Vermont Farmer Fears Disappearance of Family Farms
26 April 2007
Dexter Randall describes the impacts of US subsidies at home and abroad.
When Vermont dairy farmer Dexter Randall returned home from a trip to West Africa last July, he couldn’t help but compare his life to those of the poor farmers he had just met.
Randall may have more land and better tools than farmers in Senegal, Burkina Faso, and Mali. But at the end of the day, he’s like any other family farmer. He gets his hands dirty, and he does it alongside his wife and children.
“I understand their plight as much as my own,” Randall said. “They just want to have the ability to feed themselves and have the way of life that they’ve had for years and years. And that whole culture is about to be lost.”
The threat hanging over family farmers here and abroad has a lot to do with misguided US agriculture subsidies. Commodity subsidies—government payments to producers of a small number of crops like cotton and rice—act as an incentive for the largest farms to produce more than they can sell domestically. They then dump the surplus on world markets, driving down prices. The world’s poorest farmers are forced into a competition they can’t win, selling their crops for less than it cost to grow them.
Randall said he saw firsthand how US subsidies worsen poverty in West Africa. “They depend upon cotton as a staple for food, education, and healthcare. That is their main source of income,” he said. “Their ability to feed themselves because of low prices has been diminished to the point of nonexistence.”
What’s more, Randall said, while these agriculture subsidies fuel harmful impacts abroad, they also encourage the consolidation of American family farms. The more you grow, the more you get from the government, so bigger farms often buy up small farms. Or small farms simply go out of business.
When Randall moved to North Troy, Vermont nearly 30 years ago, there were 22 operating dairy farms. Now there are nine. “Time has gone by and families have lost land, farms, and moved into cities,” Randall said.
For someone whose family has been farming for more than 200 years, fixing bad farm policies is really about saving a way of life.
“Every last one of us relies on food and fiber to live. If we lose the family farm, we have lost all of that,” he said.
