Southernization

 It is becoming harder to ignore the evidence that the Midwest, the nation's farm belt, is becoming more southern in its economy and assumptions about its population.  Like the plantation south before the Civil War, the usable assets are concentrating in ever fewer hands.  If the current farm size here in Chippewa county, reaching toward three thousand acres per farming operation does not give sufficient evidence, what about the collectivization of livestock agriculture into huge concentrated confinement operations; five thousand sows in one building, ten thousand milking cows per site on a half dozen sites within a few miles of this farm?

We are busy wringing the "expense" out of farming, or as the late Paul Gruchow, interpreter of his own rural upbringing, once pointed out in plain language, we are taking the human trash out of agriculture.  Like the south with its slave labor, we have supplied ourselves with underpaid and too often terrorized brown skinned folks to do the hard work milking the cows, caring for the hogs, slaughtering the animals that we once took some pride in doing ourselves.  And like the slave economy of the south, we have generated massive inequality in our midst and begun to welcome in the class sorting this inequality permits and encourages. Also like the south we have permitted and encouraged the development of a class of people we think of as "white trash", folks who for one reason or another have not been able to move toward opportunity and who see no great reason for hope here. 

It is difficult for me to believe that the countryside I left for the University of Minnesota in 1966 has anything at all in common with what I see around me now. It feels as if this change over just one human lifetime, is a story not told and not heard, and for all of its killing of dreams and unrequited desire for stability and community is but one small generator of the huge anger and resentment that has taken our political life by storm.

Berry

 I pulled Wendell Berry's "The Hidden Wound" off the shelf for another read.  Published in 1989 before Berry became our American prophet of healing, it is his meditation upon his own role, as a rural white person in the border south, in racism.  The phrase, "the hidden wound" refers to the wound we whites have given ourselves in the course of our centuries long treatment and mistreatment of the negroes in our midst.  It is, he argues, a mirror image of the wound we have inflicted upon them.

I have been bothered, as an upper midwestern farm kid and now an aging Minnesota farmer over how this applies to me.  While negroes have been scarce in my experience, I grew to adulthood among Mexicans and Americans descended from Mexicans laboring in the sugar beet fields.  Right now, down the road in the nearby dairy factories, brown skinned people milk the cows we milked formerly.  Little is heard about the harsh impact upon rural communities, mostly white, of this collectivization of agriculture.  Nothing at all is said about the effect on the people working there thousands of miles away from home.

The working of slave or underpaid and abused labor helps us separate ourselves from the strict expectations and difficult life of actually working the land, and in so doing hinders our understanding of it, putting beyond reach our availing ourselves of its blessings.  This is the wound.

Berry wants to understand his wound as completely as he can in the hopes that understanding as much as possible of it may help it to heal.  

There is another wound.  This has to do with ownership of the land.  Native wisdom tells us we cannot ever own land.  We have yet to take that in and meditate upon its meaning in our lives and for our future. 

Maintenance

 While the crops farmers surrounding us are working long hours for a few days to get harvest done our work with crops and livestock is pretty much unremitting.  October is the time when the demands of harvest add to the necessity of getting winter feed lined up, buildings and livestock equipment repaired and things generally buttoned up so that we can get our work done this winter.

What this shows is a general human tendency that when there is more work than time to do it, routine maintenance gets left.  We prove to ourselves every year that someone to fix, repair and build is an important asset on this farm, because every October we see too much of the planned repair and renovation undone. This will make our winter tasks harder and less satisfying to do.

Farm income must cover the support of the farm's staff.