From the Heartland, Margot McMillen writes:
With the year about to close, everyone is evaluating. Plenty went wrong, but what went right? Well, we’re out of Iraq. Sort of. And the unemployment numbers are down, sort of, and housing sales are up. And protestors—from Madison to Wall Street to Oakland--put some of the problems into words.
For farmers, the grain prices have been good and cattle prices are high. My neighbor Angus the cattle man is happy that he’s kept his cattle and improved his pasture by planting clover. He says the clover, with root structures that actually trap nitrogen in the ground, will supply about 30 to 40 pounds of nitrogen per acre per year. That’s significant improvement without adding chemicals. “I want to hear you say it, Jerry,” I said, “improving that pasture was the right thing to do.” And he did say it.
But, despite Jerry’s model, farmers are tearing out trees on other pastures, to plant even more corn next year. The land they’re claiming for row crops is increasingly steep, meaning more potential for the topsoil to float away on the rain. Erosion. And, this at a time when the future of ethanol from the U.S. is less secure than it was a year ago. Now that ethanol is required at the pump, the multinationals are figuring out ways to import it from sugar-rich lands, where production is cheaper and higher per acre.
On January 1, 2011, as I began a year of writing a blog about policy and farming, with side trips into current events and the farmers’ protest history of the 1980s, my goal was to explain farm policy for the non-farmer and to look for themes that might emerge. Maybe these themes would reveal some solutions that I could put into words. As a writer, I believe in the power of words even though they never seem just right and the right ones are just out of reach.
From the beginning of the year, the selfishness of the export-import trade system revealed itself. At the National Family Farm Coalition meeting, I met Korean farmers that would be put off their land by the passage of the Korean-US free trade agreement, KOR-US. This agreement would make the U.S. a cheap-foods conduit for subsidized foods. All the multinationals were arguing that this would be good for U.S. agriculture, but a look at the list of foods showed that we would soon become a conduit for processed foods from all over the globe. One of the foods on the list is chocolate. Dear reader, we do not raise chocolate in this country and we don’t even process it much.
Exporting our cheap foods to Korea would mean the corporations could sell at a price lower than Korean farmers could produce it. At our meeting, the Korean farmers, members of the Korean Peasants’ League, talked about their roots on the land. Their culture goes back centuries, containing religion, festivals, foods. They didn’t talk about money. They talked with gracious elegance about family and culture. They talked about loving the land, as if it was irreplaceable. And they talked about it without apology, as if this was a normal way to talk about farming.
To these Korean peasants, farms were family homesteads stretching back centuries to the ancient ancestors, filled with memories contained in their lineages. Americans don’t talk about farms that way. In our language, farms are centers to be mined by agribusiness. This is how the media talks about farming, how the University Extension agents talk about it, how the bankers talk about it. And, for many farmers, talk about family has been reduced to talk about how well the kids are doing now that they’ve moved to the cities. Love of the land, culture, family—these things might be whispered over the kitchen table, read from a homily at the women’s club meeting or inferred from the Sunday sermon, but they’re never listed as goals for the life well-lived.
And I have puzzled about this all year long. I haven’t gone back to their words. Although I wrote some of them down the pages are buried under heaps of other papers—how to raise ginger, how to make cheddar cheese, how to apply for a grant, the results of a beard contest. But the puzzle, for a writer, isn’t really about specific words, we have plenty of those, but about spirit. Tone. Heart. That’s the trick…how to put your heart in the right place.
So the year closes and I feel I’m still no closer to the language that I wanted, the language that will give meaning to rural life, to those that choose stewardship rather than greed. I saw it in the shapes of the robes of the Korean peasants and heard it in their voices, and I’ve heard it from my neighbors when we’ve sat around the table and talked about what will happen to the land in the future. But it’s still like a secret code, a secret handshake, a wink.
