According to the profundities of our agriculture professors, these days you can either have farming as a "way of life" or as a "living"--that is, either as a "lifestyle" or as a "profitable business"--but not as both. (Purdue's Michael Boehlje, "From Tractor Driver to Chief Executive," Indianapolis Star, October 29, 2006) Obviously, things have not always been this way. At the turn of the last century, it was assumed that "to a large extent" a farmer's livelihood--food and fuel, and other necessities for living--were taken directly by the farmer from the farm and not gained derivatively through cash from farming. "The country experience" and "rural values" were a part of the "good living" a farmer made, and "the money," 10%, amounted to a return on the farmer's cash investment (5% actual cash profit, if that). Another assumption was that a "farmer" was anyone who had agriculture as the "chief means of livelihood." ("A Good Living and 10%," How to Do Things, p. 254)
As a result, one of the fundamental rural values of 19th and early 20th century farmers was self sufficiency, another was independence. Those are lost to today's "full-time enterprise farm." As Beohlje says, now farmers--as CEOs of a profitable businesses--are contract suppliers who must follow specific production methods and meet targets and deadlines. Targets? Deadlines? Operating "machinery and equipment 24 hours a day"? Sounds like nothing short of slavery to Tumbledown. All the work and none of the lifestyle? Why not punch a clock or sit in an office, if the object is merely money?
Is it really impossible to earn a full-time living and still keep the farming lifestyle? According to the good professor, the full-time farm comprises "5,000 or more acres or 10,000 or more hogs"--and is "more a business than a way of life." According to the professor, some mid-size farm families "choose" to both farm and have an off-farm job. Even so, it is "technology" that allows these farmers to manage "1,000 acres or more." Tumbledown wonders whether working two jobs really leaves time for the farming lifestyle. And when the second job is a result of the "choice" between losing the farm or adding an off-farm job to support the farming "lifestyle," Tumbledown figures the professor should have said these farmers "are forced" to both farm and work an off-farm job. Even so, these mid-sized farmers do not keep it up long, as their decreasing numbers demonstrate. That leaves the "lifestyle" farmer, whose numbers are growing. Maybe we should call these farmers "farming reenactors," weekend preservers of a "lifestyle" that no longer really exists. Artificial farmers.
Tumbledown suspects that these "lifestyle" farmers sometimes do harbor dreams of farms that "warrant the entire attention of at least one [person]" (another assumption in How to Do Things).
According to the same Star article, "65 percent, or 15 million acres," of Indiana land is dedicated to farming today. At the time of the 1900 census, the number was 21,619,623 (out of the total area of 22,982,400) acres, or 94%. (Cyclopedia of American Agriculture) According to the 2005 USDA stats, the number of farms in Indiana today is 59,000--at the 1900 census it was 221,897. Today the average farm size is 254 acres, then--if Tumbledown's calculator works--it was 97. The only statistic that seems to move in a favorable direction is the total cash value of the "agricultural products"--$5.5 billion last year, $203 million in 1900.
Have we taken the farming "lifestyle" out of farming in favor of cash? Do we really prefer dependent city living as the paradigm and independent country living as the exception?
Tumbledown somehow has the same dream as Harvey Wiley (The Lure of the Land) did:
"Theoretically, my idea of humanity would be a scattered population, all of the productive industries taken out of the cities and place in the country to which they properly belong, and the city left only as a place of exchange. Meanwhile, let us make the best of things as they are. ...intend to be real farmers, to live upon the farm and gain [...] livelihood therefrom,--and by farm I do not mean simply fields of wheat and corn, but I mean orchards and dairies and gardens and forests, in fact all the various activities by means of which Mother Earth yields her treasures of grain and fruit and flowers to her tenants."
Or as Gene Logsdon says (from his lips to God's ears), "The Future: More Farmers, Not Fewer." (Living at Nature's Pace
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