=?iso-8859-1?Q?AMERICA=92S?= HEARTLAND VANISHING

[Johnny Holiday/John A. Taube]

The San Francisco Examiner, April 2, 2000
AMERICA�S  HEARTLAND VANISHING
Rural way of life disappearing as ranchers, farmers face changing times.

TRYON, Neb � Walking acorss the prairie, stepping carefully around cow
pies, Mike Abel confesses that he has told his son  and daughter not to
follow in his line of work.

He sounds for a moment like a repentant bank robber. But Abel is in an
even less promising field: He is a cattle rancher.

Ranchers like Abel on the lovely desolation of the Nebraska prairie near
this hamlet, miles and miles from nowhere and nothing, evoke the gritty
determination and toughness of John Wayne on a good day. But these days
the ranchers also evoke something else - poverty.

"What always hurt us was when we're at the table trying to figure out
how to make a land payment, and the kids are seeing us crying as we
wonder what happens if we can't make the payment," said  Abel, a sturdy
45-year-old man with flecks of gray in his close cropped hair. "We'd
always hoped this would be a family operation. But why should my son,
Tyler, struggle and make money only two out of five years when he could
get a good-paying job in the city somewhere?"

This rural area, McPherson County, is by far the poorest county in the
country, measured by per capita income. Federal statistics show that
people in McPherson County earned an average of $3,961 in 1997, the most
recent year for which statistics were available, compared with $5,666
for the next poorest county, Keya Paha, also in Nebraska. The richest,
New York County, better known as Manhattan, had a per capita income of
$68,686 in 1997.

While most of the American economy is going gangbusters, many rural
areas are undergoing a wrenching restructuring that is impoverishing
small ranchers and farmers, forcing them to sell out, depopulating large
chunks of rural America and changing the way Americans get their food.
The gains in farming and ranching efficiency are staggering, but so is
the blow to the rural way of life.

Rusty Moore, a lanky, rail-thin fifth-generation rancher, complains
bitterly about the difficulties as he sorts cattle on an icy, overcast
day on his 13,000-acre ranch: "I went to college for four years and
decided to come back and live in poverty," the 26-year-old said,
laughing as he stomped his feet against the cold.

But while there are many reasons for the misery in the agricultural
economy, perhaps Moore�s greatest adversary is himself  � and all the
other farmers and ranchers like him who have figured out how to increase
the output of their land. In Moore's grandfather's day, it took about 18
acres of this land to sustain a cow and her calf. Now, ranchers have
improved efficiency so that they need just seven acres for a cow and a
calf.

This surge in output is the main force driving the restructuring of
agriculture. In 1969, the average pig used for breeding produced 6.7
piglets per year. By last year, that had risen to 16 piglets per year,
and the most efficient operators got 22.

Those kinds of productivity increases have resulted in a world awash
with grain, pork, beef and. milk, even though the proportion of the
American public living on farms and ranches has tumbled to 1.5 percent
today from 42 percent in 1900. Some experts believe that with
biotechnology, the productivity increases are beginning to accelerate.

You can smell the future of farming as you approach it on a narrow dirt
road in neighboring Arthur County. A series of long, low warehouses
contain what is less a hog farm than a pork factory. The factory is
still being expanded,  but ultimately it will cost a million and produce
120,000 pigs each year.

The sows spend their days lying, in tiny pens, eating, drinking and
growing piglets inside of them. After giving birth, the sows suckle
their piglets until the piglets are weaned at 17 days. Then after a few
days' respite the sows come in heat and the process begins again.

Freedom to Farm Act

Just a few years ago, the United States thought it had a plan to
revitalize the agriculture economy: the Freedom to Farm Act.

Passed by the Republican Congress and signed by President Clinton in
1996, the law aimed to phase out subsidies but ease regulations and
promote exports to make farming profitable without gov6rnment aid.

Almost everyone agrees that the law has not worked. Direct federal
payments to farmers last year rose to a record $23 billion. That is far
more than the federal government spent on elementary and secondary
education, school lunches and Head Start combined.

With the failure of the new law, no one has much of a plan anymore, even
though the present course appears unsustainable. The growing cost of
federal farm programs, the replacement of small family farms with huge
factory farms, the fading of rural hamlets �  all these point to
historic changes under way in American
agriculture Yet the changes are happening without anyone guiding them or
the nation paying them much heed.

As the welfare system for poor Americans has been hugely curtailed in
the last few years, there is more scrutiny than ever of what critics see
as a major welfare system for grain and cotton farmers. Though the
evidence is mixed, some economists argue that the  billions of dollars
in federal payments are helping to drive out family farmers and
ranchers.

"Congress talks about saving the family farm, but it pours the money
disproportionately to larger farmers," said John A. Schnittker, who runs
an agricultural economics consulting firm in California. "As you
subsidize these large farms, they can pay more in buying land, and they
can pay more in renting land. And so the system we have now really
concentrates farming among the large operators."

Two situations loom, neither one encouraging: payments may continue to
soar until they threaten the budget, or Congress may be forced to cut
payments, leaving farmers in desperate shape.

`We're in a quandary'

"We're in a quandary," said Keith Collins, the chief economist for the
U.S. Department of Agriculture. Collins said the USDA's projections were
that this year's price for wheat would be the lowest since 1986, for
cotton the lowest since 1974 and for soybeans the lowest since 1972.

While grain farmers are ever more dependent on the agricultural dole,
ranchers - who get left out of the payment system - are often irritated
by the payments.

"Just to subsidize people because the price is low - that kills
ingenuity," said Doug Schmidt, struggling to make a go of cattle
ranching on a small spread near Ringgold.

Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman says that farm policy has to be
revamped and broadened to do more than make payments to distressed
farmers. He says that it should also help them add value to their
products, make it easier for them to insure against risks and work on
mechanisms to help people run businesses in rural communities.

The larger question is why the government should work so energetically
and expensively to preserve the family farm. Family owned restaurants,
bookstores and newspapers were all widely regarded as beneficial to
their communities, yet in each case America allowed many of them to fade
and be replaced by more ferocious and efficient economic competitors.

Qnly in the case of family farms, presumably because they are so rooted
in American mythology, are Americans willing to spend $23 billion a year
fighting economic change.

COMMENTS

I�m 87and have seen huge changes. Years ago family owned business were
everywhere. They�re gone. Eighty years ago throughout the U.S., every
neighborhood in every city had its own grocery store, drug store,
butcher shop, shoe-repair shop, barber shop, tailor shop, ice cream
pallor, dress shop, and the list goes on and on. These were all a local
operation and family owned. There�re gone. Every city had its own
department store. These were all a local operation and family owned.
There�re gone.

Each one of these had its own uniqueness, individualized
characteristics. They were not identical. What has replaced them?
Starbucks, K-Mart, Safeway, MacDonald, etc.

Today�s trend is conglomerates. Huge conglomerates. There more than in a
neighborhood or in a city or even in a state. There�re national. No,
that wrong. There�re international.

Family farms are a dying species. Farms are following local owned
stores. Those who think otherwise are probably sincere people, basking
in nostalgia.

Technocracy maintains that: 1. The move from smallness to bigness has
caused insurmountable problems and  2. We are trying to hang on to our
socioeconomic structure, our �Price System,� and, because it is not
compatible with modern times, our scientific-technological age, we put
our (scientific) culture in jeopardy.

Does Technocracy have documentation to substantiate the statements in
the above paragraph? Yes, and every single person who is concerned about
our unsettling times should study Technocracy�s material, whereby
checking as to their validity. Yes, it will take a study; there�re no
short cuts. As good a place as any to start a study is to log onto
Technocracy�s official web site <www.technocracy.org>  and review the
various articles on this site. Especially read M. King Hubbert�s article
�Man-Hours and Distribution.� Also, the unofficial Technocracy web site
<www.technocracysf.org> has solid Technocracy material. On this site, a
�must� to read is �A Commentary to Jim Lehrer.�