Dom Alhambra

The largest takeaways from several Wall Street Journal articles detailing the hows and whys of this situation:

• The Trump administration is expected to dole out a record $33 billion in payments to farmers this year. The funds, including those intended to help farmers hurt by trade conflicts and the coronavirus, would push government payments to 36% of farm income, the highest share in nearly two decades.
• U.S. farm debt has grown steadily to more than $425 billion this year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates.
• Despite trade deals in North America and between the U.S. and China, crop prices remain subdued. Crop traders say the drop in prices is due to is due to less buying of U.S. agriculture goods in China. Some are skeptical China will meet high targets for buying U.S. crops and meat this year.
• Traders say part of the recent pressure on agricultural prices is due to the spread of coronavirus, which is expected to mute Chinese demand as residents hunker down to avoid contracting the disease. The outbreak is exacerbating concerns that recent trade pacts won’t be enough to lift farmers out of a six-year slump.
• With a few months remaining until they start planting this year’s crops, some farmers say the lower prices are making it harder to secure the financing they need to cover seeds and supplies. Seed costs are higher. The price of soybean seeds for U.S. farmers has more than quadrupled in the past 20 years, according to USDA data. Some farmers are settling for older, cheaper versions of seeds, though they may not produce as many beans.
• Mr. Steffen withdrew his bankruptcy filing in June to qualify for a forgivable loan under the federal government’s Paycheck Protection Program. He received roughly $40,000, enough to pay his four employees for less than three months. He also received $97,000 from the administration’s coronavirus-relief program.

Mr. Steffen, who sells the milk from his 300 cows to a string-cheese plant, said filing for bankruptcy made him feel he had failed as a steward of the farm that has been in his family since the 1860s.

No Mr. Steffen, you did not fail your farm. The unstoppable momentum of ever-specializing agricultural duties failed you. A little over one hundred years ago, just about all of the above takeaways could not have applied to American agriculture. The word “billion” was an unthinkable amount, let alone to be in debt with. Federal, state, and local governments weren’t responsible for 36% of failing farms. There was no will-they-won’t-they romance between U.S. farms and China imports. Farmers weren’t financing their next seeds—they were only planting them.

However, Mr. Steffen, despite the rose-tinted glasses I may have placed on past agriculture, the farm you inherited in the 1860s has one fundamental similarity to your carcass of a farm now: both are built to fail—it was never an if, but a when. Even 160 years ago, technological advancements in agriculture were extending beyond its owner: the planting, growing, production, transportation, exporting, and specialization of all these tasks were already getting out of hand for farm owners. This is the inevitable result of the transition from family farming to technologically-driven industrial farming. While family farming will fail sooner or later due to extended weather changes, industrial farmers will fail due to financing errors and the inability to be self-sufficient during even brief moments of time.

Mr. Steffen, your mid-sized industrial farm would look ridiculous to your 1860s counterpart. After a look at you and your four employees, 19th-century Steffen would wonder why you need so many cows to make a livelihood. For WSJ, your answer ranges from paying your employees to procuring more animal feed and cattle semen. “Huh, that’s all in-house for us, why don’t you pay your employees to make that stuff?” Here we see the foundations of the industrial farm compared to that of the past. Some excuses that an industrial farm would respond with: We only milk cows, we can’t make animal feed. My employees don’t know how to inseminate a cow, they weren’t trained in that. I have a feed deal from this other farm and I just want to pay for that. My employees signed up for a single duty, and self-sufficiency wasn’t one of them.

These articles are delving into the world of industrial farming, not the mom-and-pop farms that are completely fine with three cows, twenty chickens, and a pig, along with a few acres of corn and soybeans here and there. This is an industry worth billions of dollars, where tractors are satellite-operated and grains are engineered for maximum yield. Cows are inseminated by one metallic device and milked by another. Mr. Steffen is not a steward of the farm he heard about in the 1860s—this is the modern American factory, where production lies beyond the scope of personal livelihood. Over 160 years, one Steffen or another decided that it was time that this dairy farm must renounce an ideal of making a living, and instead become part of an industrial institution—backed by billions of dollars of government charity, Chinese trade, metallic devices, and employees who would jump at better wages and benefits at a moment’s notice. With that choice, a Steffen turned away from being a steward of “traditional farming” to being an employee of the global crop futures market.

Agriculture is built to fail—if it didn’t, the original agriculturists of 10,000 years ago could still have farms reaping the benefits of multiple millennia of agricultural knowledge. But it is rare nowadays for a farm-turned-industrial-factory to have an original owner, for when it fails, it can be bought buy a larger agricultural conglomerate, who will place managers and employees there to continue the extended failure, until it is unsustainable and that conglomerate is bought by something larger. Like Mr. Steffen, owning a mid-to-large-sized farm is like trying to hold onto an electric fence: the pain will never let up, and sooner or later you’ll have to yield or pass out from pain or hunger, and let someone else without historical knowledge grab onto it for another few decades.

• https://www.wsj.com/articles/more-farmers-declare-bankruptcy-despite-record-levels-of-federal-aid-11596706201
• https://www.wsj.com/articles/dim-u-s-farm-forecast-extends-into-2020-11582225669
• https://www.wsj.com/articles/crop-prices-dip-despite-trade-deals-11580472010