"We Found Some Animals and Now They're in Prison"
And other weird Big Team Farm news to brighten your Friday
F(orty)-Eight Hours to Go (or so)
Y’all. Since the book-splitting announcement last week, pre-orders have turned up to 11, and I’m so excited to welcome so many new members of the Big Team Farm community. A special shoutout to one Larry Drenkow, a farmer I met flying from San Francisco to Moline, IL. We got to talking, and he casually invited me to his farm, where I actually showed up a few days later. He let me drive his antique tractor around the yard, and then we caught the tail end of his town’s asparagus hunt at the local bar. I saw my first Midwest elk farm on that trip. All that to say, if you invite me to your farm, I will eventually show up. It’s not a question of if I’ll visit every farm in America, but when.
Additionally, not to beat a dead horse, but thank you all, again, so much for all your support. I couldn’t do this without you. And just putting on your radar that there’s less than 48 hours to get any last minute pre-orders in if you or someone you love has been procrastinating.
Getting Back to the Dead Horse
Okay, not a dead horse, a tiny horse. There were a lot of pop culture farm references on my radar this week. From the “Farmers for America” trailer I just stumbled upon (note the troubling centrality of patriotic rhetoric, and that, you know, farming =! ‘MERICA) to some obscure lines from Designated Survivor about needing to get the government back up and running so that farmers can receive subsidies. But they where pretty overshadowed by the most confusing Saturday Night Live sketch I’ve seen in a while, Tiny Horse ft. Timothée Chalamet.
Tiny Horse is no where near SNL’s first foray into agricultural hot takes, and for farmers and eaters alike, I think you’ll enjoy visiting (or revisiting) this True Classic:
There’s so much gold in there, but I want to call out three particularly true but incongruent points.
“…For $45, you can take home $10 worth of apples…”
“…He’s a troubled man who came with the land, and we pay him in dentistry…”
“..Does our business make a profit? No. How do we afford to live? Simple, I wrote the screenplay for 50 First Dates…”
Pretending for a moment that this is a real farm (because these aren’t super unrealistic facts for a UPick operation), just imagine. You run an organization that sells goods for a 4x markup over competitors, splitting labor needs between your thousands of customers and someone who’s being exploited, your customers are also covering logistics/delivery, and you’re coming out the other end without a profit. For the Chickham Sister, they make it work by paying for their farm with off-farm income (as is the case with many, many small and medium-sized farms).
Despite the fact that this organization my describe itself as a business, file taxes as a business, act in many ways like a business, it is not a business. It is a hobby.
A lot of people bristle at the idea of a “hobby farm,” usually because “farming is a lot of work, and describing it as a hobby diminishes the effort.” Listen. Skiing, scuba diving, hang gliding, treasure hunting, bird watching, and sailing can all be physically, mentally, emotionally, and financially demanding. But they are *absolutely* still hobbies. No knocks on farming as a hobby, if you have the resources to do it safely and well, have at it, I guess. But the problem often becomes that people believe they *should* make money on their hobby farm no matter what (despite the fact that they’re often not putting in any of the financial or human capital investment that would actually allow them to grow over time and make that money). When hobby farmers turn to government, non-profits, consumers, etc. looking for supplements to their income, it’s hard to see how that’s different than a dedicated amateur hang glider, sailer, or scuba diver looking to be compensated for pursuing their leisure activity.
We would all love to live in a world where we get paid to do our hobbies and not work, whether or not the product is anything anyone wants. I’d love to collect a check (from whoever!) to write one of these newsletters every single day, and shove it into every inbox in America, whether people want it or not. But we know that’s not a good idea. Not everyone who inherits farmland or gains enough wealth to purchase or lease it has the skills or abilities necessary to run a successful farm business, just like not everyone with a Substack writes a good newsletter. If people don’t want to read it, or if I need everyone to pay me a prohibitive amount to cover the costs of writing it, then it’s not on the newsletter-readers of the world to “educate themselves” about the hard work of reporters and to just buck up and hand over your wallet (common ideas around “educating consumers about where their food comes from” and raising the price of food). We depend on talented entrepreneurs to make great products, and convince us that they’re worth the price. We have to hold farmers to that same expectation.
Either way, next time you hear a farmer grumbling about prices being “too damn low” remember the Chickham Sisters. Remember that somewhere out there, people are selling apples that you have to go get for yourself off the tree at a 4x markup, and people eat that S up. There’s more price flexibility in food than most farmers want to admit, but it takes a savvy farm entrepreneur to connect the dots on pricing, production, marketing, and business management. Currently, food entrepreneurs are doing much of this work (and gaining all the reward).
The future of farming belongs to farmers who remember they’re in the food business first (and the penis gourd business second).
F(arm) Art
Have you ever lifted a 40 pound bucket of tomatoes onto your shoulder and run with it? Let me tell you, it’s awful. It’s one thing to talk about stoop work and repetitive motions and the demands of manual farm labor on human bodies, it’s another thing to actually try it, even just once.
Yet the lives of Farmworkers are so rarely part of our conversations about the future of farming and food. Too many of us labor under the delusion that “tech” will alleviate “the labor problem,” or “small family farms” will, somehow.
But believing these things fundamentally ignores the reality. Plant-based diets in particular demand even more of this kind of extractive human labor, and it’ll come from first generation farmers trying to scrap their way to ownership or stability just as it comes from migrants.
There’s a simple equation between land and labor in capitalism, because land = capital = money. When you have too much land (money) but you need to create something to get more money (to say, pay your taxes), you need to hire some labor to do it. But hiring labor requires spending money. But what if you don’t want to sell any of your land to get money to hire labor, because My Land Is My Land And It’s My Birthright, colonialism, etc. What American’s have done for pretty much our whole history is just force labor so you don’t have to pay for it, or at least get a steep discount.
So that’s it, stolen land and stolen labor go hand in hand. That’s the true American dream; too much land owned by too few people, worked by people who’s labor is exploited to grow food that they can’t even afford to buy.
These two powerful pieces by Vanessa Lopez (check out her stuff and hire this talented woman for your design needs!), entitled “Protect Farmworkers,” captures this sentiment beautifully, as part of the incredible work she’s doing to elevate and celebrate farmworkers.
“Farm workers are vital in this time in history and we should promote more protection for farmers and farm workers.” Vanessa writes. She says her use of the American flag is meant to remind viewers that farmworkers literally work everyday to feed our country, and we, as a nation, have a responsibility to shield and protect these workers from the dangers to their health and wellness they face doing this work, with higher wages, PPE, and legal protections, especially during the pandemic.
I’ll be real honest with you, these images made me uncomfortable when I first saw them. My immediate assumption was that it looks like empty patriotic pandering; putting flags on farmworkers as if to say, “this is how much farmworkers love America.” But the longer I looked, the more I saw the flag in these pictures as a need, a demand, and an unfulfilled promise.
Technology nor small family farm fantasies will save us from this reckoning nor heal that history. Only grappling with it will do any good. And that grappling goes well beyond the food system. It requires grappling with everything that it means to be an American.
(Though for all my international friends in the house, very few countries have a good track record on treatment of farm labor, so I’m sure there’s good grappling to be done where you are as well.)
Farm Teammates to F(ollow)
A brief shoutout to a member of this community that I think many of you would enjoy getting to know better; Lucy.Maude (on Twitter and Instagram), is out here in these streets doing the absolutely phenomenal work of cowboy drag as Jack Lope, America’s Finest Cowboy. Lucy tackles the myth of my Wyoming homeland’s favorite son, The American Cowboy, and their lived experience as a longtime ranch hand informs their take on rugged individual masculinity, big hats and belt buckles, and the “Old” West stories that define agriculture in the Great American Desert.
Last F(ew) Things
If you’re new to Big Team Farms and want some explanation for what the F you just read, check out The Intro Newsletter and Last Week’s Edition.
Remember, if you know artists, visual or otherwise, dancers, comedians, basket weavers, potters, performers— really any kind of artist who’s doing cool work and interested in exploring the intersection of farming, people, food, and nature, please push them in my direction. We’re always looking to elevate and support more narratives in this space.
The last episode of my ag history/economics podcast came out this week, aptly named Escaping 2020. I’m offering to write a personal haiku to anyone who leaves a five star review. Also, just dropped End of Glyphosate as well.
A fun final note, here’s an interesting piece written in response to my story last week about carbon markets. And here’s the most garbage part of it: “In the words of Greg Page (former CEO of Cargill), for the cost of $1 for every person on Earth, the US Farm Bill guarantees there are enough calories to avert global hunger.” The brief annihilation of this fantasy— we spend way more than $8 billion on the Farm Bill every year (and that doesn’t even begin to include ad hoc payments), and doing so does absolutely nothing to avert global hunger. It doesn’t even come close to averting *American* hunger. There are more than 35 million people who regularly miss a meal/go hungry in the US right now, and 10 million of them are children, and we sent farmers $40 billion in direct payments this year alone. So don’t let anyone; not Sonny Perdue or Tom Vilsack, not Joe Biden or any ag CEO, and definitely not some random guy on LinkedIn, tell you that the Farm Bill is about averting global hunger. The End.
Here’s hoping you all have a safe and lovely holiday, and remember to mind the kids…
Rock on,
Sarah
When I preorder the book I didn’t realize I’d be getting a newsletter, but I love it. I work in housing/energy but as the grandson of hobby farmers and a participant in CSA, your work has really helped connect the dots in my concerns about food economics. Keep up the good work.