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Decline of farms leaves voters with painful choice
By Kathy Scharplaz
(Thursday, Oct. 3, 2002 -- CropChoice guest commentary) -- There are few sights more depressing than a ghost town, a town that once
was filled with the whir and hum of community life, the shouts and laughter
of neighborhoods full of children, a town that now sits eerily silent and
empty and lifeless.
Equally depressing is watching a once-excellent school go down the tubes
for lack of funds, laying off award-winning teachers with decades of
experience, eliminating whole subject areas, handicapping its students not
only for college but even for basic living in a democratic republic.
On Election Day, residents of north Ottawa County, Kan., will vote on a
referendum that, in the minds of many, boils down to a choice of the lesser
of two evils. The issue is whether to close the school in Delphos, 18 miles
northwest of Minneapolis. Because schools receive most of their funding from
the state based on the number of students enrolled in their district,
declining enrollment in north Ottawa County means a painfully shrinking
school budget. Something1s got to go.
Grassroots groups have formed on either side. Delphos residents suspect that
once they lose their school, ghost-town status is not far away. The
experience of hundreds of other small Kansas towns backs this up. On the
other hand, the expense of keeping the Delphos school open would mean budget
constraints could only be met with drastic layoffs and program cuts at all
the district1s schools.
What1s most galling is that none of this would be happening if wheat were
going for $9.38 a bushel and corn for $6.35. Those are the prices wheat and
corn would be bringing if crop prices had risen at the same rate as farm
operating costs over the past 100 years. Everyday consumer items rose even
more steeply than did farm inputs. In 1910, in Salina, you could buy a
little girl1s dress for 59 cents, a man1s suit for $3.98, a movie ticket for
5 cents, a bedsheet for 7 cents and a gasoline stove for $8.
Farmers could buy these things as easily as anyone else because they were
getting paid $2 to $3 a bushel for their wheat and corn. A century later,
farmers are still getting $2 to $3 for their wheat and corn Ð but they can1t
buy clothes for their kids for 59 cents any more.
I see the problem every time I drive down the road from our farm. A stretch
of land that once supported more than a dozen farm families now supports
only two. Thus the declining enrollment in our schools. In fact, Ottawa
County1s population was cut by half in the last 100 years.
This is no accident. It was planned, very deliberately, starting not long
after World War II. Federal and industry officials believed that progress
depended on continued industrial expansion. By 1962 the Committee for
Economic Development, an influential, corporate-funded think tank, was
saying that this expansion would be accomplished most efficiently if
policy-makers could "induce excess resources (primarily people) to move
rapidly out of agriculture." The committee recommended keeping crop prices
low enough to make farming financially unviable for most.
Their plan to force people off the land was aided and abetted by increasing
corporate involvement in agriculture and food processing. Very little of
what you pay at the grocery store makes its way to the farmers who grow the
food. A $4.19 box of breakfast cereal, for example, returns less than a
nickel to the farmer.
I1m not sure yet which way I1m going to vote in the upcoming referendum.
But I do feel sure that if more people would buy their food directly from
farmers Ð instead of from Del Monte, General Mills, IBP and Tyson1s Ð the
countryside could support more farm families, and there would be more pupils
in rural schools.
- Kathy Scharplaz, mother of two and a former high school teacher, writes
from a farm in Ottawa County, Kan., where she and her husband raise and sell
drug-free beef. She is a member of The Prairie Writers Circle, a project of
The Land Institute, a Natural Systems Agriculture research organization in
Salina, Kan. | |
