PREFACE It is best that here on the front end of this report to try to define what it is, and what I think it is not. There has been some rush to get into print because the National Farmers Union wants to introduce the subject for study in its young people's program that will get underway at the beginning of the 1968-69 school year in September, 1968. Thus, it is not a complete study of the forces of change that are now at work in American agriculture. In some respects, it only scratches the surface. It is what seemed to me to be the most obvious and pressing nature of the reality during the middle months of 1968. But one thing is significant, I think. Everywhere I went--everywhere--there were evidences of the corporate invasion. I think it has to be described as somewhat more than my own opinions. Although I am sure there are a number of assertions in the text of this book that will raise eyebrows of our President, Tony T. Dechant, I think he probably agrees with most of it. Anyway, he will be blamed, because he started me thinking about the problem, and contributed a great deal to my understanding when we managed to get together between my trips around the country to look at things. Above all, I have had the help and advice of the extraordinary staff of National Farmers Union in Washington and Denver--Angus McDonald, Reuben Johnson, and Dr. Blue Carstenson, and many others. Contributing to the ideas projected in this book have been Farmers Union. leaders around the country, some of whom have testified at Senator Gaylord Nelson's Monopoly Subcommittee hearings--such as Ed Christianson of Minnesota, Ed Smith of North Dakota, Gil Rohde of Wisconsin, Syd Gross of Iowa, Ben Radcliffe of South Dakota, and Elton Berck of Nebraska. I guess most of all, though, the reality of the impact of this new force in agriculture was developed for me by farmers whom I met for the first time and who felt strongly enough about the matter to spend time with me and talk about it--such as Amer Lehman of Colorado, Berge Bulbulian of California, and others. A good deal of it came out of my own experience, starting when I saw sharecroppers move out on a highway in protest during the 1930s, and when I saw 27 farm families displaced on a group of farms bought by a feed and seed company in Southeast Missouri when I was a boy. During the years when I was a newspaperman and farm magazine editor, one area I always liked to visit was Northwest Arkansas where many Ozark farmers were going into broiler growing. I thought they were the most interesting, imaginative and, on iiv iv PREFACE the whole, the best educated farmers I met. Sometimes they would invite me to stay for dinner and served good fried chicken, as well as stimulating conversation. But a change has occurred in recent years. Those families are no longer the same. Many of them have left. Those remaining ordinarily don't invite you to dinner because the wife has gone to work in town, sometimes in a broiler processing plant. The husband can no longer make the living by himself. He has been reduced to working for wages. His pay is usually figured on a piecework basis--per broiler produced. He isn't the same man he was 15 years ago, and he knows it. He's tolerated only because he works cheap. If he gets dissatisfied with his lot, the company--sometimes the same one his wife works for--says, with a show of regret, goodbye and good luck. Quite a few stay on, of course, partly because they have no place to go, and partly because of the anaesthetic delusion that everything is still the same, or that maybe things will get better some day. This saddens me. Meanwhile, the same sort of thing is beginning to happen to others. The National Farmers Union will continue studying the problem, hoping to interest others in it, and perhaps developing a course of action for America before it is too late. Washington, D. C. VICTOR K. RAY INTRODUCTION We in the National Farmers Union believe "the corporate invasion of American agriculture" by non-farm interests is real. It is leaving behind "wasted towns, deserted communities, depleted resources, empty institutions, and people without hope and without a future." The invasion is still in the beginning stage. Some people see this trend as inevitable--that it cannot be stopped. Not only can it be stopped, it must be stopped. I do not believe that we should concern ourselves only with trying to decide what the future of American agriculture is going to be--but what it should be. We should not accept any trend as inevitable. Trends are made by our public policy, not born of the wedding of inscrutable and uncontrollable forces. What is happening in America is because of our public policy--not in spite of it. I believe we miss the significance of the corporate invasion if we consider it only a matter of the ownership and/or control of the land. The agricultural establishment of this Nation is more than land. People are involved. Our democratic institutions grow out of the nature of people who are independent, who develop integrity and self reliance, who make their own decisions, who live in communities where neighbors share the security of common cause, yet have privacy that permits the highest development of individuals and the family unit. What is happening in rural America cannot always readily be seen. Vast changes are afoot. In this book, Victor Ray gives us a birds-eye view of what is happening throughout the land. We in Farmers Union believe that it is in the national interest that we decide--now--what direction we want to go. And now is the time to start doing something about it. Tony T. Dechant, President National Farmers Union Denver, Colorado CHAPTER I THE SILENT ASSAULT Rural America is being invaded. It is not an invasion of tanks nor of troops. It is a subtle invasion, driven by engines of financial and political power. Indeed, the take-over is so quiet that the very use of the word "invasion" seems forced and inappropriate. But it is leaving behind wasted towns, deserted communities, depleted resources, empty institutions, and people without hope and without a future. Its power is so enormous, so impersonal and ruthless, its progress so inevitable, that it may already be too late to stop it. The urban society has long since been dominated or surrounded. Restless generals are studying greedily the weakened flanks of rural America. Area by area, commodity by commodity, the silent assault moves forward. The panzer divisions of corporate power--becoming more depersonalized with each celebration of victory--are mopping up the countryside, isolating the social and economic body of America. So far, it has been easy. "The disparity of power" is so great, National Farmers Union President Tony Dechant has said. How can they fail? It is not just the weakness of the agricultural sector that makes it easy for corporations--often subsidized and protected in other sectors of the economy--to take over. The climate of political and social opinion is warm and friendly, and welcomes the invader. Politicians accept the contributions of money and influence of corporations, and then do their bidding in the legislative halls of the Nation. The mass media make heroes of the new generals and tell the peasants that the take-over is inevitable. Urbanites do not understand what is at stake. Nowhere is the misunderstanding--or failure to understand--more apparent than in the academic community. Few professors accept the idea that urban America has already been captured, despite the alienated residents of the ghetto, and the crime and the riots. How can they be expected to understand the assault now on rural America? The new persuasion is that it is perfectly all right for America to have a corporate answer to every problem. But what is happening, to use John |