Dowden, in the first chapter of Altered States, Ordinary Miracles, describes a school in Uganda that he used to teach at as a young man. He took the time, a few sentences in this chapter, to describe a tenet of rural life in Sub Saharan Africa. Polemically stated, children don’t want to be farmers.
It’s possible to say the same about children and farming in the United States. Even without statistical backing, it is not beyond the grasp of many people that they do not want to be farmers. They do not want the long days, the toil, and low pay (even with subsidization).
The outskirts of Chicago are expanding. Naperville, a forty minute drive from the city center by expressway, was predominantly farmland fifty, twenty, ten years ago. I visited the last 700 acre farm in Naperville in the late fall of 2009. It’s proprietor saw needed more revenue – a larger harvest, higher grain prices, or increased subsidies – to predict keeping the farm more than three more seasons. Developers were offering him vast sums – the equivalent of two years net income for the land. It sits one mile off of the main commercial street that sports national chains and their parking lots. A housing development can be seen through the trees on the far south side of the grain fields. Our farmer is hemmed in.
He, who will be referred to as Farmer Joe to maintain his anonymity, is a rare case in as much as he grew up in a rural community, took over his family’s farm, left farming, and then came back to it again in later life. Coming back is what makes him the rarity. He said the likes the toys – the machinery, the combines, etc. – and his mechanical affinity brought him back. He owns these 700 acres, and is a tenant farmer on four other farms that he doesn’t own. He does this to make more money. By his accounts he needs this in order to have a comfortable retirement within the next ten years.
As of August 2010 the Tuttle Farm in New Hampshire – the oldest continuously running family farm (no definition of family farm will be attempted here) in America has publicly announced it will be closing. (Here is the NPR radio transcript with it’s current proprietor discussing it’s closure.) It’s been operating for longer than the United States has existed. In July NPR also ran a story about United Farm Workers (UFW) – a majority Hispanic political body representing the interests of a largely Hispanic population of farm workers in the United States – and how they are offering training to anyone, ANYONE, who would like to be a farm worker. Their aim was to counteract the claim, particularly in light of Arizona’s recent immigration legislation, that Hispanic immigrants from the Americas are taking American jobs. The labor group contends that they are taking jobs in America, but that the common moniker that Americans don’t want these jobs is true. As of that interview (available here) the President of the NAFW wasn’t aware of any documented American approaching the group for training. The hours are long, the pay abysmally low, and if any one of us had documentation we would be hired according to this interview. It’s an uncompetitive market for documented workers. The employers are legally required to hire documented workers – they hire undocumented ones illegally in direct reaction to the paucity of legal workers ‘contending’ for jobs. It might be fare to say that Americans on the whole don’t want to be farm workers.
Farms around the country are being transferred or closed as kids decide they want office jobs, or an escape from the inevitable truth that all agriculture (including husbandry) is dirty, bloody, and low paying.
CSA farms too have high intern and employee turnover rates. The majority of them are non-profit urban farms, and even if they grow organic vegetables – the highest returning per unit produce in the world and have access to direct farmers markets for excess yield – often don’t make ends meet without state assistance. This is true as far as I’ve seen.
I’ve left Chicago for DC, and I’ll be leaving DC for East Africa within the next six months. I was walking down the street, and I had to laugh as it dawned on me that this metropolis particularly the predominantly white NW section is filled with almost nothing but service sector employees. Value adding comes through service and an ever increasing incorporation of electronic capital. I wanted to walk down the street and ask this city if anyone was employed in chemical manufacturing, commodities, farming, etc. – any of the basic industries that manipulate the inorganic and organic fundaments of our world to create the more complicated objects and foodstuffs all around us. It may be erroneous of me, but I assumed that each of the people walking or driving down the street in the highest educated city in America per capita were not stewards or participants in these industries.
We don’t want to work on farms – I mean that the people around me in Washington, DC, or the absolute majority of people I knew in Chicago, or the people I knew in San Diego want to work on farms. It explains the ever growing Urban Rural divide in the United States. What makes this different than youths wanting to leave their plots, shambas, land in Sub Saharan Africa? Well, in comparison with the white middle class in America – predominantly service level employees already – we don’t have to deny the livelihoods of our parents in order to seek air conditioning and a cubicle.
If the United States is the Saudi Arabia of cereal, but the vitality of it’s agricultural sector is in gradual decline because the American economy re-established itself over a century as a predominantly service driven economy, would it not be in the interest of our state to maintain our agricultural sector? Most states in Africa rely on some level of food aid to help impoverished populations some years. Would it not also be in these countries’ interests to increase the vitality of their agricultural sectors in the face that many of their populations, the young in the world’s youngest continent, wanting to leave the land for greater material wealth? Then why not institute a program that entices people to the land for a time?
We have programs that create temporary teachers in light of failing educational systems. We have tuition incentives in order to bolster a decreasing military population. Education and the military have become part of our civic parlance throughout our nationalist pedagogy. Why can’t the science of food production be made part of our civic vocabulary and incentivize temporary agricultural participation – farming or more – while increasing early exposure to environmental education and the important political, economic, and life sustaining ramifications of food production. Could we re-invent the Civilian Conservation Corps for the twenty first century and re-connect the American populous to the realities of the food they find in boxes and under cellophane? Could others expand education and national grain yields by creating a clear pathway to air conditioned office jobs and education through agriculture?
Could we actually expand (optional) pedagogy to a point where the world would become singularly practically and abstractly participatory in its own subsistence?
In America it would require an institutional decompression of time; twenty year olds would need to understand that the entirety of their futures don’t have to be decided exclusively over the 8 years between 9th grade and the end of their undergraduate careers. In Africa on the other hand funerals, weddings, and school fees account for large portions of any individual family’s total costs. With state help, the equivalent of agricultural work study, could one of these major burdens to African livelihood be lifted from families’ shoulders? Black Africa would need a market and distribution system it largely doesn’t have yet. America would just need to get private industry to affirm it’s civic/agricultural education/accreditation system so they would accept ‘work study’ candidates after training. The network of farms and transportation systems in the United States already exists to accept workers. The farms and corporations just need to know they want the students seeking tuition help.
So everyone needs food, and youths in both America and Africa want to leave the soil for more comfort and prestige. If we cannot glamorize the dirtiest and bloodiest of all pursuits, can we not acclimatize people to its necessity, incentivize its stewardship, and persist? All in all I’d guess implementation of this plan would need this plan would require 10 years concerted effort in the United States for national implementation; while selected case projects could be done in less time in various areas of consistently high relative production in parts of African countries. It would depend on environmental, social, and political climates on national and local levels to determine if a case study could even be possible.
Maybe I should look.
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