The Rural Voice, 1989-08, Page 10i!1
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8 THE RURAL VOICE
ARE FARMERS SMUG?
Think, what right have you to be
scornful, whose virtue is a deficiency
of temptation, whose success may be
a chance, whose rank may be an
ancestor's accident, whose prosperity
is very likely to be a satire?
—W . M. Thackeray, Vanity Fair
We as farmers are a rather smug -
talking lot. How often don't we, or
our leaders, assert that without us
everyone would starve?
The next statement most often
made by farmers is that when our
fathers farmed they produced food for
12 people. Today, as Ontario agricul-
ture minister Jack Riddell said recent-
ly, one farmer supplies more than 120
people with sustenance.
Of course, the world would soon
be empty of humanity if no food were
produced. But if we lost all farmers
tomorrow, the day after tomorrow
their place would be taken by ama-
teurs. The argument is meaningless.
The second statement needs to be
discussed. That one farmer of the last
generation did not feed 12 people all
by himself. He had help from the
blacksmith, the farrier, the carpenter,
and the many other craftspeople who
made their income from farmers.
Without them he could feed only his
family.
Nothing has really changed.
Today's farmer doesn't need a farrier
— unless he has horses for entertain-
ment — but he does need all the other
tradesmen. The blacksmith has be-
come the skilled factory worker who
may never have dirtied his hands with
soil. The blacksmith is also the engi-
neer who designs the tractors, planters,
and combines used by the farmer.
Fifty years ago, an acre of good
soil might have returned 30 bushels of
corn compared to the 100 bushels it
would return today — more than three
times as much. Yields of other crops
have grown comparably. Did the
farmer do this alone? Not on your
sweet bippy. He bought nitrogen and
phosphates and potash and trace ferti-
lizers. He added herbicides, fungi-
cides, and insecticides.
These inputs represent many man-
years of work by chemical engineers
who devised ways to extract nitrogen
from natural gas, by crop specialists
who experimented with crop rotation,
by armies of laboratory workers who
took natural insecticides and fungi-
cides and weed killers from wild
plants and synthesized them for mass
production, by construction workers
(the old carpenter) who built the labs
and factories and warehouses, by
distributors with their truckers and
sales staff, by implement dealers and
their staff.
If we include these people with
farmers as food producers it is doubt-
ful that today's farmer produces more
food than his father did.
Another smug assertion we like to
make is that the farm family is the
backbone of our civilization, of
morality. At one time I too believed
in this cliche. But the past decade has
taught me not to submit so readily to
generally accepted judgements.
We now know that wife beating
and child abuse are as popular among
rural people as urban people. So are
alcoholism and other aberrations. The
difference is that in the rural areas
these things are not as blatantly dis-
played. But just because something
is less visible or goes unpunished
doesn't mean it is less prevalent.
But to be fair to ourselves, we are
not the only ones to be smug about our
status. From editorials in the papers
we see how some editors smugly
chide us for the subsidies we receive,
completely ignoring their own.0
Adrian Vos, from Huron County, has
contributed to The Rural Voice since
its inception in 1975.