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About The Battalion. (College Station, Tex.) 1893-current | View Entire Issue (April 13, 1982)
have a meeting on April 15, Thursday, in up SERVED WITH SPICED MEAT BALLS AND SAUCE Parmesan Cheese - Tossed Green Salad n> ; i '-*■ —i r-> j Page 16-The Agriculturist-April 13, 1982 The eternal bind Farmers fight cost squeeze By RANDY GREEN Almost everyone now knows that agri culture is a business. The question is who the businessmen will be. They won’t be the farmers who went out of business last year. Or the ones who, unable to make ends meet by tilling the soil, will quit farming this year. Farmers and ranchers are in a cost- price squeeze. That in itself is nothing new. The cost of everything from fertiliz er to machinery to (increasingly) money has been going up for some time; com modity prices haven’t even pretended to keep up with spiraling expenses. But for many agricultural producers, things have simply gotten worse and worse. This year, predict the experts, might just be the worst income year for farmers since the granddaddy of them all, 193 . The government is trying to get pro ducers of major crops to produce less: to refrain from cultivating some of their acreage in the hope that a smaller supply will raise prices. Maybe that will help, a little. But it says something about American agriculture that farmers, in order to safe guard their economic survival, have to produce less food, not more. The American farmer is a victim of his own success. His productivity is unpara lleled in the history of... well, just about anything, anywhere. One U.S. farmer produces enough food to feed himself and roughly 60 other people. That’s incredible. Think about it: Most of man’s history has been a long and fitful struggle to survive. The fight for enough food to eat was so all-consuming, such an uphill bat tle, that the vast majority of people in most societies have had to till the soil — not to raise a crop for sale, but just to feed their families. Most people, in other words, farmed by necessity, not choice. The industrial revolution and its after- math changed that, and America’s far mers and ranchers took full advantage of it. They produced, and produced, and produced. America has not known famines; it has known surpluses. And therein lies the irony. Our food producers harvest a bounty unprecedented in history. We export more food than any other country in the world. Americans, for all their complain ing about high food prices, turn out to spend 16 percent of their income on food — less than virtually any other people on earth. This country’s main “nutrition problem” is overeating. Whatever advan tages the Soviets have over us in the grand scheme of things, our superiority in agriculture is unquestioned and un questionable. And our farmers are going broke. Not all of them, to be sure, not by a long shot. But it is happening. A veteran farm broadcaster recently showed a visi tor a thick stack of neatly printed fliers announcing auction after auction of farm equipment and supplies, all from the operations of families who just couldn’t afford to farm anymore. Those auctions speak far louder than any government statistics. Bad management may have done in some of those farmers, but the majority are more sinned against than sinning. They are good businessmen. They work hard, manage their money wisely and keep up with new techniques and tech nology. But they’re up to their ears in debt, and the price they get for their wheat or their cattle won’t even pay their cost of production, much less make them a profit. All right, so that’s a very sad story,Sc what? Well, comes one answer, if wedonidd something soon, the family farm willbt gone and corporate agriculture will ult over. Our food won’t be produced b; independent farmers with deep lies it the land and rural life, but by huge monopolistic corporations. That, of course, is the extreme statt- ment of the case. The vast majority of al! farms in this country are still ownedb[ individual operators. A great many of them are by no means “small farms,"of course; but 2,000 acres can be r owned just as much as 200. And historic ally, “corporate” agriculture perse hasp: been too successful, except in a fewfairb specialized areas. In other words, the question whether small farms are losing monet and will soon become factories-in-lhe- fields. The question isn't whetheritpaji small farmers to farm. No, the question is whether it pan anybody to farm. And that’s what makes the currentcri- it is unrealistic to call it anything else — so very disturbing. WE ARE FAMILY WE ARE FAMILY WE ARE FAMILY WE ARE FAMILY WE ARE FAMILY WE ties it was k lux Kl; mplish j&y Willey [: “We don we had in member of ( Ku Klu He saic tied will bletns n “We are iid. The Te nsored lw Klan esday n Willey, eader of t paginal f jc. He o tea code He exp rticipati ley were “Huma ences,’ going thn do their \ “But, i arms as tf ^ change h It’s not jninoritie mig abi educated ■lid. Willey a recent Beau mo 1 the K nJ w w TEXAS A&M COLLEGIATE FFA The i . Oldest Collegiate Chapter in the Nation *WE ARE FAMILY uj as Ui A PROUD PART OF THE COLLEGE OF AGRICULTURE FOR OVER 50 YEARS DEDICATED TO AGRICULTURAL - LEADERSHIP - COOPERATION - CITIZENSHIP Ui ITEL A aders Jenache brchestr Sinai with hd a U [Israel tod gyptian Tensic fom the tinned cl nd Pale hg of tw vered Dc ter Sund & §5 § Membership: AH Ag Majors and/or Present or Past FFA Members Meetings: Second and Fourth Tuesday of Each Month ft An ern fttalion ii hr Fall itory sh College ivith gr; :an pre iemeste Bus probath pterin G they ar Jrorobati 1 regrets Family WE are family we are family we are family we are family we are FAMILY