FamilyFarms

Family Farms

If you are old enough, you may remember the "farm crisis" of the 1980s. Actually that phenomenon has not
never ended and continues to this day. It simply got monotonous, depressing, and old in the media so it
is no longer front page news. Over the last 40 years American agriculture has experienced a devastating
transformation from small to mid-size family farms to dominance by industrial agribusiness. many financial
analyst consider this as a logical trend and economically sensible because it has provided Americans with
a cheap and abundant food supply. But many, as I, contend we are seeing a system out of control where we now
people who have little interest, other than return to investors, controlling the production, marketing and
distribution of unhealthy food.

Since 1960, 600,000 families who had a passion for farming have been replaced by operators hired by global
agricultural corporations who neither have an interest in farming nor quality food. In addition, there is
connection to passing any passion down to future generations of farmers. As a result, there is no emphasis
to conserve or use natural resources in a sustainable manner or to give respect to anyone or anything
downstream or downwind of farms.

As a consequence, we have cheap food. But why is food cheap? Food is cheap because the actual total costs of
production are not accounted for but rather hidden in a plethora of ways. When the lagoon system at a confined
feeding operation fails and a million gallons of raw manure spill into a receiving stream, the price of a pound
of pork does not go up. The state and federal environmental agencies pay staff to regulate, permit, inspect, and
oversee their operations. These agencies assess, mitigate, and/or clean up the spills. We all pay taxes to
this activity. Pork prices stay the same or go down from unfair monopolistic practices by agribiz. The price
of a loaf of bread does not go up when water treatment facilities must treat their distributed drinking water
with expensive activated carbon to remove toxic agrichemicals. The price of water goes up. Bread stays the same.
Our medical bills go up because we see an increase in incidence of cancer, birth defects, and other diseases
related to exposures to hazardous agrichemical, but the price of a gallon of milk stays the same. We could go
on and on about increase incidence of floods due to the lack of water infiltration into agribusinness fields,
contamination and abandonement of rural drinking water wells, the destruction of rural communities, loss of
plant, animal and insect species, loss of suitable wildlife habitat, and etc.

Only with the economic viability of real family farms, can we hope to control these factors. However, we must be
willing to pay the real cost for food. Small organic family farms accurately depict the cost for food. Labor is
substituted for synthetic chemical inputs. A living labor wage is more expensive than those hazardous and toxic
inputs, but then we are not confronted with the ramifications of their use and the associated hidden costs.

Links to other family farm web pages

Links to family farm organizations