Saving the Family Farm
Why would anyone want to be a farmer? If it's sunny, you sweat. If it's snowy, you freeze. If it's rainy, you get wet.
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| The Patchwork Family Farms Cooperative allows dedicated hog farmers like Carl Weihardt to stay in the business and raise hogs using healthy, sustainable practices. |
by Kristina Cañizares
Yet farmers across the country are fighting with their whole souls to keep on farming. They are men and women with farming in their blood, who can trace cultivation back through their families to the days of ox and plow. Now they find their livelihoods endangered, and the only way they can survive is together.
The family farm has been in decline ever since the 1930s, when 25 percent of the US population were family farmers. Now only 2 percent remain; the rest have been pushed out as farms grow bigger and more of them are owned by massive corporations rather than individuals. These corporations have deep pockets and tremendous political clout, against which no one farmer can compete.
But farmers have found a way to beat the odds; they are forming cooperatives. While each farmer continues to work his land individually, they organize as a collective and find strength in numbers.
Cornelius Key is a farmer and organizer for the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, an organization that supports black family farmers across the southeast. He believes that cooperatives are the future of family farming.
"The thing about a coop is that we can buy and sell together," explains Key. "Together we pay less for what we buy and get a higher price for what we sell because we have more to negotiate with. On our own we're too small."
A cooperative can also work together to create new markets. Key's cooperative the Flint River Farmer's Coop, bought a building and turned it into a farmer's market where they can sell their produce directly to consumers.
Patchwork Family Farms, a cooperative of hog farmers in Missouri, quickly found that they had to create their own markets because direct competition with big business was impossible. They did this by establishing relationships with local businesses, everyone from restaurants and independent grocery stores to soup kitchens and church groups.
Rhonda Perry is one of the founders of Patchwork and a lifelong hog farmer. "We aren't just out to sell a few hams," says Perry. "We are working to build a community around food justice and food systems. Our consumers are our allies, and the more they know about what we do the more they value us."
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| Thong Le and his family are members of the Hmong American Community Cooperative, which helps them market their vegetables to buyers throughout California. |
A growing number of consumers do recognize the advantages of family farms. Numerous studies have found small farms to be more efficient and productive and better for the environment because the farmer is more invested in the long-term health of the land. Besides, the quality of the product far exceeds anything a factory farm could produce--one bite of a Patchwork porkchop and you can taste the effort and care that went into its production.
"You've got more pride in something you own yourself," claims Karl Weihardt, another Patchwork member and a dedicated hog farmer. "I take good care of my farm because it's all I have, and I care about what the American people eat. I wouldn't sell anything that I wouldn't put on the table for my family."
Cooperatives also provide important technical and financial support. It is far harder for family farms to find farm loans and extension agents appropriate to their size. Most of them just service large farms.
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| Johnnie and Ulysses Marabel grew their farm from 60 to 650 acres over the last 50 years. They were able to provide college educations for all ten of their children, and during the peanut harvest they provide jobs to the local community. |
Many cooperatives work with training centers, like the one established by the Hmong American Community in Fresno, California. The Hmong are an indigenous people from Laos who arrived as refugees in the 1960s and are one of the poorest ethnic minorities in the country. The HAC works to improve their lives mainly by supporting farmers through its cooperative and training center.
"The Hmong people have always farmed," says Chouko Thao, director of the HAC. "They are not familiar with the technology and markets here. The cooperative and training center give them a place to turn for information and a way to learn from each other's knowledge."
The cooperative helps farmers with marketing and access to land and credit, while the training center educates farmers about appropriate technology and safe use of agrichemicals. "We are preserving the Hmong way of life," says Thao. "Farming gives us a sense of pride and accomplishment. For many Hmong it is the only way they know to make a living."
It is the same story for farmers across the country: farming is their way of life and their only job skill. When they lose their land, they lose their historyand their future, their homes and their jobs. Oxfam supports cooperatives like the Federation, Patchwork, and the HAC because without them, many of their members would already be condemned to poverty, struggling to afford the food they once produced.
"Farmers are part of the foundation of America," says Weilhardt, scratching his favorite sow behind the ears. "We're independent, but not so independent that we can't work together."
Kristina Cañizares is a freelance writer based in the San Francisco Bay area.
Click here to read more in-depth profiles on the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, Hmong American Community, and Patchwork Family Farms.