The Midwesterner: Blogging the Global Midwest

Farmers Fighting Back

It will be news to most Midwestern farmers that they should turn an unused corner of their barns into a public relations department. But they do, and it looks like this may be happening.

At the moment, the farming debate in this country has been seized by a handful of city-based ideologues who have never been on a real farm and scorn farmers who till more than 20 acres and actually try to turn a profit.

The result is that the people who produce most of America’s food have been losing the debate. Now they’re fighting back.

Food Hubs Reshape Small Farming

Small farms are becoming big business. One reason is an innovation called food hubs.

Food hubs aren’t exactly new: a few have been around for 20 years. But lately, they’ve been growing like zucchini in August: two-thirds have been in business less than five years, one-third less than two years. Not only are there more of them. They’re getting bigger, and doing more, and becoming more important to agriculture, in the Midwest and around the country.

My guess is that they contribute to a phenomenon that we noted in a recent posting on this blog – that the number of mid-size farms, defined as farms with sales of $100,000 to $500,000 per year, is growing. These are the so-called family farms that had been vanishing, as U.S. agriculture became big business and the so-called mega-farmers bought up smaller farms and put them out of business.

That’s changing, and food hubs may be one reason.

Growth for Both Mega-Farms and Market Farms

Have you been to a farmers’ market recently? I hit a downtown Chicago market before lunch today, picking up some last-minute sage and yellow beets for tonight’s dinner. The city’s Federal Plaza was packed with kiosks, all doing a brisk business.

These farmers’ markets are proliferating, and a casual visitor would conclude that they are the future of American farming. Much of what we read about modern farming comes to exactly that conclusion. So a reality check is in order.

The Crisis of Food Deserts

Urban food insecurity is one of the crushing issues that plague American cities. It’s a fancy name for food deserts – the vast tracts of inner cities that hold millions of America’s poorest people but lack grocery stores or other sources of decent food for them to eat.

Much of the debate so far on what to do about this has been distorted by hype, ideology and wishful thinking, mostly from good-hearted activists who think that urban farms or non-profit agriculture will solve the problem.

A new and much-needed report has just been issued on this problem, by the Emerging Leaders program of The Chicago Council on Global Affairs, and it should become the basic text for any city trying to feed its poorest people. The report is called “Feeding an Urban World: A Call to Action,” and it’s hard-headed, sensible, devoid of false optimism and rigorously sourced. It lays out the problem, reports on how some cities are beginning to deal with it, and suggests a way forward.

Here Comes China, Bringing Money

China is sitting on $3.4 trillion (that’s trillion, with a T) in foreign exchange reserves, three times the stash of Japan, the only other global trillionaire. In the meantime, the U.S. economy badly needs more investment to put the recession behind it. And in the same meantime, American banks, which should be investing here, are keeping their money in the mattress, except to give top executives million-dollar bonuses.

Wouldn’t it be a good idea to take money from where it is, which is China, and invest it where it’s needed, like the United States? Isn’t this the way the global economy is supposed to work? And wouldn’t we be grateful if it did?

A Sea Change in Midwestern Immigration

Just as President Obama and Congress are moving to solve the nation's immigration problem, the shape of the problem is changing.

Across the Midwest, companies -- mostly agriculture-related -- are hiring many fewer Mexican and other Hispanic immigrants. The reason: half or more of these immigrants were undocumented, and employers were both tired of verifying documents and afraid of the penalties if they slipped. Some highly-publicized raids by federal immigration agents reinforced their fears, as did a new policy of "silent raids" targeting employers themselves.

These Hispanics are increasingly being replaced in packinghouses and on farms by a spectrum of immigrants -- apparently legal -- from other countries. These include immigrants under national quotas, refugees, and winners of the government's visa lotteries. They come from around the world, mostly Africa and Asia, and include Pacific islanders, Congolese, Sudanese, Somalis, Vietnamese, Burmese, Ukrainian Pentecostals and others.

Evidence for this is mostly anecdotal, gleaned from visits and calls to Midwestern towns that once were on their way to being majority Hispanic: I'll fill in some of these details later. So far as I know, there's been little media attention to this shift. At the moment, it's a big story waiting to be reported. 

Saving the Countryside

A Midwestern public radio reporter phoned the other day with a really good question. Why do small towns and rural areas matter? she asked. Everybody talks about scarce federal and state resources. So are small towns and rural areas important enough to our future to be worth investing in?

She referred to a recent speech by Tom Vilsack, the agricuture secretary, who said that "it's a fact that rural America with a shrinking population is becoming less and less relevant to the politics of this country, and we had better recognize that and we better begin to reverse it."

Going Blue in the Driftless Area

By now, everyone is familiar with those post-election maps of the United States, showing most of the nation a bright red, solidly Republican, speckled with some small blue dots, where Democrats dwell. It looks like an overwhelmingly Republican country, but Democrats dominate, as they did last week, because the blue dots are cities, where people live. The red vastnesses are more rural, with fewer voters and more empty space.

But there are some exceptions, splotches of blue in rural, less-populated areas, Democratic outposts where you wouldn't expect them, Obama bastions unexplained by cities or university towns. Some of these are in New England, naturally, but also a patch in northern Montana, a swath along the Mississippi River between Mississippi and Arkansas, a Democratic stronghold in the iron range north of Duluth, where Minnesota juts out over Lake Superior.

And then there's one true curiosity -- a cluster of mostly rural counties and small towns in southeastern Minnesota, northeastern Iowa, southwestern Wisconsin and northwestern Illinois. This also happens to fit exactly with a region called the Driftless Area, a four-state region around the Mississippi River. It's called the Driftless Area because the glaciers that flattened most of the rest of the Midwest gave it a pass, leaving a lovely hilly area carved by rivers, home to small farms and little towns.

More Good Books from Iowa

I like to keep an eye on the literature of my native Iowa, from the baseball fantasias of W.P. Kinsella (Shoeless Joe, The Iowa Baseball Confederacy) to the heart-breaking explorations of small-town life by Marilynne Robinson (Home, Gilead.) Recently, I wrote here about the short stories of J. Harley McIlrath, who does for farms what Marilynne Robinson does for the small farming towns.

Two new books are out, one deeply felt, the other riotously over the top. Both deserve a mention and, for Midwestern readers, a place on the shelf.

Mary Swander is the poet laureate of Iowa and an Iowa State professor. In 2007, she dispatched a class around the state of Iowa to interview residents, mostly about environmental issues. As time passed, the focus on the environment developed into a panorama on farming and how it's changing. They interviewed successful farmers and unsuccessful farmers, farmers who had lost the farm, organic farmers, workers in the state's meatpacking plants, townies, a winery owner. All were part of the changing rural landscape.

Pop Goes the Bubble

Yogi Berra has reminded us that "it's tough to make predictions, especially about the future." With all respect for the Sage of St. Louis, I'm going to make a prediction that is sure to pan out. Here it is:

There is a big and growing bubble in farm land prices across the Midwest, and this bubble will pop, sooner or later. The result will be a rash of failed farms and rural misery.

We know this will happen because it's happened before, most recently thirty years ago. In the 1970s, a variety of factors -- mostly high grain prices -- sent farm land prices to record heights as farmers borrowed heavily to buy as much land as they could. Then, in the early 1980s, other factors -- mostly falling grain prices -- left many indebted farmers unable to pay their debts.

The result: thousands of Midwestern farms failed. Banks foreclosed. Many small rural banks, holding too many bad loans, also failed. Newspapers reported farmer suicides, even the murder of bankers by distraught farmers. Farm foreclosure sales became common social events. Most big farmers weathered the storm, but medium-sized farmers, whose debt soared by 250 percent in the 1970s, collapsed. Usually, they were bought by bigger farmers next door, accelerating the consolidation of Midwestern farming and the decline in rural population.