I have been a fan of Will Allen for a long time, but never known much about him. His new book, "The Good Food Revolution" is a combination historical account of the evolution or devolution of the black farmer wrapped up in the story of his own ancestors, an autobiography, an inspirational speech and a how-to book.
This blog post will mostly focus on research presented in the book on the decline of the small farmer (and the black farmer), but the other portions were incredibly informative and in many places brought me to tears. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the history and necessity for urban agriculture especially in poor urban communities.
The following excerpts are meant to inform on the past. Allen also goes deeply and richly into his solution to these problems. For a full account of the how-to, I highly recommend this book.
On page 6, Allen discusses the two opposing viewpoints of the black leaders of his parents' generation, "Some black leaders encouraged my parents' generation ot leave the land as a way of self-improvement. At the turn of the twentieth century, the great black intellectual W.E.B. DuBois had urged African Americans to find success through a liberal education.
'The Negro race,' Du Bois wrote, 'is going to be saved by its exceptional men.' With this position, DuBois found himself in a long-standing argument with the educator and writer Booker T. Washington, who argued that black people would be better served by the development of practical abilities. He thought that African Americans should make an effort to improve their own position from within-by developing skills for self-sufficiency and by helping one another. 'Agriculture is, or has been, the basic industry of nearly every race or nation that has succeeded,' Washington wrote. 'Dignify and glorify common labor,' he said elsewhere. 'It is at the bottom that we must begin, not the top.'
DuBois' ideas won. His vision helped give us a world where it was possible to have Martin Luther King Jr, Jackie Robinson, Henry Louis Gates Jr, Colin Powell, Ben Carson, John Lewis, and Barack Obama. African Americans proved their worth in corporate board rooms, in Ivy League universities, on sports fields, in operating rooms, in the halls of Congress and the White House. This 'talented tenth,' as DuBois called the top-performing African Americans, provided blacks with role models and reasons for pride.
Yet, there never was a place among Dubois' Talented Tenth for farmers. And for all the progress in civil rights in the past several decades, there is one area in which we have stepped backward. Great disparities have grown in the physical health of our people. This change has come directly in the wake of the departure of black farmers from their land.
One in two African Americans born in the year 2000 is expected to develop type II diabetes."
Allen believes that "equal access to healthy, affordable food should be a civil right - every bit as important as access to clean air, clean water, or the right to vote."
He talks on page 51 about being inspired by the McGayverness of George Washington Carver, the famous black agriculturalist. He describes how when Carver arrived at his teahing job at Tuskegee Institute and found few resources for his classroom, he "went to the trash pile and started [his] laboratory with bottles, old fruit jars, and other [useful things.]
Where did all the small farms go?
On page 98, Allen goes into detail on the reason for the decline of black farming in the United States.
He writes, "black farmers have faced discrimination for generations, even to the present day. They have also been hurt rather than helped by the US department of agriculture and its policies. A crucial turning point in the relationship of black farmers and the federal government came when the Union general William Tecumseh Sherman marched through the South towards the end of the Civil War. Slaves abandoned their plantations and joined his army. To handle the challenge of so many refugees, Sherman issued a special directive to resettle the black families on the coast of Georgia, saying that 'each family shall have a plot of not more than forty acres of tillable ground' and that 'the military authorities will afford them protection until such time as they can protect themselves.' Shermans' army also provided mules to some of the first settlers protected under this directive.
Freed slaves soon embraced the hope that the federal government would help them establish their independence with the guarantee of 'forty acres and a mule.' Yet when president Abraham Lincoln was assassinated a few months later, his successor, Andrew Johnson, abandoned any commitments of the U.S. Army to protect black people who were resettled under Sherman's directive. He returned all land that had formerly belonged to slave owners, and the Freedmen's Bueau Act of 1866 - passed over Johnson's veto - did not provide forty acres and a mule. The act focused instead on trying to make sure that labor contracts between black people and their former slave owners were fair. The law provided few resources to enforce even this much more limited goal.
Without protection or assistance, former slaves faced severe obstacles if they hoped to obtain land. Few had any inherited assets or much if any cash. The reason that so many Afican Americans still speak nostalgically of 'forty acres and a mule' is that the policy if properly carried out might have provided a chance for thousands of former slaves to establish themselves independent of white landowners. It could have given former slaves and their descendants a path to self-sufficiency. Most black people in agriculture had to turn instead to sharecropping - a business relationship that seemed like wage slavery. Many Southern whites, however, perceived the policy of 'forty acres and a mule' and even the modest work of the Freedmen's Bureau as a handout to lazy blacks who didn't have the discipline to work har enough to buy their own property. These sentiments were often expressed by people whose economy had been built by slaves.
For black farmers in the twentieth century who outlasted the upheaval of the Great Migration, there were more subtle forces that drove them off their land. In 1982, the bipartisan US Commission of Civil Rights issued a report called, "The Decline of Black Farming in America" that attempted to understand why black farmers were leaving the profession at a rate two and a half times greater than that of whites. The committee found that one important reason was that black farmers were small farmers. The average commercial farm owned by a black man in the South was 128 acres. The average farm of a white landowner was 428 acres. Almost all of the technological innovations that the United States government had subsidized over the previous decades, the authors acknowledged, were geared toward increasing the productivity of large farms - and not to making small farms sustainable.
"The cost of basic equipment minimally necessary to run a commercial farm is much greater in proportion to the number of acres of land held by the average black farmer than it is for white farmers,' the authors wrote. 'Black small farm operators who cannot afford new large scale technology to increase their output fall behind.'
The authors also found that the governments income-support programs had the indirect effect of pushing small farmers off the land. These subsidies were first established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Great Depression to help farmers who were suffereing. Prices for things like wheat, corn, tobacco, rice and milk had declined sharply in the 1930s. Roosevelt's New Deal program encouraged farmers to allow some fields to lie fallow or to kill excess livestock; the decreased supply increased prices for these commodities. The government, in turn, compensated farmers for the money they would have made had they continued to farm at full capacity.
This idea was well intentioned. The unforeseen trouble with the income-support program as decades went by was it benefited those who needed it the least: the largest farms. the policy later shifted emphasis so that farmers were less often encouraged to let fields lie fallow, but were simply compensated directly with payments if corn or wheat prices fell below a certain minimum. This meant that the more food you could produce, the larger your income-support payment when prices fell too low. By the late 1970s payments for participating small farmers were as low as $365. Farms with more than 2,500 acres…received as much as $36,000 a year.
These policies allowed large farms to 'borrow and invest capital in more land and improved technology, resulting in increased production on their part and an increasing disadvantage for small farmers.
When black farmers tried to compete with larger farms, they have also needed progressively larger lines of credit. Farmers are paid only after a crop is harvested, which can be many months after they need money for seeds, equipment and fertilizer. When farms were smaller and communities were more close-knit, black farmers could sometimes turn to local farm supply stores for credit, borrowing from people who knew them personally. As this agricultural economy became more concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer companies in the twentieth century, most of these local stores were absorbed by national chains reluctant to to extend loans."
He goes on to talk about discrimination against black farmers in USDA loans. It's frustrating to think about how different the U.S. and the world could be today had the "forty acres and a mule" policy not been altered.
Why are there so many corn and soybean fields???
On page 113, Allen talks about the appointment of Earl Butz as secretary of agriculture in 1971 by President Nixon. "Mr. Butz had ties to several agricultural business firms, and he opposed the policies of Roosevelt's New Deal that fought to contain overproduction. Butz fought for foreign markets for America's excess corn and soybeans. He encouraged farmers to plant, "fencerow to fencerow" and to "get big or get out." He spoke of America's 'agripower': it's ability to develop huge stockpiles of commodity crops, which it could unleash upon the world markets when it wanted.
These new policies put considerable pressure on small to mid-sized farmers. After paying for fertilizer, seed, insecticides, fungicides, fuel, crop insurance, and labor, small farmers faced significant pressures in a farm economy where margins could only be a few cents per bushel. They no longer were competing against just local famers but were increasingly part of a global economy. From 1970 to 1980, the total number of farmers in the United Sates declined by nearly half. The average size of a single farm grew, however, to nearly 430 acres. When Butz resigned his position in 1976 after making a racist joke, he wrote to President Ford to say that "American farmers will always be grateful to you for your solid support of our efforts to raise their incomes and to permit them to manage their farms without excessive government regulation.'
The problem with Butz's argument against the meddling of big government is that his policies required the largest government interventions in agriculture in U.S. history. His fencerow to fencerow policy led to an eventual collapse of corn prices from overproduction in the 1980s, requiring large taxpayer-funded support for farmers - a dependence that has continued to thsi day. in 2000, nearly half of hte income for corn farmers in the United States was padif or by subsidies. In 1972, by contrast, the average annual federal subsidy to a corn producer was less than $100. By 2010, nearly 3/4 of government commodity payments were given to the same top 10% of recipients. The beneficiaries of this new cheap system of cheap corn and grain were companies like Archer Daniels Midland, who stood between farmers and food companies. They took raw commodities like corn and wheat and turned them into products that could be used for processed foods and beverages: high fructose corn syrup, frying oils, flours and gums."
The effect of this food system on the urban eater:
That people in cities should mostly eat food grown within a few miles of their homes was not always a strange idea. Kings and Queens Counties, which neighbor Manhattan, ranked as the number one and number two largest producers of vegetables in the United States as late as 1880. Someone standing in the heart of Brooklyn during that American Civil War would have seen, according to one account, ' avista of the finest farmland in America, almost treeless for six miles and beyond, in full view of the Atlantic Ocean.' These farms fed the city that was rising on the Hudson River. By 1949, however, the Brooklyn Eagle ran a story on the area's 'last farmer' who grew squash and broccoli on three acres soon to be overtaken by an apartment complex.Across the United States, the local agricultural system was dismembered piece by piece in the twentieth century. As urban areas expanded, property prices rose in areas on the edge of cities. Farmers sold their land and often relocated to places where land prices were cheaper. City planners never made an attempt to incorporate agriculture into the fabric of urban life. Technological innovations that arrived over the course of several decades - the canal system, the railroads, refrigeration equipment, tractor-trailers, airplanes, canning and freezing processes, meant that farmers and consumers were no longer yoked together geographically by necessity.
The average food item of food consumed in the United States today travels 1500 miles from producer to consumer, and it is buoyed on a sea of oil and gasoline. We spend about $140 billion each year just for the energy required to deliver food on our tables. The long journey from farm to consumer also has nutritional effects on the foods we consume. Fresh green beans, for example, have been shown to lose nearly 80% of their Vitamin C within a week of being picked.
A family living in an inner-city community today faces a radically different food environment than their ancestors did. Less than 1/4 of 1% of the food they eat comes directly from farmers. This family often lives two miles or more from a supermarket, which abandoned inner cities in the 1960s and 1970s as part of a tide of urban disinvestment. If the family is poor-and the father and mother are working on or more jobs - they contend with the daily struggle of nourishing themselves using as little money and time as possible.
In many inner-city communities, the only companies that meet these specific demands of low-income families are corner stores and fast-food restaurants, with their dollar menus, 99c bags of chips, two for one offers, and 20 piece boxes of chicken nuggets. One recent study has shown that a 2000 calorie diet can cost as little as $3.50 a day if it consists entirely of junk food, while healthy foods that are not as energy dense can cost more than 10x as much.
'If you have $3 to feed yourself,' a researcher at the University of Washington recently told The New York Times, 'your choices gravitate toward the foods that give you the most calories per dollar. Not only are empty calories cheaper, but the healthier foods are becoming more and more expensive. Vegetables and fruits are rapidly becoming luxury goods."
Below are people, readings and organizations mentioned in the book that are worth looking into
Jonathan Woods p.124Jerry Kauffman p. 145
Robert Pierce p. 163
Lewis Mumford, The City in History
Arnold Kauffman, The Radical Liberal
Journal of the American Planning Association, "The Food system: A Stranger to the Planning Field"
The Madison Food System Project
Farm-City Link
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