Time’s Up for another 100 Acre Family Farm

On November 30 the little Super 8 Motel in Brookfield Pennsylvania was nearly full. Most of the guests were deer hunters out of the woods from their first day of the season. Men in orange camoflauge stalked the halls, and gathered in the motel parking lot around SUVs with deer strapped to their roofs and fender racks. Joan and I slept soundly. But then I always sleep soundly when I’m surrounded by men with guns who happen to be on my side.

At 5:30 am the next morning, the hunters came into the breakfast room in groups of 2 and 3, talking about what they got or might get. On the TV an anchorwoman reported on the season’s first hunting accident. A man out hunting with his 12 year old daughter, climbing up the tree stand, dropped his loaded rifle. When it hit the ground, butt first, it discharged. The bullet went through the girl’s hand first, and then…true story…proceeded on through the dad’s hand as well.

Hunters mumbled about the damn fool, and the concierge expressed her opinion while she changed the coffee pots. “I don’t think they should let kids hunt until they are 18.” One of the hunters pointed out that it was the dad’s stupidity, not the kid’s, that caused the accident. The concierge considered the point for a minute, and then nodded her head. “Well, exactly what I was saying. That girl wouldn’t have got shot if they raised the age limit to 18.”

Makes sense both ways, doesn’t it? But the general conversation drifted over to swine flu. Half the kids are out of school, reported the concierge. And in her opinion if there are that many out of school, they oughta just close down the place. But, said one of the hunters, that would make it really tough for all the working parents who would have to find child care for their kids. “Well,” said our mistress of the breakfast room, ” the half of the parents with kids home sick have to do that anyways.”

Which brought us to the problem of the businesses who wouldn’t cut their employees any slack during these hard times. The hunters aired a handful of stories of employees unjustly treated, but finally a young guy with his boot laces untied came up with the winner. Seems a friend of his worked at Walmart. Came down with the swine flu, got a doctor’s written diagnosis, stayed home a day, and then showed the diagnosis to his Walmart boss. No deal, said the boss. You missed work. You are fired.

Now the room was full of outraged men dressed in orange camo jacked up on coffee and belglian waffles soaked in fake maple syrup. And each of them had a rifle in his car in the parking lot. The mood got ugly. “I tell you,” said the concierge, “Walmart better watch out. People could stop shopping there and that store could disappear in a SNAP!!”

The room empited; not, I think, that our boys were headed to Walmart for an armed standoff with an employee-abusing manager, but off to the woods to thin out the deer population. A task that was already underway with great success due to natural causes, if you count as natural the death-by-collision of dozens and dozens of deer on the highway. My estimate is that through Pennsylvania there’s an average of 1 deer body every 3 miles. And those were the ones I saw.

I was about to head back to the room to get my bag when an old, broke-down man in his early 70s came in with his wife, same age, much better shape. They were obviously farmers. I hooked another cup of ghastly coffee and invited them to my table. He and his wife looked over the available food and chose a styrofoam cup of OJ and a sticky little cinnamon bun mummified in plastic.

We talked about farming, and what emerged was one more Story of Another 100 Acre Farm.

He and his wife are still working the same 100 acre farm near Canton, Ohio that his father bought for $10k in 1947. His parents raised cattle, pigs, chickens, grew corn and vegetables, and made enough money to raise a handful of kids. And my farmer and his wife in their turn did the same thing on the same 100 acres. But none of their children were interested in taking on a farmer’s life. His son, he said, had expressed an interest as long as he didn’t have to do the work or manage the finances. He shrugged, “So what’s left?” But there is the possibility that a grandson might be interested. Might be. In actual fact, our farmer is not really making a sustainable, independent farm living now. He’s raising beef cattle, and growing their feed, but he buys steer calves from local dairy herds and feeds them up on his own farm. He and his wife buy their vegetables from local Amish farmers, and looming over their lives is always the debt they carry for even the minor pieces of equipment they have…tractors, new-fangled hayrollers, and the like.

So how much is your farm worth now, I asked him. More than half a millilon dollars, he said. OK, so that’s the kicker. There’s nobody in this real world who can spend that kind of money on a single 100 acres and hope to make a living farming it under that kind of mortgage. So what will happen if his grandson doesn’t want to farm it? One of two things, most likely. One of the big ag holding companies will buy it and add it to their existing acreage and plant it in soybeans and corn. Or our farmer’s children will decided to split it up into small parcels and sell it as residential or hobby farm lots.

Either way, that 100 acres will never again raise a family.

I guess the final tone here sounds like one of despair. The use of land changes, the dollar economics of the moment trumps the longer-term economic ecology that might somehow find a more productive use for that 100 acres. But for every 100 acre midwestern farm that will no longer raise a family, there may be a 25 acre farm in Kentucky, or New England, or Oregon which might, in the hands of a young farm couple with new ideas about sustainable agriculture and local marketing, actually produce a real income sometime in the coming decade.

I think it could happen. Actually, I believe it is already happening. If you know about a small farm that’s doing well, drop me a line…or make comment to this blog.