We had been talking about the
surplus of new dairy factories out here in western Minnesota, my
friend and I. We had finished adding the 4000 cows in the first one
to the 10000 cows in the next one, then adding the 10000 cows in the
just completed one as well as the 10000 cows in the just proposed
one. That is thirty four thousand cows all within twelve miles of my
house. I told him that the dairy factories imported young men from
South America to do the work and constructed bunkhouses at the site
so they wouldn't be bothersome in the town, creating a PR problem.
Then, speaking from his own experience of a lifetime dairy farming
came his question:
“How far from slavery is that,
really?”
The question floated there in
the air, neither of us wanting to answer it too specifically for fear
of what it would reveal about the future of the agriculture we had
spent our lives practicing. After all, we had both been willing
enough to modernize and expand in our farming and also to hire help
when we needed it, when our farms grew a little beyond what we
ourselves could manage. Where to draw the line? What separates our
lives from some of the practices we see around us we don't admire
much?
A piece of peasant wisdom from
my father comes to mind here. 'Never think you can make another
person do work you think you are too good to do yourself' was one of
the principles he instilled in me. And if you think about it, this
little saying provides the standard. This helps us draw the line.
The attitude my father warned me against forms the philosophical
basis for slavery in spite of our attempts to put fancy sounding
political and economic theortizing on it. I remember a friend of
mine, whose political ambition has since carried him off his farm and
pretty high in state government describing the expansion of hog
factories twenty and thirty years ago. He said, warning of our
increasing division in farm country:
“They want the profits and
they want the manure. You have got people building these things that
are way too good to ever spit on the best part of a pig.”
We are a long way from Henry
Wallace's New Deal efforts to help farmers help themselves through
production controls. These quickly morphed into grain based price
supports, which effectively built today's huge grain farms and the
livestock factories; the grain farms by providing part of the profit
margin and the livestock factories by offering grain at the feed mill
cheaper than the cost of growing it, thus enabling the separation of
livestock from the land and the movement of some grain farmers into
the investor class. It is doubtful that anyone who ever spent his
life working with livestock, much less anyone who really thought
about the meanings and implications of animal husbandry can be very
comfortable with this agriculture.
But more than the anger of a
certain part of the rural population against another part, the
current situation speaks of our basic inability as a people to make
good sound decisions about anything. And we don't understand our
land any better than we understand each other. Anyone can, as I
have, take the time to drive through what was formerly dairy country
after a significant rainfall. See those wide and deep gullies coming
down the creases between hills, with the corn rows, but cutting
across as gravity dictates. Two inches in June will cause gullying
deep and wide enough to hide a small car in some of these places.
And in one year! Where are the sod crops? Why so much corn?
The best of the former family
dairies kept much of this in check in these places. Cattle require
forages, hayfields and hopefully pastures. Manures are the best
fertility. Family labor, when not abused, is the best way to tend
domestic animals and raise children. It will not do to sing
unqualified praises of these farms; some of them were not good, some
needed much change to become good, some should have been shut down.
But the idea was workable. It could have been improved upon. We ran
right past what the land needs because we would not take on the hard
work of understanding what was needed to keep agricultural production
dispersed and agricultural people on the land.
In my youth here on the flat
black fertile land in the northern corn belt I was surrounded by
family dairies. What happened? They are all gone, have been for
thirty years, victims of overpriced land and, as everywhere, a
preditory marketing system. The elites are to blame. Wall Street.
Industry. The boosters and lovers of the money to be made foisting
too much technology on us. I have said it myself and more than once
and it never gets to be less true. But also, there is us. Our idea
of ourselves has changed.
The peasant wisdom about work we
think we are too good to do doesn't have much of a hold on us
anymore. We still know-most of the time-that it's wrong to force
another human to do what we think is beneath us. That responsibility
we have given over to technology. And technology offers us the
illusion that it can answer ethical questions and dilemmas on the
cheap. Having acquired a few tools that make our physical lives
easer and thus more prone to disease and ill health, we find we want
more technology so that we may do even less. Of course, the more
technology we must have must be paid for and so we work more, and
worry more. Our technology saves physical work while its cost
increases mental and emotional distress. We get to the point where
our lives have gotten so easy that we cannot afford a day off.
While we have been manuevering
ourselves into this Catch-22 the world around us has been changing.
When the powers that be decided that the farm population needed to be
reduced a half century and more ago, the logic was that the people
were needed in the factories. The siren call was to leave the
drudgery of the farm and come to where you could make enough money to
buy things for yourself and your family. Farms shrank in number and
grew in size while the manufacturing capacity of the country grew
into the envy of the world. People thought of second cars and
vacation homes.
But then, several decades ago
the elites decided that the manufacturing should be shut down and
shipped overseas. Now, other than the few places available in the
first professions-teaching for example, which is also being shut
down-most of the grandchildren of the people who left the farms
earlier have few options left to them. For many families the status
“permanently unemployable” looms as a frightening possiblity. I
am left to wonder if many would not like their great grand parent's
lives back again.
Compare a 1950's farmer, one of
the better sort, with the situation on today's dairy factory and
study it for what it says about our concept of work and how it has
changed. Drawing on the wisdom of his forbears, for whatever that
was worth, and on his own gumption, the 1950's farmer scheduled his
cows' calving for when the feed was available for the best milk
yield, with an eye to the fact he also had to have the time to see to
the crops in a timely fashion, and that it is not always easy to
fight the weather. He ran his day so that the chores got done on
time, the milkings were an appropriate time apart, and the jobs
requiring more than just he and the hired hand took place when the
kids were home from school. He figured some of his work was going to
be nasty, and that at other times, satisfaction would be more
available. He assigned his hired help and his kids work in such a way
that they would keep coming back. He worked with them, teaching them
and learning himself that often the hardest part of a hard job is
getting it started. He learned and lived the idea that a stitch in
time really can save nine, that debt was something to work your way
out of and that the protection of some long term assets and virtues
and values was going to require a certain amount of unpaid work. He
learned the sweetness of rest after hard physical labor and the joy
of testing himself against the farm and the work. He came to
understand himself through his work, through his failing and his
coming through when he had to.
The factory dairy hand works
without agency. He has nothing to say about his work, can do nothing
to modify it and improve it, and can only hang onto it for as long as
he can live on the little pay, and until a robot can be devised to do
his job. He has no stake, and those who do have, the investors, have
only a financial one. The understanding in the whole system is that
the biggest sucker is the one who works and the biggest winners are
those who do not. The land, which he doesn't control either, is
either a despository for manure or a source of feedstuffs, depending
on the time of year and what arrangements the investors have made.
No thought is given to the potential for erosion in use or to the
building and maintenance of soil health. Indeed, there is properly
no one available anymore to understand either the need for or the
particulars of achieving and maintaining good health of the soil.
That work would have been the natural province of the grandsons and
daughters of the 1950's farmer mentioned above, and the few that are
left of this breed are overworked, confused and often in conflict
with the banker. That farmer has essentially been disallowed from
today's agriculture.
We seem to have advanced
ourselves completely out of the possiblity of decent work. And how
far away from slavery is that, really?
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