The Farmer As Rock Star

The year before Jen and I left Philadelphia for Schoharie Jennifer took over managing a stable in Fairmount Park. One day before they left, Jen and I were talking to the previous managers and one of them, the male of the male-female couple told us about being a jouster at renaissance fairs. He said, “It’s about the closest thing to being a rock star.” Jen and I got a huge kick out his saying that then and we still get a kick out of it every now and then. Yesterday a funny thing happened at the farmers market that made me think immediately of that jousting rock star.

Last week I was on a panel to discuss the film Eating Alaska, which was very good. The film was about the challenges of a former vegetarian to eat locally in Alaska, dealing primarily with the struggle over eating game, which is the principle source of nutrition for Alaskans. I think there might have been about thirty people there. In the discussion, we shifted the context from Alaska to here, and so shifted our focus from the meat of wild game to the meat of livestock. There were two other people on the panel, another farmer and a person who works in multiculturalism. Unfortunately, the multiculturalist got short shrift I think because most people were interested in talking about things more directly related to farming. I did my best to find ways to relate the discussion to culture — multi- or otherwise –  because that is one of my own areas of interest, but the multiculturalist only had an opportunity to participate a few times.

Yesterday while at the farmers market I was interacting with two customers at my booth and one of the women suddenly realized that I was one of the panelists from the other night and she told me how great she thought the discussion had been. We spoke about it for a minute or two and then her friend bought something and they left. Then about fifteen minutes later the woman that had recognized me came back and as she was looking over the tables for what she wanted she joked that she “had been so star struck that she forgot to do her shopping.” Suddenly I felt the weight of the jousting lance tucked under my arm as I rode steady in my saddle above the thundering hooves of my most trusted horse as he galloped down the field….

The farmer as rock star has been a recurring theme over the past few years, in the media especially. While I think it is wonderful that so much attention is being paid to farmers and farming, I find elevating farmers to celebrity status highly problematic, primarily as it relates to the gathering steam of the local-regional farm and food systems movement, for a couple of reasons. First there are very few rock stars in the world, and their lights blot out the work of the masses of people just as talented and important as they. Second, as our lenses become more and more narrowly focused on just a few rock stars, the horizon of ideas also becomes ever narrower. For example, Joel Salatin, who is currently the rock star farmer, really is something of a treasure when it comes to focusing our attention on the ecology and ethics of grass farming. However, as it relates to creating farm and food systems, I find his anarcho-capitalist agenda highly problematic (his libertarianism is so extreme that I do not think the anarcho- is an exaggeration), but because he is such a grass farming rock star, his ideas about farm and food systems are prioritized as well. The idea of food justice is not even a roadie on the Salatin farm rock tour.

If we were able to suspend our cultural inclination to elevating just a few of our community members to rock star status, the horizon of ideas would be much broader, and the base of the movement would be firmer, more sound, and so less susceptible to being made a tool for the promotion of a narrowly held agenda. I, of course, want people to hear the ideas and thoughts that I am attracted to, and I hope, given the opportunity, to be able to present those ideas in a way that entices people to be similarly attracted to them. However, what I want is for those ideas to be the faceless ideas of a movement, to seem to have come from out of the depths of the movement itself. I want those ideas to be out there, appearing unsourced and infinite, just zipping around available for people to adopt and cherish, defending and promoting them as an integral part of their worldviews.

Movements move not by the light of a few rock stars, but by the weight of the masses. Rock stars are a mistake.

 

(Farm) Worker Rights

A central thread of much of my thinking on the topic of agriculture is that social justice in farm and food systems is a must. I believe this is especially true in the case of local-regional farm and food systems, which we are in the process (hopefully) of creating. A paramount issue on the question of social justice is the treatment of farm workers. Farm workers are overworked and underpaid, and that needs to change.

Paying farm workers higher wages, and giving them a day or two of rest, paid time off, and things like health benefits, however, is not as simple as passing a farm worker bill, like the New York State Senate is currently working on. Policy makers, almost universally, are totally myopic, and beyond that suffer from debilitating tunnel vision. They see only what is directly in front of their face and nothing beyond or aside it. Policy makers are incapable, for example, of appreciating the interconnections between farm labor and the broader economy, especially the plight of the working class in our credit-based consumer capitalist society. People who work are drowning in debt, usurious debt, at that (usury is a word that seems to have been totally erased from the collective consciousness). When a third of all New Yorkers are incapable of meeting even a basic family budget, passing a farm worker bill that raises wages, either directly by including overtime pay or indirectly by including some paid time off, does nothing but strap even further the already strapped — small farmers and the rest of the working class alike.

What is needed are radical, comprehensive changes to our socio-economic system. Such a thing, of course, cannot be legislated. We have cultural work to do. We have to overcome our culture of worker apathy. We have to overcome our culture of rampant debt-based consumerism. We have to overcome our culture of capitulation to capitalist interests (acceptance of low wages and long hours). We have to overcome our disastrous culture of rugged individualism. We have to overcome our cultural aversion to class-based struggle.

We need to recognize that this is a universal struggle for social and economic justice. The plight of the farm worker is threaded together with the plight of the fast food worker and the custodial worker and the cashier and the waitress at the diner. Together they and others make up the fabric of a besieged working class that is in deep and desperate trouble.

Addressing the concerns of one group of workers does nothing but pit those workers against the rest of the working class. The wages of all workers need to rise, and not only wages, but wealth. Without wealth, workers can do nothing but live pay check to pay check. There needs to be enough at the end of the day to buy property, to make investments, to save for retirement (we should also return to a real pension system).

Certainly, the most egregious exploitation needs to be addressed. However, in doing so, we cannot let ourselves think that in passing legislation that protects one group of workers we have accomplished anything at all. We would have merely stemmed the worst of the tide of the stinking evil of consumer capitalist excess (the last quarter of the 20th and the early 21st century will almost certainly be remembered in the same way as the years of the robber barons).

We must make of this a total struggle for the health and well being of all workers.

 

Inflammatory Extortion

Yesterday, Devra left this very level-headed comment:

It’s true that it costs more to produce sustainable food than in does to produce industrial food. It’s also true that many sustainable producers could make changes that would help to lower their prices.

I know many small scale farmers and meat producers. Although many of them could make some better choices that would result in lower prices, not a single one of them is in it for the money, as the term “extortionist” implies.

You have an important perspective on this issue, but you’ll be able to be heard more effectively if you show a bit of respect for the good work that other folks are doing.

First, I would like to acknowledge the truth of Devra’s point about the mistake I made using such an inflammatory word as extortion, which is, I assume, the locus of the lack of respect that Devra points out. It seems to me that the use of that word just made people angry and distracted them from my real point. I frequently make this mistake. I use words or language that I think are provocative, but really, they just piss people off. I am slowly learning my lesson, but I suspect I will make the same mistake more than a few times more.

Having said this, however, what I am not saying is that the word wrongly defines the current state of local meat pricing as I see it. The mistake was not definitional.  The mistake was tactical — it caused me to not be heard effectively. I continue to think that extortion accurately defines the current state of local meat pricing, in a couple of ways. I just should have used less inflammatory language like exorbitant, or extremely high, or etc., so that people found the criticism more palatable.

One of the dictionary definitions of extortion is

n. 3. “An excessive or exorbitant charge.” (www.dictionary.com)

According to my own costs, calculated both at 300 pigs ($225 per pig) and at seventy-five pigs ($262 per pig), or even at a hypothetical $300 per pig, the going price for a whole or half pig in my area of $3.50 per pound hanging weight is indeed excessive or exorbitant. Using the $300 cost, the profit is $225 per pig. That is an awful lot of money to pay someone to raise a pig. Of course, as I pointed out in my original post, because of their low-volume, low-volume farmers are not running to the bank with fistfuls of cash — they are hardly in it for the money, and I never suggested such a thing. What I did suggest was that because of the model of farming they have chosen, they are in a position of needing to charge excessive or exorbitant prices, which definitionally matches perfectly the word extortion.

Other definitions of extortion (extort) are

v. 1. to wrest or wring (money, information, etc.) from a person by violence, intimidation, or abuse of authority

2. obtain by coercion or intimidation; (www.dictionary.com)

What I thought would be the provocative part of my use of the word extortion was its connotation of the use of coercion and abuse of authority, but that is exactly what made it distractingly inflammatory instead. My intention was not to suggest that farmers are bad people selfishly wresting money from people literally by force. However, people that are interested in escaping the system of industrial agriculture very much think of alternative farmers as guides, as counselors, as knowledgeable experts. We are interviewed and quoted, we are asked our opinions, we are put up on pedestals as “heroes” and “roll models.” When we criticize the industrial model or when we say things about how local-regional farm and food systems should look, people listen to what we say and they take on faith that what we say is true, valid, legitimate, and/or authoritative. In other words, we have power, real cultural power.

Therefore, when we say that the low-volume farming model reflects the “true cost of raising meat,” people believe us. Those that are able to therefore dig deeply into their pockets and purses and pay us what we ask them to. Those that are not able to continue to shop at the supermarket buying factory farmed meat, but without rancor towards low-volume farmers because they too believe that those high prices are necessary to sustainably provide an alternative to factory farmed meat. They might be angry about their inability to afford it, but they harbor no ill-will toward farmers for charging those high prices.

Is this faith in the statements of low-volume farmers warranted? No, I don’t think it is, which is what I have been trying to argue for the past few days. There is very much so a sort of coercion in the low-volume, high price farm narrative. People are being coerced into believing something that isn’t true by the powerful stories low-volume farmers tell about the high cost of raising “honest” meat. It is not true, for example, that the only sustainable alternative to factory farming is low-volume farming.  The truth is that a low-volume farm can never be anything more than a niche farm (only a small percentage of the population is — or ever will be — in a position to afford to buy into that model), can never serve as a model for a paradigm shift, a true alternative. An Amish-scale farm, farmed thoughtfully, is in fact more sustainable than a low-volume farm because it makes meat available at prices that more people in the community can afford than does a low-volume farm, both because costs are lower and profit margins do not need to be as high.

A substantial percentage of the high costs that low-volume farmers incur are high because they have consciously chosen to be low-volume farmers; they have chosen a model that very poorly distributes costs, especially fixed costs. However, low-volume farmers do not say, “my prices are high because I chose a model that provides a very low-volume of cash and very poorly distributes fixed costs.” They say instead, “this is the true cost of raising meat. These prices are necessary to escape the factory farm system.”

As a farmer that started out as a low-volume farmer and that made those very arguments myself, I am here trying to tell you that the low-volume farm narrative is a coercive myth, that the “good work that other folks are doing” that Devra argues I should respect is in fact impeding the cultivation of a real, durable farm model upon which paradigm shifting local-regional farm and food systems can be based. The contribution of those other folks has been extremely good work, invaluable work, to date, but now it is time to get our heads out of the clouds. It is time to get serious about constructing a model of (sustainable) local-regionalism that makes meat broadly affordable. I don’t ever again want to have a hard working person tell me through her tears in a broken voice that she desperately wants out of the factory farm system, but simply cannot afford it. She could afford it, not thoughtlessly or without restraining her spending on other things (the true true cost of raising local meat is too high), but she could afford it only if we acknowledge her, and welcome her, and make a commitment to her instead of pretending she is not there, rendering her silent, invisible.

Was the word a bad choice? Yes. Was it definitionally inaccurate? No.