Surplus production is a risk native to commercial agriculture. This is because farmers individually and collectively do not know, and cannot learn ahead of time, the extent either of public need or of market demand. Given the right weather and the “progressive” application of technologies, their failure to control production, even in their own interest, is thus inevitable. This is not so much because they won’t, but because, on their own, they can’t. Either because the market is good and they are encouraged, or because the market is bad and they are desperate, farmers tend to produce as much as they can. They tend logically, and almost by nature, toward overproduction. In the absence of imposed limits, overproduction will fairly predictably occur in agriculture as long as farmers and the land remain productive. It has only to be allowed by a political indifference prescribed by evangels of the “free market.” For the corporate purchasers the low price attendant upon overproduction is the greatest benefit, as for farmers it is the singular cruelty, of the current agricultural economy. Farm subsidies without production controls further encourage overproduction. In times of high costs and low prices, such subsidies are paid ultimately, and quickly, to the corporations.
This version of a farm economy pushes farmers off their farms. By increasing the wealth of urban investors and shoppers for “country places,” it increases the price of farmland, making it impossible especially for small farmers, or would-be small farmers, to compete on the land market. The free market lays down the rule: Good land for investors and escapists, poor land or none for farmers. Young people wishing to farm are crowded to the economic margins and to the poorest land, or to no land at all. Meanwhile overproduction of farm commodities always implies overuse and abuse of the land.
The traditional home economies of subsistence, while they lasted, gave farmers some hope of surviving their hard times. This was true especially when the chief energy source was the sun, and the dependence on purchased supplies was minimal. As farming became less and less subsistent and more and more commercial, it was exposed ever more nakedly to the vagaries and the predation of an economy fundamentally alien to it. When farming is large in scale, is highly specialized, and all needs and supplies are purchased, the farmer’s exposure to “the economy” is total.
It ought to be obvious that an economy that works against its sources will finally undercut the law of supply and demand in the most fatal way, that is, by destroying the supply. A food economy staffed by producers who are always fewer and older, whose increasing dependence on industrial technologies puts them and their land at ever greater risk, obviously cannot feed without limit an increasing population. But the reality of such an increasing scarcity is unaccounted for by the doctrine of the free market as applied to agriculture. Even less can this version of freedom comprehend the need for strict limits upon land use in order to preserve for an unlimited time the land’s ability to produce. In a natural ecosystem, even on a conservatively managed farm, the fertility cycle may turn from life to death to life again to no foreseeable limit. By opposing to this cycle the delusion of a limitlessness exclusively economic and industrial, the supposedly free market overthrows the limits of nature and the land, thus imposing a mortal danger upon the land’s capacity to produce.
When agricultural production is not controlled by a marketing cooperative such as the tobacco program, the market becomes, from the standpoint of the farmers, a sort of limitless commons, the inevitable tragedy of which is inherent in its limitlessness. In the absence of any imposed limit that they collectively agree to and abide by, all producers may have as large a share of the market as they want or can take. Only in this sense is the market, to them, “free.” To limit production as a way of assuring an equitable return to producers is assuredly an abridgement of freedom. But freedom for what? For producers, it is the freedom to produce themselves into bankruptcy—to fail, that is, by succeeding. For the purchaser, it is the freedom to destroy the producers as a normal and acceptable expense. The only solution to the tragedy of the limitless market is for the producers to divide their side, the selling side, of the market into limited fair shares by limiting production, which is exactly what the tobacco program accomplished here in my region. By preventing the farmers’ overuse of the market, it prevented as well the overuse of the land.
Agribusiness corporations of course don’t openly advocate overproduction. They don’t have to assume visibly the moral burden of their bad motive. All they have to do is stand by, praising American agriculture’s record-breaking harvests, while either hope or despair drives the remaining farmers to produce as much as they can. The agribusinesses then are glad to sell the very expensive surplus of seeds, chemicals, and machines needed for surplus production.
The agricultural tragedy of the market is in part political. And how was the by-now entirely dominant political position on the agricultural free market defined? In the middle of the twentieth century, think tanks containing corporate and academic experts laid down the decree that there were too many farmers. They decreed further that the excess should be removed as rapidly as possible, and that the instrument of this removal should be the free market, with all price supports and production controls eliminated. The assumption evidently was that the removed farmers would be replaced by industrial technologies, recommended by the land-grant universities, and supplied by the corporations. The surplus farmers would increase the industrial labor force, and they and their families would enlarge the population of consumers of industrial products. It was proposed of course that all of society, including the displaced farm families and farm workers, would benefit from this. There would be no costs, social or agricultural, no problems, no debits, nothing at all to subtract from the accrued economic and social assets. This would institute an evolutionary process that would unerringly eliminate “the least efficient producers.” Only the fittest would survive.
In short, by granting a limitless permission and scope to the free market and technological progress—which is assumed to work invariably for the best—politicians, by doing merely nothing, could rid themselves of any concern for farmers or farmland. The representatives of the people and the guardians of the common good were thus able to “free” the market to promote the (allegedly) inefficient farmers to (supposedly) the suburbs while subjecting the countryside to limitless progress and modernization. Against this heartless determinism, it is useful to remember that it was the aim of the program for burley tobacco in my region to include and help every farmer, even the smallest, who wanted to grow the crop. The difference was in the minds of the people whose work during four decades at last shaped an effective program. Those people, unlike the experts of the midcentury think tanks, were thoughtful of the needs of farming and farmers as opposed to the needs of the corporate free market known as the economy. The doctrine of “too many farmers” has never been revoked. No limit to the attrition has been proposed.
As evidence of the persistence of this doctrine, here is a passage from a letter of October 3, 2016, from John Logan Brent, Judge Executive of Henry County, Kentucky:
I have taken a couple of afternoons to work on the accounting for farming cattle under the current terms. Enclosed you will find that product based upon a real example, which is our 100 acre farm . . . and its approximately 25 cow herd. . . . The good news is that for a young man wishing to earn a middle, to slightly below middle class annual salary of $45,000 farming cattle full-time, he only has to have $3,281,000 in capital to get started. If he can find 780 acres to rent, he only has to have $551,000 for used cows and equipment. I say this is the good news, because the reality is that this was based on a weaned calf price of $850 from June of this year. According to today’s sales reports, that same calf is now $650 at best.
That alone, forgetting other adverse agricultural markets, would be an excellent recipe for the elimination of farmers. And conservationists should take note, as mostly they have not done, that in the absence of the eliminated farmers and with the consequent increase of agricultural dependence on the fossil fuels and toxic chemicals, there will be more pollution of water and air.
The related problems of low prices and overproduction of a single but significant crop were solved for about sixty years, in my part of the country and in others, in the only way they could be solved: by a combination of price supports and production controls. This was the purpose and the