|
Previous |
1 | 2
As megafarms take over, rural towns fight for survival
Still, old patterns die hard, especially in the brutally competitive food business. Many direct-marketing experiments have failed to capture a sustainable market. Dakota Growers faced the opposite problem: Its farmer-owners couldn't raise capital quickly enough, which forced the cooperative last year to change its organizational structure and move a step closer to becoming a traditional corporation. Even organic farming is showing signs of going the corporate route, Kirschenmann says.
For two decades, biotechnology has held out the promise that farmers could grow new kinds of foods. But the technology remains controversial and so far has improved current mass-production crops rather than creating new ones.
Other farmers are diversifying away from food altogether. Some are trying to reap the wind with huge turbines that create electricity. All across the Plains, producers are turning to "agri-tourism": They open their farms to visitors who want their children to see where food comes from, or they rent their land to hunters. This time of year, hundreds of Plains motels lure the hunting trade by making available cutting tables and large freezers for cleaning and storing game.
"It's our harvest, really," says Betty Chapin, who runs the Modern Aire Motel with her husband in Smith Center, Kan.
Still other producers hope to make a living from growing and processing renewable fuel, such as biodiesel. And a handful are experimenting with an offshoot of biotechnology, called "biopharming," which involves raising crops that produce drugs or drug ingredients. The Texas-based company ProdiGene, for example, is selling an enzyme, Trypsin, grown in bioengineered corn and used to speed up the production of insulin.
The biopharming market remains iffy. "It's not clear how big an opportunity it would be for farmers," says Michael Fernandez, director of science for the Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology, a nonpartisan group in Washington, D.C., focused on genetically modified food. Large drug companies are likely to strictly control production, perhaps even owning and tending the fields they use.
Even smaller biopharming companies may insist on strict controls in the wake of a recent federal fine levied on ProdiGene for accidentally contaminating soybeans with its bioengineered corn.
Could public policy help the region? The biggest federal initiative - farm programs - has kept average farmers' income above that of nonfarming neighbors and roughly equal to that of other local businesspeople. But because the lion's share of aid goes to the biggest operators, critics argue that farm programs are speeding up consolidation. In essence, big farmers get government money to buy out their neighbors, they say.
But that's not the full story. Big farms also produce more food than smaller operations and, on average, actually receive a little less federal aid per dollar of output than smaller farms, says Jeff Hopkins of the US Agriculture Department's economic research service. He concludes that farm policy has done little to affect consolidation one way or the other.
Some reformers argue public policy could rescue the Plains frontier by shifting more money toward the revitalization of rural communities. "We could spend the same amount of money we spend now on agricultural incentives and public policy and stop the bulldozer" of depopulation, says Chuck Hassebrook of the Center for Rural Affairs, a nonprofit research and advocacy group in Walthill, Neb.
Environmentalists argue the government should stop paying farmers to take cropland temporarily out of production and buy up that land instead, creating huge ecological reserves.
Whatever direction the region decides to take, decision time is approaching for frontier farmers.
* * *
No one is more surprised that Alexander is still farming than Alexander himself. When he graduated from college with an accounting degree, he had a job lined up in Duluth, Minn. He came back home simply to help his father harvest the wheat - and then lingered.
"I realized what we had here and how unique it is," he explains. His great-grandfather, a runaway Mississippi slave and Buffalo soldier, homesteaded here, and passed the land on to his son, who expanded the operation and tilled 600 acres with mules. By the time Alexander and his father ran the operation, it had expanded to some 1,700 acres.
Tractors and combines, chemical fertilizers and herbicides meant that one family could now run a large spread by itself and produce far more grain than farmers two generations ago could have dreamed of. But they also speeded up the seemingly unstoppable march toward megafarms and rural depopulation.
"This whole 20-mile radius was our playground," says Alexander, standing in his driveway and stretching a hand out toward the emptiness that once housed big families and his playmates. "We would ride our bicycles. Then we went through a phase where we rode horses."
For the future, "I see bigger and bigger farms," he says, "and small family farms like what I'm running won't be around."
A soul-food restaurant dream
BOGUE, KAN. - Sometimes, ties to the land run so deep it's nearly impossible to come home. Just ask Angela Bates-Tompkins, who wanted to return from Denver to her roots in Kansas.
Her parents, who had already moved back, preferred to leave their land to all six children, rather than sell. And no one else from Nicodemus, the historic farming settlement, would part with their property. For six years, Mrs. Bates-Tompkins pleaded with a cousin, who finally sold her 25 acres just west of Nicodemus.
Now back, Bates-Tompkins wears many hats. She writes educational materials, performs a living-history program, and last May opened Ernestine's Bar-B-Q here in nearby Bogue. Every weekend, people come from miles around for ribs, potato salad, and baked beans so fine they could almost be the main course. She even uses the locally produced Promised Land Flour for her bread and fried chicken.
Ernestine Van Duvall used to run a restaurant in Nicodemus but moved to the Los Angeles area and started a restaurant and catering service there. That's where Bates-Tompkins learned to cook soul food.
These days, Bates-Tompkins does the cooking while Mrs. Van Duvall plays the piano for customers. The restaurant "is holding its own," Bates-Tompkins says, but she hopes to move it to those 25 acres outside of Nicodemus. "If I could be in 'Demus, that's where I would be. It's home."
| For further information: |
| • |
With these Hands
|
| • |
American Farmland Trust
|
| Please Note: The Monitor does not endorse the sites behind these links. We offer them for your additional research. Following these links will open a new browser window. |
|
RSS feed
