There are fewer farmers every year. Our average age keeps going up, and so does the average size of our farms. For the past 20 years, I’ve kept a “Family Farms” file of newspaper clips - many full of politicians’ rhetoric, espousing the values of, and the need to save, family farms. In 1940 there were 6 million farms; now there are 2 million, and the prediction is that there will be fewer than 1 million by the year 2000. The 400 largest farms in the country represent only about .02 percent of the nation’s farms, but they account for about 15 percent of total farm income. Ours, a mediumsize farm of 480 acres, which I work with the help of my wife and one employee, is doing well - for the moment. But we are concerned for our three sons, ages 6, 8 and 10, should they choose to farm.
This country has lost the capability even to recognize the needs of rural America. Many “enlightened and educated” people haven’t the foggiest idea of what is happening, nor do they care. Even farmers have been brainwashed into thinking little can be done: technology and big business’s control of agriculture are just too powerful to counter, they figure. And as long as food is relatively cheap and abundant, the consumer doesn’t seem to care how it’s produced.
Small family farms are worth saving, and not for nostalgia’s sake. We can never go back to the romantic scenes of Currier and Ives. But it appears the path we’re following continues to dry up small- and medium-size family farms and the small towns and community values that go along with them. It’s happening in the name of free enterprise and efficiency. Farm programs, initiated in the 1930s to help small farmers, have, over time, resulted in a major portion of the program going to large-scale agribusinesses. This encourages environmentally damaging practices on fragile lands. The more corn planted, the greater the subsidy. Some program modification is needed. We have a “cheap food policy,” but is it cheap in its implications? What are the environmental and health costs of modern agriculture with its heavy dependence on pesticides?
Some small farmers are fighting for something called “sustainable agriculture,” which simply means a system of agriculture that will last. In Iowa we call it “practical farming.” With it, farmers are seeking environimentally sound and profitable farming techniques that rely more on management and labor skills than on pesticides, expensive technology, high capital outlay and big debts. We are not organic purists; we are trying to find a happy medium where pesticides are used sparingly. It means making a decent living on the small- and medium-size farms, not looking longingly over the neighbor’s fence hoping his or her place will come up for sale.
My father’s attitude from years ago about social responsibility and proper care of the land continues to offer me hope. My dad could have farmed twice the number of acres. Instead, my folks rented out two 160-acre farms to a neighbor for more than 35 years. Dad said it meant having another family in our community. Several farmers I know got a foothold in farming this way and are still successful. Which brings to mind some agricultural myths:
Bigger is better. A recent study showed that production cost doesn’t vary much from 300 to 3,000 acres. (The medium-size farm is disappearing the fastest.)
One third of the world would starve if pesticides were eliminated. I’m not advocating that pesticides be banned. On our farm we have reduced their use by more than 75 percent in the last 10 years, and our crop yields have actually increased. We have rehed on crop rotations and improved cultivation with ridge tillage, a version of “raised bed”
Food prices would rise significantly if producer prices increase. You only have to examine a box of cereal to figure out that the farmer gets about 2 percent of what the product costs the consumer. A fairer way of pricing could be decided by the actual cost of growing product’s. As the system works now, huge producers who use large amounts of pesticides and drain the land of its nutrients through overplanting get the same price support as smaller farmers using more ecologically sound-and expensive-methods.
Politicians and government officials need to recognize that although very few people could produce all the food we consume, that is not in our best social and environmental interests. We must emphasize working with natural biological systems of growth to ensure long-term food safety and availability. We need a farming system that sustains a large number of farms and farmers and supports strong, vibrant rural communities. How many members of Congress who determine farm policy have a true handle on how a farm operates, how the needs and concerns differ in various parts of the country.?
Growing food, living in communion with the land and nature, raising livestock, guiding our children, having something to call our own-all these things give life meaning. I believe there is still a bit of farmer in all of us and that, given the choice, many would try this way of life. If we fail to see this and continue to move toward the corporate form of agriculture, the loss will be everyone’s.
title: “This Land Is Your Land” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-26” author: “Danny Hawthorne”
Once Frazier arrives in Cherokee, he’s asked to appear before the tribal council and say a few words about himself. He wasn’t expecting this. He is a soft-spoken man, and looks briefly nonplused at the podium. Fortunately, no one has mentioned that the meeting is being broadcast on live TV. When Frazier is finished speaking, there’s a silence before chairman Dan McCoy delivers his verdict: “He’s a country boy, just like us.” Then councilwoman Tommye Saunooke speaks up. “Darn good author, too, I’ll tell you that,” she says. “If I bring in my copy of ‘Cold Mountain,’ will you autograph it?”
Frazier published “Cold Mountain,” his debut novel, in 1997. He was 46. He had quit teaching at a local university to write it, after his wife, Katherine, told him, “You don’t want to wake up at 65 and wonder what kind of book you would have written.” The novel concerned a wounded, soul-sick Confederate soldier who deserts and treks home to the Blue Ridge Mountains and his one true love. “Cold Mountain” was riveting, though too meticulously written to be a page-turner in the usual sense: reading it was a steep hike, rather than a walk in the woods. Frazier hoped there might be 10,000 Southerners who’d buy it. But even without the divine agency of Oprah, the novel has become a modern classic, with more than 4 million copies in print. Today, outside Cherokee, Frazier passes a restaurant that his work obviously inspired: Inman’s Cold Mountain Cafe. When it’s pointed out that a lot of authors have given the American people great books, but not a lot have given them all the pancakes they can eat for $3.99, Frazier laughs and nods, looking slightly embarrassed. “I’ve contributed,” he says.
While researching “Cold Mountain,” Frazier came across a reference to a 90-year-old man in an asylum in Raleigh, N.C., in the late 1800s–a white man named William Holland Thomas, who, for days, spoke nothing but Cherokee. The story became “Thirteen Moons.” By April 2002, Frazier had already done some legwork on the book, but knew what he’d written was too woolly to show prospective publishers: “It’d go from a pretty finished scene that was five or 10 pages long, to 10 pages of plant names, to the recipe for yellow-jacket soup.” Instead, he wrote a one-page proposal for “Thirteen Moons” before coffee one morning. Random House paid $8.25 million for it, and producer Scott Rudin ponied up$3 million for the movie rights. Frazier was admonished in some newspapers for leaving the small publisher, Grove Atlantic, that had discovered him, though he’s still friends with his former editor. (Grove had bid $6 million in partnership with Vintage paperbacks.) It was not an entirely pleasant time for such a private person, although, sure, there are worse problems a guy could have. “I called my mother after the deal was done and I said, ‘There may be some stuff in the papers about this’,” says Frazier. “She said, ‘Oh, I already know. I saw it on the crawl on CNN’.”
“Thirteen Moons” is a gorgeous book. The novel’s narrated by ancient and feisty Will Cooper, who wants to set a few, but not all, things straight before heading off for “the Nightland.” At 12, Will, an orphaned white boy, is sold into indentured servitude at a Cherokee trading post, and finds a father figure in a tribal elder named Bear. Will studies every book within arm’s reach. He falls for an elusive girl named Claire and even fights a duel for her–not that this stops him from frequenting prostitutes. He buys hundreds of thousands of acres in his and Bear’s names and, as a state senator, travels to Washington to argue that his adopted tribe cannot be banished from the land because–gotcha!–they now own it. “Thirteen Moons” calls “Cold Mountain” to mind in its wonder at the natural world; its pacifist undercurrents; its dismay at the dismantling of what matters, and its conviction that one love, no matter how tortured and inexplicable, can be life-defining. The new novel is more ambitious and not always as tightly wound as its predecessor. But its history lessons are more fascinating and various, its prose more vivid and alive–the irony being that writing comes hard to Frazier, and “Thirteen Moons” was written during years’ worth of all-nighters that obliterated all else.
Even now, after advance raves for the new novel, there is still the occasional snipe in the media about Frazier’s rich deal–evidence of our peculiar, self-fulfilling notion that art should never sell and that only hacks should get the big bucks. “All that stuff about money–I sort of understand where it comes from. Do I like it? No, I don’t, but it comes with the territory,” says Frazier. He’s sitting in a coffee lounge, waiting for a meeting about a translation project he’s funding to render portions of the novel into Cherokee, part of an initiative to keep the language alive. “I saw something that said I was ’the symbol of greed in the publishing industry.’ I’m not the one who decided what the offers were gonna be on the book. And it’s not like I went into this just looking to take the highest offer.” Several offers were in the same vicinity, he says, but the strength of Random House’s marketing team was a factor. The publisher could hardly be handling the novel with more gravitas. These days, when Frazier says something goofy to his family–when he relates a joke from “South Park,” say–his 20-year-old daughter, Annie, will needle him by intoning, “An American master returns!”
Frazier is still more comfortable being called “a country boy just like us” than “an American master.” As a Southerner who comes from an unbroken line of readers, however, he would certainly defend a person’s inalienable right to be both. “One time at the University of Colorado, at a faculty dinner, this professor said to me, ‘Well, my goodness, a boy from Appa-LAY-chee-a with a Ph.D.!’ The dinner was in her house. And I said, ‘My grandparents didn’t have indoor plumbing, but they had more books in their house than you do’.” He laughs. “I was a little insulted by the Appa-LAY-chee-a business.” He shakes his head. “Yep, and I got shoes on!” And wherever he walks, we’ll follow.
