Rural America has lost its soul – UnHerd

But as the Farm Aid website suggests, the Jeffersonian myth persists. Many Americans continue to believe that the small-scale family farm is at the heart of American agriculture, and even more politicians parrot that rhetoric. This celebration of the family-farm fantasy is one of the few remaining tropes shared by both political parties.

The Farm Bill, a vast, sprawling, and expensive piece of legislation, is up for renewal during this legislative session. Whatever its final details, it will undoubtedly provide an almost bottomless grab-bag of subsidies and other goodies for industrial-scale agricultural producers, as it has for the last 50 years. I m guessing, however, that the elected officials who will shape the legislation will sing the song of the American family farm yet again, and voters will cheer in genuflection. This is a myth that will not die.

via unherd.com

After my second year of law school, one of the law firms I interviewed at was a small firm, filled with former Supreme Court clerks and with a reputation for employing the best and the brightest. I didn’t like it at all; one of the more reasonable young lawyers I talked with thought that prisons were so bad, no one should ever be sent to one, no matter how depraved his crimes. The name partner was a particularly obnoxious piece of work. He was a former Justice official from the Kennedy administration. He told me that they had a firm party every summer where all the young lawyers went out his horse farm in Virginia and “put up the hay.” As if that were just some sort of rural idyl. I grew up in Idaho and I’ve “put up the hay” a few times. You walk along side the hay truck, lift up 80 pound bales and drop them on the elevator, which lifts them up to the bed of the truck, or if the farmer doesn’t have an elevator, and sometimes they don’t, you lift up the dusty, prickly, unwieldy 80 pound bale to the bed of the truck, where another guy wrestles them into place. You do that about a thousand times. In fact, “bucking bales,” as it was called, was thought to be good training for the wrestling team. It was hot, dusty, dirty work, went on all day, and left your sinuses impacted with all manner of dust and manure powder. The farmers provided a hearty lunch, which was good, and you got to rest for an hour at lunch time, but then you were back again soon enough, bucking bales. How anyone could lure people to his farm and get them to buck bales, well, it struck me as about as fraudulent as the rest of his firm. Though they’re still going strong I heard.

Farming is hard, hard work. Not to mention dangerous. Many accidents are caused by the exhaustion of farm workers. If you’ve never done the physical part of farming, you really can’t imagine how hard it is. I have nothing but respect for farmers. When America was industrialized, young people flocked to the cities partly to get away from the drudgery of farm labor. Yes, I love animals and the country life, but I don’t like back breaking labor. Jefferson’s celebration of farming is just another pean from one who never did it.