive in today's "global economy."

The family farm is dead. In its place, a pale replacement called a "hobby farm." Sure enough, it's a family operation all right, but self-sustaining it certainly is not. Farmers like me who cling to this post-modern notion of a family farm have to work a full-time profession off the farm to indulge themselves in this continuing anachronism.

No more building family values at the end of a long day spent with dirt under the finger nails -- we do that in the van on the way to soccer practice where, in between breaking up soccer dad fights, we teach "teamwork" and "sportsmanship." If not, we can always ship them off to some exclusive New England prep school where they can learn narcissism, morphable ethics and greed. All prerequisites for becoming the captains of this new American society -- litigation lawyers, cosmetic surgeons, savings and loan bankers, twenty-something Dot Com millionaires.

And if 'Ole Farmer John could hop in the Waybach Machine with us and come forward to the dawn of the 21st Century, what would he see? We, his progeny, can't even buy our building supplies from a business that isn't climate controlled or live for a few days without our precious Playstations and DVD players.

And when faced with that prospect, mob each other to pay inflated prices for an electrical generator. There's a metaphor for that, when the cultural waters run that shallow -- desert.

Behold our Manifest Destiny? To go from being a land of plenty to a desert?

Boy, we've come far.

Help keep this site going and growing!

No parts of this site, its contents, photos or graphics may be used without permission.