FARMER ISLAND
A few days ago I had the distinct pleasure of spending time with Andy Caygeon Junkin, author of Stubborn and guru of succession and restorative farm family harmony.
His main mission is to save family farms by helping them work together better. His stories of family farm breakups due to relational tension are vivid and heartbreaking. This post is not about that primarily, as big a problem as it might be.
The profoundly striking comment he made to me centered on the emotional reality among successful commercial conventional fulltime farmers. These are the kinds of operations where he spends most of his time. These are the backbone of America's exceptionally productive agriculture, who makesus the number one commodity exporter in the world.
These are not homesteaders. They're not newbies. These are the heart and soul of our nation's mainline farmers. They operate relatively large scale farms; they're the ones featured in pictures and articles about American agriculture. The ones that make politicians and the USDA swell with pride. "Look at us, world, we feed you and we're the best."
He asked me to name what I thought these farmers worried about most. I took the bait and answered "weather, price, pestilence and disease." My mentor Allan Nation used to call these the farmer's "four horsemen of the apocalypse." When you think of what farmers lean on their pickups and complain or consternate about, it's always weather, price, pestilence and disease.
Any one of these things, at aggressive scale, can sink their operations. These are what every article about agriculture focuses on. Droughts, floods, hurricanes--all weather anomalies. Then the price; the poor farmer never gets a fair shake and the middleman makes it all. Pestilence--fungus, molds, grasshoppers. They never end. And finally, disease--the average farmer lives in abject paranoia that the next epizootic will wipe out his crop, herd, or flock. Bird flu is the current bogeyman.
According to Andy, I was wrong. He spends days, literally, sitting with these families at their kitchen tables. They call him at crazy hours in emotional crisis. If it's not weather, price, pestilence, and disease, I queried, what could it possibly be? Andy is a wise man.
Here's the answer, and I'm putting this in quotations although I may miss one or two words: "These guys average 60 years old. They're running this supposedly efficient operation, at scale, pleasing all the industrial ag experts, featured in publications and sitting on commodity boards, but they're paranoid about the future because their kids want nothing to do with the farm. Their kids are either in the process of leaving or already left and the empty nest screams to them 24/7/365. And their workers hardly speak English. They have no one to talk to. No one understands. No one to share with. They are emotional islands."
Wow. My heart broke. Why have we come to this? How did we get here? We got here because commercial conventional farms don't work. They're fragile, ugly, stinky, unattractive places to be. And what's the result? This will infuriate some, but the result is that the conventional commercial farm kids who are staying on the farms are the least thoughtful, least mindful people in the culture.
Only dimwits would want to take a dead-end commercial conventional farm. The action is on the fringes, where compost replaces chemicals and where diversity replaces monocrops. The excitement in agriculture today is not on the conventional commercial large scale operation, the obsolete aircraft carriers of agriculture. No, it's in the speed boats and small hand-crafted yachts in our farm sea. These smaller vessels are easier to turn around, quicker to change course, much more responsive to course correction.
Unfortunately, America's farming bloodbath is happening right now. Weather, price, pestilence and disease occupy the headlines, but the real story is about our allegedly most successful farmers becoming lonely islands in their sea of plenty. This is probably the biggest tragedy and failure of modern American agriculture.
What would you tell a 60-year-old depressed and frustrated commercial conventional empty-nester farmer?