ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, March 9, 1997 TAG: 9703110051
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: 3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DENNIS T. AVERY
FOR 60 YEARS, the farm policies in America, Europe and rest of the First World have been aimed at ``saving the small family farm.''
But we haven't done it. Instead, our farms have continued to get larger and more mechanized in spite of price supports, import protection and laws against corporate farms.
Now the world is debating whether to permit free trade in farm products and ``unleash big industrial farmers'' to compete against the small family farms in Asia and Latin America.
The trend toward fewer and larger farms can already be seen in such ``poor'' countries as Thailand, Poland, China and Bolivia. Why can't we save the small family farm that every country wants to preserve?
The problem is that people, farmers included, want to live better. The small family farm has been losing out to the rising value of the off-farm job.
In colonial America, 95 percent of the population lived mostly on small family farms. The country didn't have many other jobs to offer.
But as the years went by, we thought up new products to make and new professions to serve people's wants.
When Henry Ford invented the assembly line and created the affordable car, he offered $5 a day for new workers. Where did they come from? Mostly from the farms.
Some of Henry Ford's new workers didn't like farm work. Maybe they hated getting up at 5 a.m. seven days a week to milk the cows. But many came because $5 a day at Ford was more money than they expected to earn by farming.
As the industrial age has turned into the silicon age, more and more companies have offered more in their wage packets to more workers to make more and more cars, refrigerators, TV sets, computers, tennis rackets and mountain bikes. They bid labor away from the farms.
There's also the ``city lights'' factor. Many young people are drawn to cities for their social life and the opportunity to explore more of the world.
When you combine higher urban incomes with bright lights, it's not hard to understand why the First World countries have less than 5 percent of their population on farms. The remaining farmers divide up more land among them.
To make better use of newly scarce manpower, three teams of horses get sold off to buy one tractor. Electric motors take over manure handling from the pitchfork. Rising productivity per worker makes up for lost manpower - but it also reinforces the trend toward urbanization.
The opportunity to live on the old-style subsistence farm is still out there. With 80 acres, a family can raise a few acres of crops, keep some dairy cows and chickens, even raise its own horsepower. It can get by with a secondhand car and library cards.
But that's always been a hard, often-lonely lifestyle. (Television is a deadly virus, because the kids get to see how other families live.)
And if you didn't inherit the 80 acres, you have to bid for them against commercial farmers who are trying to raise their family incomes by stretching their labor and machinery over more acres.
In a truly poor country, like Kenya, almost everybody lives on a small family farm. Nobody can afford much more than food.
Kenya's tourist industry creates only a few thousand jobs, and 75 percent of Kenya's 30 million people live on farms.
In rich countries, the number of small family farms drops so low that we do various unlikely things to ``save'' them.
America spent billions of dollars diverting 60 million acres of good farmland from production during most of the peacetime years since 1933.
If this preserved any small farms, they were outside the United States. A recent study estimated that the cropland diversion reduced America's rural nonfarm job opportunities by one-third.
Fortunately, America still has lots of people enjoying rural lifestyles and contributing to its farm output - even though they provide only a small fraction of our farm production.
They're ``sundowners.'' They hold off-farm jobs and farm only part of the time. They farm because they want to.
They add life and value to our rural communities as well as business volume for rural businesses. They are tough, flexible survivors who never got much from the farm subsidies and can't easily be driven out by low prices.
We can expect even more of them as electronics and telecommunications decentralize more ``city'' jobs and let more people live where they wish instead of where they work.
We can also expect the bipolarization of farming to continue. We'll get more small part-time farmers and bigger full-time farmers, whether sociologists and activists like it or not.
Is that a bad alternative? Ask a family in a nice eighth-floor apartment in Singapore if it wants to go back to a life of stoop labor in a rice paddy.
Ask a kid from an old-style dairy farm if he wants another low-paid job with a 14-hour day and a seven-day week.
The family farms that plan on staying in business are the ones that can project good lifestyles, good educations for their kids and some net worth at the end of the long row.
DENNIS T. AVERY of Churchville, author of ``Saving the Planet with Pesticides and Plastic,'' formerly was the State Department's senior agricultural analyst.
- KNIGHT-RIDDER/TRIBUNE
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