“Home, out on La Grange…”

June 27, 2022 

You may have heard about this in the political discourse sometime in the last ten years. Even if we are paying attention to the political situation, we hear about it, and then They disappear that narrative. I want to fight that cultural amnesia that is imposed on us from without. Because this is important to us all. Everyone eats. 

How often have we heard that the small family farm in America is under threat; even under water? That Big Agribusiness is buying out the small farms that can't effectively interface with global capital flows? And then there is no follow-up, and the narrative disappears from view. 

I want to call back something Slavoj Zizek wrote about, that I quoted here: 

Russia's strategic plan is to profit from global warming: control the world's main transport route, plus develop Siberia and control Ukraine. In this way, Russia will dominate so much food production that it will be able to blackmail the whole world. This is the ultimate economic reality beneath Putin's imperial dream. 

The health of the American farm is not just the basis of the American economy but more properly and exactly, it is the foundation of the American State. And yet we don't often get a chance to talk about it in a political way, and bring the issue from the right and left wing into a mainstream conversation. But two things, both interconnected, give us a chance to talk about it: the first is global warming, and the second is Putin's invasion of Ukraine, which is one of the world's largest food exporters, mostly of concern to the global grain supply. Zizek points out that Putin's invasion is Russia positioning itself to be stronger in the climate change geopolitical paradigm. And I have also pointed out here that the State has long prepared for a paradigm when, because of climate change, food politics becomes the primary driver of competition between States on the global stage. 

I don't claim any expert status to define this issue. I'm just a guy looking this up on a screen. And a guy with political connections who hears about the fates of the small family farm when it manages to breach the silence about farm issues and speak into the din of the political discourse. I'm three generations off the farm, but I'm woke enough to know that if your lineage came from the farm, the farm never leaves you. No one is disconnected from agriculture. 

The farm is not to be fucked with. The Farm is sacrosanct. I'm not calling for anyone to take the American farm lightly. But if there is a blessing from climate change it is that the farm and the natural world can no longer be ignored. I think we should find a middle ground here. And not the middle ground of doing nothing, but the middle ground of balance. I think we should do some old things in new ways, and new things in an old way.

To make sense of the farm and Nature in some grand theory is nearly impossible. Like looking at Nature itself, you can only say what you see and hope that you see the current clearly enough to maintain your course. 

I see a slow and inexorable "trend" - and they only hope it is actually inexorable - over decades, to financialize the American farm. Yahoo Finance on February 11, 2021, talks about the cost to agribusiness of climate change disasters. Why is Yahoo Finance reporting that? One reason I can think of is that they want to sell farm insurance and then probably derivate and accumulate those stock market instruments into some over complicated financial device I don't really understand, nor do I want to. This goes to the rightly-held Leftist critique of the modern economy - that the rich and powerful want to financialize everything so that they benefit while the rest of us with not so much money continue to lose our rights at an alarming clip. I'm concerned about this. 

But there is another observation that I think everyone should look at. SeekingAlpha.com May 19, 2014; headline says "Farmland Value Held Back By Waning Grain Prices." 

We have to all realize something right now. The world may be increasingly connected and defined by trade and financialization but the fact is that the small farmer can't do that. The farm economy is a planned economy. Perhaps even more exactly, it's not an economy at all, really. And most importantly a true farm in the classic way is not run as a business; although its produce is sold to consumers at market, most of it, especially grains go through a more complicated process to get to consumers. I can take you all the way to ancient Sumer and Ur on this, but I shouldn't have to. It should be common sense. 

What I'm seeing is this: There is an agricultural commodity index that tracks the overall prices of only agricultural commodity prices only (excluding gold and minerals and so on). It's called the RJA and its linked to the Rogers International Commodity Index. 

What I see during this time is that from 2014 to about 2020 agricultural prices were in a sharp and steady decline, then they spiked back up stating 2020. As much as I think it's not right the way small holders are squeezed out of the agricultural system, all I can say for sure at this point is that I've observed the confluence of certain things against the backdrop of a known fact: that the food system is at the very least a planned economy if not wholly the province of State management. One thing is this long period of low commodity prices while many small holders are in debt - I have the ears to hear that. The second thing is the kind of articles with headlines and so on like the last one cited, that point out that low prices for grain are keeping farm land prices low. Those articles are written with enough knowledge of the fact that the Farm is a planned economy that its known that food prices don't have to be as low as they are. So someone must be benefiting from the system as it is. And the word gets around, too, that those small holders that do go under and have to sell their land to Big Ag are doing so at rock-bottom prices. That observation is just buttressed by other headlines like this one from 2014 saying that agricultural stocks are "out of favor". The tone of this has the flavor more of a command than analysis: because the agricultural system is a command economy overall, especially as it is felt at the level of the farmer. The third overall observation that there is an effort out there to financialize the entire economy - and climate change is opening the door to even financializing the farm economy. And if they do it, the scale of this problem is massive. Not only the issues of insurance against catastrophes related to storms, but also droughts. I'm not getting into the ethics of betting against the success of a harvest - or for it, for that matter. But the overall structure is veering that way - and it is common sense that Big Ag is going to have fewer qualms and scruples on those ethical questions than a system of small holders. 

When it comes to commodity prices, everyone talks about petroleum prices and so on - but what really matters is not only that: much closer to everyday human life is agricultural "commodities", and the "food system", in short, the health of the farm. 

Let's zoom out a bit. 

I think there is a reason to think that the low agricultural commodity prices for a long time have not been entirely natural. For one thing we were supporting two large-scale foreign wars during that time, without strictly defined commitments (Aghanistan was drawn down into a nearly undefined commitment while still sucking up vast resources during that same time frame.) And for another unrelated thing, now we are hearing quite a bit about how Afghanistan, after our occupation ended, is demanding more food aid because otherwise they can't feed themselves. 

But some people don't agree with the truth here. When prices fell, the natural reaction among the more nimble and thoughtful farmers is to look for crops that perhaps can fetch a higher price. And those who could, did. But not everyone could or can. So the suppression of prices, although not a pure market action, coincided with the foreign wars. Causation doesn't explain that entire, but it is not unconnected. And at the same time there aren't that many "opportunity" crops that are viable. However there is a false narrative that someone heroic could switch to novelty or heirloom grains to supply a purported but as yet unrealized demand for, say, amaranth. These ideas have more cultural currency than they do practicality, and it does come from a well-meaning but uninformed liberal desire to help. The problem is, we all went along too unthinkingly with the idea that we could solve the problems relating to supply of staple foods using capitalist interventions. 

I think this is the biggest public health issue of our time. And it is the backdrop for nearly all other public health issues. it's a huge playing field and I can't claim to have drawn its exact dimensions. But all social diagnosis and political objection, is, I think, meaningless without this.