Saturday, May 19, 2012

The Family Farm

Earlier this week, the students and I watched Troublesome Creek, a documentary that chronicles the struggle of one Iowa farm family to survive the farm crisis of the 1980s, when times were tough on the farm and too many farmers were overextended.  Nominated for an Emmy for Best Documentary, the film was a very personal project for film maker, Jeanne Jordan, as the family farm at the center of the project was that of the parents.  It was the second time that I watched the movie, and could barely contain my tears at the end of the film.  The film is about the complicated relationship that she experiences with her roots in the Iowa soil and the fight to save the Jordan farm brought all of those issues into full relief.

For some reason, if you've grown up on a farm, you can't get it out of your soul.  Jeanne Jordan used her considerable skills as a documentary maker to tell an incredibly personal story in a way that was powerful, while avoiding excessive sentimentality.  But the story she tells resonated with my own, even if my family  avoided the financial perils that plagued Jordan's parents, brothers, and others in her family.  Perhaps most significant, Jordan notes that she never thought her growing up on a farm near Rolfe, Iowa, was special--in fact, it seemed pretty dull and boring.  I, too, thought that . . . and, yet, here I am, 36 years later leading a group of students to study this boring and dull place!

Throughout the experience, it is a rare presenter that does not tell the history of his or her relationship to farming, and that relationship often is through photos of the grand parents or great-grand parents, who were the first in the family to settle the land.  In the case of the Neubauer farm, my great grand father bought our farm in 1917, and my grand parents were the first occupants of the house were the students are living.

The family farm has long been viewed in a positive light from Jefferson to present.  The struggle to maintain that family farm has hardly been limited to the 1980s or other farm "crises."  If we've learned one thing during our time in Iowa it is the growing concentration of land in the hands of fewer and fewer farms.  These operations are often "family farms" in that the owners are not corporations like Cargill or Archer Daniel Midlands, but family farmers who are buying the neighbors' land.  We witnessed one operation here in which the army of tractors, sprayers, fuel trucks, planters, and workers tilled, planted, and sprayed 180 acres in one day.  All of this is made possible by the highly mechanized nature of production agriculture which needs fewer and fewer people to run massive machines.  So the definition of the family farm has evolved and is evolving.  Sustainable farming advocates worry a great deal about the massive size of many farming operations--they want to repopulate rural America as well as farms with more "eyes on the land."

One final thought: There is an increasing sense in which those with whom we are speaking believe that there is a bubble in agriculture and that over the next five years, the price of land will plummet as will the price of commodities.  Will Jeanne Jordan's film produced in 1996 have a sequel in the 10s of the 21st century?  It seems that many experts and those close to Iowa agriculture believe this to be the case.




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