The Rural Voice, 1979-04, Page 25Keith Roulston
It's time farmers stopped being nice guys
BY KEITH ROULSTON
While many people in Canada and the
U.S. have been heading for Florida or
California or Arizona or some other
southern clime, thousands of American
farmers have been spending the past
couple of months in Washington.
Now despite all the hot air generated by
thousands of politicians and bureaucrats,
Washington is not exactly anybody's idea
of a winter retreat. But the farmers have
been anything but on a retreat: they've
been on an offensive.
Many people in Washington have found
their campaign indeed offensive. People
got pretty upset when the slow-m_ving
tractors the farmers brought with them
created rush-hour chaos on the
Washington highways. The farmers got
very little sympathy from members of the
press corps in Washington. Those feelings
did change somewhat when a blizzard
buried the city and the farmers used their
tractors to get people around the clogged
streets and clean up the city. For the first
time people saw them as something other
than radicals on expensive machinery.
There was a day when I would have been
with those who thought the farmers should
go on home and write letters to their
congressman like nice little constituents.
That day, however, is gone. I'd be in
support of the U.S. farmers even if they
hadn't won sympathy through their work in
the snowstorm. They say when you get
older, you're supposed to mellow. When it
comes to the farm issue, I seem to be going
the other direction.
Not that I'm exactly in favour of farmers
taking to the streets and burning and
looting like the student radicals of a decade
back; not that I see a need for a revolution;
it's just that I think farmers have been
worried for the last decade or so about
being polite and not smudging the image of
the farm population and just how much
progress has it gained them? Every year a
few thousands more farm families are
forced off the land and into jobs they are
often ill suited for in the cities. And all in
the name of "efficiency".
Maybe my feelings on the situation were
effected by the fact I was reading John
Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath at the same
time the march to Washington was hitting
the headlines. The Grapes of Wrath is one
of those books that gets the hackles up of
some of our citizens here about because
characters in it use the Lord's name in
vain. I think the Lord wouldn't mind that
so much as people not reading the book
and missing the story that Steinbeck has to
tell.
His story begins in the American
southwest during the dust -blow years inthe
'30's. Driven by the economic s of the
depression, the banks foreclosed on the
farmers and consolidated their little farms
into big farms, replacing the power of
hundreds of backs with the horsepower of
giant tractors. The bewildered people were
driven from their homes and were lured to
California by the promise of jobs. There
they found more big farmers who had
purposely sought more people than they
needed so they could pay lower wages. The
huge plantation owners who grew cotton
and oranges and other crops put the
pressure on the small farmers. They could
afford to grow crops at cheap prices
because they also owned the canneries that
processed the fruit. They made their
money, not on the farms but in the
canneries. They drove the little farmers out
of business with their low prices until they
controlled more and more land. The man
who cared for the soil, the real farmers,
were driven from the land by men who
farmed in business suits. And in that
garden of Eden, people actually starved to
death.
But that was nearly 50 years ago wasn't
it? Well the thing that makes The Grapes
of Wrath so frightening is that with
changes in place and names, the book
could be telling the same story. Ohsthings
aren't as dramatic today. The farmers
aren't being turned out penniless in huge
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THE RURAL VOICE/APRIL 1979 PG. 23