Stop starving the guy who feeds you
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by Jack Stapleton, Jr.
The vast majority of Missourians go to work every morning at jobs that guarantee a check on payday. They also get some benefits that may even include health insurance for their families and, last but not least, a measure of permanent assurance that life will slowly but surely get better in the future.
On the other side of the street, however, there are Missourians who are guaranteed neither a regular salary nor benefits save what they themselves purchase, accompanied by a suspicion that times could get worse before they get better.
Meet the farmers and their families. They are once again in a heap of trouble. None of it is of their making, yet trouble is so persistent that many have begun wondering if they’re not in the wrong business of living at the wrong time.
There are few occupations that offer more rewards than agriculture, particularly for those whose ancestors blessed them with a legacy of love for the soil, feeling good about supplying the foodstuffs society requires and a close kinship with nature. But farming, one viewed as the source of a free and contemplative life, has been invaded by so many disparate trends and factors that it has become almost unrecognizable from the vital state industry of a half century ago.
Because of cataclysmic changes, both direct and indirect, today’s farmers are finding it hard to survived economically whether in the rolling bluegrass meadows of northern Missouri, the rich Delta flatlands in the southeastern portion of the state, or the Ozarks hill farms to the west. This is despite the investment of many thousands of dollars in new equipment that has become so essential to successful production yields.
There is freedom of spirit found on some 100,000 agricultural units in Missouri. There also is the freedom to face problems encountered nowhere else in the U.S. economy. The problems range from adverse weather to adverse market prices that may be influenced, even controlled, half way around the world. In recent years there have been new challenges almost as daunting: more intense competitive forces, product embargoes, corporate competition, political agendas, even a lessening of credit sources in an age of general affluence. It is one thing to ride out a season of floods or drought. It is quite another to stand by hopelessly as your receipts fail to finance expenses or the bank turns down yet another loan on the basis of inadequate earnings potential.
Thanks to the efforts of a great many farm groups, such as the Missouri Farm Bureau Federation, and virtually every Missourian in Congress, our state’s farmers will receive nearly half their 1999 income from the federal government. What a lousy way to enter the new millennium, particularly when there’s no indication next year will be a bushel’s worth better.
I hate to mention this once again, but the grossly misnamed Freedom to Farm Act of 1996 has contributed far more to Missouri agriculture’s problems than the economic collapse in the Far East, this summer’s dry weather and all the crazy environmental groups combined. The Missouri farmer has no control over the price he receives from any of his labors. He remains on the short end of the stick when it comes to tax reform and the essentials of his business are subjected to price influences beyond his control. You can’t get more vulnerable.
Indeed, if U.S. car manufacturers, to name but one industry, were faced with as many recessionary influences, we would all be driving Japanese cars or watching television on made-in- China sets. In an age when government has made it virtually impossible for financial institutions to fail, the same government has made it virtually impossible for farmers to succeed with its 1996 removal of vital overproduction safeguards. Those who argue that farmers should be able to compete in a so-called free economy fail to recognize that no industry except agriculture is forced to operate in a marketplace in which it is devoid of influence.
Government and the politicians we have elected to run it know how to restore the farmer’s ability to make a living: amend the Freedom to Farm Act, restore overproduction safeguards and give the farmer back his former freedom to survive economically. Such reform may embarrass the politicians who wrote the law but it will literally save the farmers of Missouri.
[Missouri News & Editorial Service, Inc. Copyright (C) 1999 MNES Corp.]