by Hal Hamilton

— April 1, 2002 —

We all know that farming is both important and endangered. It doesn’t have to be endangered.

From our farm in Hartland, VT we sell vegetables, “Ascutney Mountain Cheese” from the milk of our small herd of Jerseys, and maple syrup. The vegetable operation employs 3-4 people full time in the summer; the dairy and cheese business keeps 4 people busy part-time; and sugaring is busy for a couple of people in February and March.

Our farm is also an important recreational place for the village. There’s a walking and cross-country ski trail. There’s a snowmobile trail too, and a great hillside for sledding. One of the local teachers created a treasure hunt with Robert Frost poems on signs along paths so that kids are drawn from spot to spot.

Our farmstead is becoming one of the places where neighbors mingle and talk, particularly on summer Tuesdays and Thursdays when they come by to pick up their baskets of vegetables.

If we weren’t farming here, the whole 270 acres would probably be evolving into private lots for subdivisions and estates.

But our cheese, vegetable and syrup enterprises are all subsidized with off-farm work, and we’re wondering how they could pay better. From any normal measure of financial success, we’re somewhat foolish to keep on farming. A large proportion of the remaining farms in this part of the country will probably only survive if the rest of society is willing to make a commitment to farm income.

A few years after I started farming the first time, in 1973, I was making a decent living from a dairy farm-more money than a schoolteacher and less than the postmaster. I kept farming until 1988 and then took a break until recently. Finances for farmers have changed dramatically. For every 10 dairy farmers who milked 30 cows in the 1970s there is now only one dairy farmer milking 300 cows. And that one dairy farmer isn’t earning much more than he used to milking 30!

Farming is subsidized by off-farm jobs or government unless one is relentless enough to keep buying or renting more land, raising production, and making the same money from lower margins on higher volumes.

Meanwhile lots of people like to talk about the importance of family farms to our landscape, small towns, and culture. Consumers want fresh local food when they can find it conveniently. Everyone likes fresh tomatoes, specialty cheese, and corn on the cob in the summertime, horse-drawn wagons in the town parade, fields and woods to walk through in the fall-all these wonderful benefits of a patchwork of farms across the countryside.

But farmers need to make a living, not just enough to survive but enough to keep the barns painted and the work hours reasonable enough to get to town for meetings. Do we sigh and give up on this possibility, or can we sustain healthy farms?

To sustain farms, we’d have to decide it is really important, and then we’d have to change some policies. Changing farm bills, purchasing practices by institutions, and all that sort of thing will probably be the easy part. Deciding it’s important in the first place, or possible, is the hard part.

We’re trapped in old ideas. We think that short-term economic efficiency is the most important criterion of success, even though we all know that if we think about what’s good for our grandchildren, we’d add other criteria to the list. It might be more “efficient” to buy all our food from somewhere far away, but we’d really like to have some farms for our children or grandchildren to visit with their classes from school. We’d really like to maintain a working landscape and cultural traditions, even if it would be more “efficient” to let market forces suburbanize our hillsides.

To have any farms left in places like most of the Northeast, consumers and taxpayers are going to have to make sure that the production of those farms earns adequate incomes. That’s hard because beautiful year-round food in the grocery stores comes to us without its full cost. We get it cheap because labor is exploited somewhere else-Latin American, Texas, and California. We get it cheap because streams and soils are also exploited somewhere else.

Someday all that cosmetically perfect food won’t be flown on airplanes anymore because jet fuel will be too expensive. Someday, if current trends continue, we will have worn out or used up all that soil and water somewhere else. And meanwhile we may have lost most of our farms.

If we’re going to have farms left, and if we want our own Northeastern streams and soils cared for, we’ll just have to pay a little more. Farmers can get some of their income from consumers who are willing to pay extra for local food. Some farmers will earn money for providing a bed-and-breakfast service or recreational privileges. In places where the land is priced too high for farmers to afford, land trusts can buy the development rights and make farming more affordable. Taxes could provide incentives for stewardship and disincentives for using non-renewable resources.

In some circumstances, government will probably always be asked to write subsidy checks. Subsidies now have a really bad name because some of the largest farms get the most money, with many of the smaller farms not getting anything at all. If we focused those subsidies on what we want-landscape, local jobs, and wildlife, for example-there’d be plenty of money to go around and we’d pay for what we want.

We could do these things: change the tax system, support land trusts, and provide payments to those farmers who protect their land for the good of everyone. The first step, however, will be to decide that we MUST do these things.

© Sustainability Institute