In defense of the family farm
In defense of the family farm
"the peasant on his freehold"
Since I started writing Alternatives Exist I have wanted to reproduce the following excerpt from Robert Ardrey’s Territorial Imperative.1 It contrasts the abject failure of Soviet agriculture with the equally stunning success of its counterpart in the United States. Eventually Ardrey concludes that the difference of prime importance is the energy and dedication of a pair on their territory — a condition enjoyed by the farmer in America but denied to the Russians by the Communists and their system of collectivised agriculture. This piece is the best argument I know for the family farm, “the peasant family on its freehold” as Ardrey describes it.
While most farms in Australia are family owned its not really freehold is it? Agricultural land is loaded with debt. The least indebted livestock farmers are those raising sheep with an average business debt of $329,000. Cattle farmers carry significantly more at $570,000.2 A third of dairy farmers owe up to $300,000, a further third between $300,000 and $1.3 million and the most indebted third are north of that.3 In 2022 - 23 the average interest bill for dairy farmers was $89,000. It’s a treadmill from which there is no escape.
In addition to debt costs the typical agricultural business relies heavily on outside inputs the prices of which tend to increase, sometimes dramatically, for reasons outside the farmer’s control. Fertilizers, biocides, machinery, insurance, water, fuel and energy costs are all crucial to modern farming operations so the farmer must buy them whatever the cost. Compounding the problem is the fact that conventional methods tend to result in the deterioration of natural fertility leading to increased inputs to maintain production levels. For these reasons corporate agribusiness has a decisive influence on the method of farming and the quality of produce.
Since most farmers do not sell directly to the public they are also squeezed on the distribution side. Prices for primary production are notoriously volatile and the nature of his products, being perishable or costly to store, means the farmer must take what the market is paying. Furthermore, limited choice in processors, retailers, transport and warehousing leaves farmers vulnerable to price gouging and middlemen abound.
On top of all this is the ever-present risk of bad seasons. In a good year the sums can be made to work but in the inevitable bad years all bets are off. For instance, dairy farmers average $330, 000 a year for feed. Imagine that in a drought.
Like everything else, the Australian farming scene has changed dramatically over the last 40 or so years. Since the 1980s the number of farms has halved4 and, since the year 2000, the average price of farmland per hectare has quadrupled5. Its a hard game to break into. Increased equity in land values means that farmers can access more debt, and they are, but this does not necessarily mean that their businesses are more profitable. Economy of scale is the strategy for those choosing to stay on, and with the average Australian farmer pushing sixty (58) there should be plenty of properties to be had. The trouble is that this strategy of go big or get out inevitably looks less like an enterprise dealing with life and more like the “factory in the field.”
You could slow down the big ag juggernaut with financial reform. A challenge to the debt paradigm is sorely needed. If farmers had more breathing space many would choose not to drive their land and animals so hard and look to gentler methods. Unfortunately, the general population remains plunged in ignorance about the most basic financial facts so this seems unlikely anytime soon. Consumer demand might also be able to do something but again there are still a lot of people who don’t seem to care enough to know anything about what they are putting in their mouths.
For those of you not willing to wait for the hoi polloi and who worry about food quality and security the real message of hope is towards the end of Ardrey’s piece. Hint:
Private plots occupy about 3 percent of all Russian cultivated land, yet they produce almost half of all vegetables consumed, almost half of all milk and meat, three-quarters of all eggs, and two-thirds of that staff of Russian life, potatoes.
There are things that can be done on small plots and you don’t necessarily have to become a Russian peasant either — though it probably helps. What definitely helps is keeping the trident of world dominion; the banks, the government and the multinationals, out of your back pocket. This is a lesson Australian farmers have forgotten, if they ever learned it.
The new small farms must aspire to the ideal of Lord Northbourne who coined the term ‘organic agriculture’ in his book Look to the Land: “the farm itself” he wrote “must have a biological completeness; it must be a living entity, it must be a unit which has within itself a balanced organic life”.
That to me is real farming and there is much useful work to do here.
Anyways, without further delay I give you Robert Ardrey’s thoughts…
If we think back, we shall recall that farm and farmer have been the central problem of civilization, even as they have been its central cause, ever since in neolithic times almost 10,000 years ago we began our domestication of plants and animals. Having gained control over an abundant food supply, we made possible populations of such number that the old hunting life could never again support us. We could not return. Like the beaver, we mastered a culture which in turn mastered us. Pasture and field, orchard and garden became like portions of our body, organs without which we could not exist. And like the beaver’s dam and lodges and wooded acres, they commanded an intolerable lot of work.
Which of us from dawn to dark would bend in the rice paddies, cut hay in the fields? As the millennia progressed, we supplied many an ingenious answer. We tried at first to push the work off on our women, an answer favored in much of Africa even today. We tried human slavery, a solution respected throughout the civilized world until a century or so ago. We tried serfdom in many guises, chaining the worker to someone else’s soil. But there was always a shortcoming that the involuntary worker is inefficient.
Until the industrial revolution the inefficiency of our agriculture was of no alarming moment. So long as the slave in the the field was pressed to feed only a handful of nobles and warriors and priests and artisans, involuntary labor was good enough. But with the rise of industry and the massive increase of a factory and office population, our old systems collapsed. Despite the most humane or brutal attentions of landlord and overseer, the involuntary worker in the field could not produce the surplus food which such populations required. Slavery and serfdom vanished. To whatever extent other forces, moral or political, may have caused the final dismissal of our ancient institutions, the first cause was that they no longer worked. And we turned, most of the world’s people’s to another old if less prevalent institution, the peasant family on its freehold.
It is an accident of history that in 1862 the American President, Abraham Lincoln, with his signature on the Homestead Act committed the American agricultural future to the principle of private ownership based on a one family unit, and that two years later Karl Marx with his call for Communism’s First International committed what would someday be the Soviet Union to public ownership and the collective way. A giant race, of which we are almost as unaware today as we were then, was set in motion. As in two enormous living laboratories, the two human populations that would someday dominate the world’s affairs were placed on opposite courses to solve a common problem. And that problem, in an industrial age, became in time the problem of all peoples the world around.
How many worders can be released to the wheel by a single man at a plow? As nations came to compete for 9power and prestige under eh single racing flag of industrial worth, a stubborn equation of human mathematics came to limit their most splendid ambitions. What fraction of a people’s numbers must remain in the field to free the remainder for the ultimate competition? And by what means may the energies of that farming fraction be so enhanced as to reduce its number to a minimum?
No argument exists — certainly not in Moscow’s Central Statistical Administration — concerning the current state of the competition. In the united Sates of America one worker on a farm produces food for himself and for almost twelve more in the city: 92 percent of all Americans are freed for industry by a rural 8 percent who not only feed them but produce a food surplus of politically embarrassing dimensions. In the Soviet Union one worker in the field, but only in good years, feeds one worker in the factory. A doubtful half of the Russian population is freed from the soil. And as if to confirm the Soviet calamity, its major partner in the collective way, China, pursuing more extreme communal policies, must combine the efforts of six in the field to free one man for the industrial adventure.
China’s pretentions to power are young, enveloped in a cloak of secrets, and cannot be inspected here. But the Soviet Union has been with us for almost half a century and makes no effort to hide or dismiss its failure. We know that many a blight besides proscription of private property has fallen on the Russian farm. Stalin’s liquidation of the kulaks eliminated at an early date the ablest Russian farmers. The reign of Lysenko and his Lamarckian nostalgias all but annihilated Russia’s science of plant genetics. Permafrost, that layer of permanently frozen earth underlying so much of the broad Russian plain, has been less than helpful. Drought, combined with the blunder of putting to the plow so much virgin but marginal land, has enforced the disaster in recent years. And for decades there was the naive pressure to favor the factory over the field, to neglect fertilizers, farm machinery, irrigation.
Like Chekhov’s man of two-and-twenty misfortunes, the Russian farmer has had his full share. But does the total misfortune explain in full the catastrophe which has come to Russian hopes? There, of course, lies the argument. And I submit that were the ratio between American and Russian effectiveness, as measured by this final yardstick, a matter of two to one, or three to one, or even of four or five to one, then American wealth, soil, science and luck might account for the difference. But that the American farmer can feed twelve men besides himself, whereas the Russian can feed only one, is a little too much. I submit that a final multiplication of natural American assets arises from the biological value of the pair territory.
The smallness of American farms is among the best-kept secrets in the arsenal of American power. The Soviet Union’s collective farms, in which workers shared until 1966 nothing but surplus earnings, average 15,000 acres, each with about 400 families. The state farm, hiring all workers at a fixed wage, averages 70,000 acres and employs 800 workers. Yet of America’s two and one half million commercial farms, only one in ten is over 500 acres. The average number of workers, including the farmer and his sons if he has any, is five. Despite those advances in farm machinery which permit a worker to cultivate an acreage far greater than in Lincoln’s day, still half of our farms are not larger now than then. The factory-in-the-field exists but it is of minor significance. The American agricultural miracle has been produced by a man and his wife with a helper or two on a pair territory.
(…)
One recalls the beaver and his saplings, and a vigilance concerning his dam that makes him so easily trapped. One recalls the parent robins gathering a thousand caterpillars a day. One recalls the platys and their duckweed, and the intruding cichlid fish who must be twice as big to challenge a proprietor. One recalls planarian worm who will take twice as long to start feeding, despite all hunger, if his plate is unfamiliar. Are we to believe that a biological force, commanded by a sense of possession, which plays such a measurable role in the affairs of animals plays no part in the measurable discrepancies of man?
In any final inspection of the Soviet-American experiment with the territorial imperative one might thumb through statistics as dreary as they are endless to demonstrate the superior efficiency of the man who owns over that of the man who shares or works for wages. Some have their fascinations such as that process called stock raising, in which availability of fertilizer and machinery and irrigation provide limited advantage. Yet to achieve a net gain of one hundred pounds in a walking unit of beef, the American farmer will expend three and one-half hours of labor, the wage worker on a Soviet state farm twenty-one, the sharing worker on a collective farm an impossible fifty-one. But it is a situation within the Soviet farm economy that provides the last garish touch.
From the days of Stalin’s enforced collectivization of the land, the peasant has been permitted to retain a tiny plot for family cultivation. It is the last bedraggled remnant of the pair territory in the Soviet Union, and in times of political crisis and ideological pressure its size has been reduced. Today the private plot averages half an acre in size, but there is little likelihood of further reduction. Without it Russia would starve.
Private plots occupy about 3 percent of all Russian cultivated land, yet they produce almost half of all vegetables consumed, almost half of all milk and meat, three-quarters of all eggs, and two-thirds of that staff of Russian life, potatoes. After almost half a century the experiment with scientific socialism, despite all threats and despite all massacres, despite education and propaganda and appeals to patriotism, despite a police power and a political power ample, one would presume, to effect the total social conditioning of any being within its grasp, finds itself today at the mercy of an evolutionary fact of life: that man is a territorial animal.
Natural selection deals ruthlessly with any populations, bird or beaver, which fails to solve the problem problems of its environment with all those resources, learned or unlearned, which may be at its disposal. It deals as ruthlessly with men. And in time when we should like to pretend that natural selection no longer pertains to the human being, the most cynical observer must be moved by compassion for all those hundreds of millions of his fellow beings, in this earthly setting or that, who are being subjected to selection’s surgery to prove that man is being more ancient than all man’s theories. But the evolutionary process grinds on, whatever our hopes or compassion undeterred by tyranny, undeterred by dogma, undeterred by our most soaring excursions or delicate perfections of human self-delusion.
The territorial nature of man is genetic and ineradicable. We shall see, farther along in our inquiry, a larger and older demonstration of its powers in our devotion to country above even home. But as we watch the farmer going our to his barn with the sun not risen above the wood lot’s fringe, we witness the answer to civilization’s central problem which none but our evolutionary nature could provide. Here is a man, like any other territorial animal, acting against his own interest: in the city he would still be sleeping, and making more money too. What force other than territory’s innate morality could so contain his dedications? But here also is the biological reward, that mysterious enhancement of energy and resolution —territory’s prime law and prime enigma — which invest the proprietor on his own vested acres. We did not invent it. We cannot command it. Nor can we, not with all our policemen, permanently deny it. He who has will probably hold. We do not know why; it is simply so. It is a law that rings harshly in the contemporary ear, but this is a defect of the ear, not the law. I believe that we shall see, as this inquiry develops, that, harsh though the law may be, in this territorial species of which you and I are members it has been the source of all freedom, the curse of the despot, and the last desperate roadblock in the path of aggression’s might.
Ardrey, R. 1966. The Territorial Imperative. Atheneum, New York.
Meat and Livestock Association. October 2023. Strong financial outlook for the agricultural industry. Available from: https://www.mla.com.au/news-and-events/industry-news/strong-financial-outlook-for-the-agricultural-industry/
Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry. Financial Performance of Dairy Farms 2021-23. Available From: https://www.agriculture.gov.au/abares/research-topics/surveys/financial-performance-of-dairy-farms#:~:text=At%2030%20June%202022%2C%20one,of%20%241.3%20million%20or%20more.
ABARES: Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry. 2024. Snapshot of Australian Agriculture 2024. Available from: https://www.agriculture.gov.au/abares/products/insights/snapshot-of-australian-agriculture#daff-page-main
ABARES: Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry. 2024. Farmland Price Indicator. Available from: https://www.agriculture.gov.au/abares/data/farmland-price-indicator