Farming

by Don Henry Ford Jr.

We leased out most of our farmland to a sharecropper this year. He's one of the best in the county; otherwise he wouldn't still be farming. But his kind are soon to be dinosaurs if current trends continue.

Quentin's dad still speaks English with a German accent, and his mother maintains the old ways. In Oma's home lunch is served at 12 pm and you'd best not be late. No jeans for her. Papa was raised during the time when being a sharecropper meant you didn't go to school in the spring for there was cotton to hoe, and fall picking often ran until a month or so after school resumed. For him, getting a higher education was not an option. But he made sure his sons got the chance.

Quentin is a big man; he stands 6' 4" tall and weighs around 300 pounds. He moves well for his size; signs of the great college football player he once was still exist, but the dream of playing pro ball went out the window when a commitment to the military sent him to the Mediterranean as a young navel officer. That's about the only time he has left his haunts.

After the stint in the military Quentin returned to what he knew. But what he knew no longer worked--to stay in business required farming more and more land with less and less manpower, more and better equipment, and greater yields. The seed he once planted no longer sufficed; a farmer had to use new and improved varieties. And a wide array of chemicals became a necessity.

The freedom to plant what you wanted when you wanted eroded--oh you could do it all right. But if you did, you went broke. Farmers learned to rely on government subsidies for their survival--the cost of raising a crop often exceeded the value of that crop, and these handouts represented the profit. To qualify, you had to do what they told you: plant what they said, when they said, how they said.

When conforming to the needs of the government didn't alter Quentin's ways, conforming to the rules necessary to get crop insurance did. Without it, a few consecutive crop failures would put him out of business. Crop failures are a given in Texas. Sometimes it rains, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes when it does rain, it rains too much or at the wrong time. Early freezes, no freeze at all, hail, pestilence, crop disease: many things await the man who puts a seed in the ground and hopes it will multiply.

And when you do make a crop, chances are good everyone else did also so the price of the farmer's product is likely to be bad.

Take this year's cotton crop as an example.

First Quentin had to register with the government to plant cotton--the only way you can get assistance is if you comply with the rules and regulations for bowl worm control.

We had good early moisture. Quentin plowed multiple times to make a good seedbed out of the otherwise tight black clay soil. He fertilized before planting with anhydrous ammonia. And he put out a pre-emergence herbicide, but this works only on certain kinds of weeds.

The seed he planted was genetically altered to make it resistant to Roundup, a herbicide that kills just about everything it touches, everything aside from the Roundup resistant plant that emerges from this special seed. But this seed probably cost him about ten times what normal cottonseed costs.

After planting it rained--hard--way too hard. About twenty acres flooded and remained under water long enough to kill the seed. And about another hundred acres of land crusted over. The seed could not break through and Quentin had to replant. With more of that expensive seed. Then it rained again. The low spots in the field were lost for the year. The rest received a new dose of weed seed carried in by the floodwater. Muddy fields prevented him from cultivating, but he did manage to get through the field one time before the plants got too tall.

Then it rained. And rained some more. The plants grew too fast and Quentin had to apply growth retardant so the plants wouldn't get too tall for the cotton strippers. He also had an outbreak of boll weevils and pesky weeds to deal with. He hired an airplane and an insane pilot to apply these products. Several times.

Roundup deals with the weeds, but there's a catch. Round-up is the name brand product. Until a few years ago it was under a patent and extremely expensive. After the patent expired, an identical product was created and sold by a competitor. But Quentin can't use this cheaper brand. The company that sells him this genetically altered seed is owned by the same people that make and sell Round-up. Monsanto. And they require you to use their name-brand product. The insurance company is in on the deal as well. Without proof that you bought and used this outrageously priced herbicide, you have no crop coverage. We are talking about four of five times as much money per gallon and many, many gallons.

Quentin hired contract strippers to harvest his crop. These contractors travel from field to field and state to state harvesting crops. When they arrived to strip Quentin's cotton, it lacked a couple of weeks being totally ripe. But storms in the gulf loomed. So Quentin sprayed defoliant on the cotton and settled for what was ready. In retrospect he did the right thing. The crop yielded over two bales to the acre in spite of the flooded out sections and the loss of twenty percent of the bolls too green and immature to pick.

It began raining again as soon as he finished removing the cotton modules from the field. Those that waited for a full yield lost a lot of cotton to the water.

By the time Quentin was done, a bumper crop in the panhandle of Texas and in China had driven the price of cotton down to the point that this miracle he pulled off--producing a crop in far less than optimal conditions--did nothing more than break even. Meaning he and we made nothing. Zero.

The government stepped in and made crop deficiency payments. So Quentin netted about a $20,000 profit and we got $10,000, every stinking cent worth in the form of a government handout because Quentin was a good old boy, and filled out all the forms, and did everything the way he was told and maybe kissed the right ass.

I'm sure those big corporations that sold him those chemicals and that expensive seed did well.

You'd think farmers would resist going along with this kind of thing, but those that have survived know they must. I don't know a single cotton farmer in this county that dared to try to raise a crop this year without being part of the program. The same goes for those that raise corn or milo.

Damn it.

The day of the independent farmer is dead and gone. It's no different for those that raise chickens or turkeys. A few corporations own all the slaughterhouses and the distribution networks. Cattle all end up in the same hands, regardless of who raised them. Fortunately for us, a Texan sits in the white house so meat is high. So is oil. Imagine that. And it may just be a coincidence, but if one does a little snooping you might find that the boys sitting in the capital are heavily invested in companies like ConAgra, Monsanto, Cargill, and a few others and that they are all doing very well, thanks to all of you that need to eat.

Quentin has been hard at it, getting ready for another crop. His sons though have watched what their dad endures and moved on. One is a commodities trader in California; the other manages an athletic wear store in a Dallas shopping mall. No way in hell they are going to waste their life on the farm. So when Quentin retires, maybe some corporation will hire his Mexican hands and continue farming.

It's sad to see farming go the way of the buffalo, but if what this article (courtesy of cousin Phil) says, we can't make it here anymore.

Sometimes I shake my head and wonder how things got this way.