On the Great Prairie, the Farm Bill Does Little to Help Land Stewardship
20 March 2007
A multi-generational family farm in Minnesota is overlooked in favor of industrial producers.
Audrey Arner wants a few simple things from the 240-acre Minnesota farm she works with her husband, Richard Handeen. One is to live a balanced life, mixing work and play, and to do it within their means.
She wants her family to eat the food the farm produces and to be able to earn some profit from its crops and livestock. Her goals are the same ones farmers around the world have, including those in Africa: to make a living from the land. And Arner’s family does—because they market their farm goods directly to customers.
But for many other farmers, a 64-year-old initiative launched during the Great Depression stands in their way. It’s the US Farm Bill—a program that has pumped up to 20 billion dollars a year into a handful of American-grown crops whose surpluses flood markets abroad, dragging down the prices poor African farmers can get for their own hard-won harvests.
For Arner, who values the native grasses and rich prairie land around her, those billions of dollars are supporting the wrong things on American farms.
“I think the Farm Bill should reward stewardship, rather than excessive production,” she said. “There have been helpful provisions, like the cost-sharing programs, but there are just so many ways the program could foster more stewardship farming—driven by an ethic of conservation rather than an ethic of over-production.”
Stewardship is an important principle at Moonstone Farm. Handeen’s great grandparents emigrated from Sweden in 1872 and settled the land in Sparta Township. More than a hundred years later, Handeen and Arner followed in their footsteps, settling into a new life at Moonstone.
“We have taken a lesson from the great prairie,” said Arner, noting that buffalo once roamed the land there. Instead of planting vast expanses of monoculture crops like soybeans or corn—two of the commodities heavily subsidized by the Farm Bill—Arner and her husband have turned many of their acres back into a diverse mix of grasses that can support their 100-head herd of cattle.
“Our bread and butter is our cattle operation,” said Arner. “We directly market our grass-finished beef. We don’t feed any grains. It’s much more environmentally wholesome—healthier for the land, the people, and the animals.”
And they have taken steps to diversify the land even further—so it’s welcoming to all kinds of plant and animal life.
“We have broken up all the big fields, crosshatching them with wide swaths of woody plantings,” said Arner. “It’s beauty and diversity that can support prosperity.”
But it’s not prosperity courtesy of the Farm Bill—a false prosperity that props up the country’s largest farmers while doing little to help disadvantaged or minority farmers.
“Taxpayers don’t support us for growing grass in the landscape,” said Arner, “though grass is the foundation of the great prairies where we live. Taxpayers only support people growing corn, rice, cotton, wheat, and soybeans.”
And that’s where the trouble for farmers in Africa comes in.
For instance, a superabundance of US cotton, fueled by a program that rewards American farmers with ever bigger subsidies the more of it they grow, has depressed market prices in Mali, making it hard for farmers there to provide even the basics for their families.
That knowledge bothers Arner. And it might well bother other farmers too—if they thought about it.
“If we have any compassion at all, we understand what drives people to farm: It’s to generate enough income to send our children to school or to buy medicine when we’re sick. We take the ability to pay for those kinds of expenditures for granted here in the US,” said Arner. “Put yourself behind another farmer’s plow to realize the inequity.”
