Op-Ed Columns

One of the most enduring images in American culture is the family farm. That independent, solitary, make-it-by-the-sweat-of-your-brow institution that has been the backbone of the nation.

I challenge you to find anyone who does not admire the family that earns its living by farming.

And I challenge you to find more than a few families who do.

That's the rub.

Today across Alabama and all of America, the family farm has pretty much ceased to exist as an economic or social unit. However, it lives on as a political catch phrase, a buzzword. And saving it has become an issue without an identity.

I began to suspect this back in 2003, when Gov. Bob Riley proposed sweeping economic reforms that would, among other things, raise property taxes — which everyone agrees are low in this state, though they don't agree whether this is good or bad. Then, because Riley said he "understands the difficulties that face the small family farmer," he proposed that "farmland under 200 acres will be exempted from state property taxes."

So, there you have it. A family farm is 200 acres or less. The governor said so.

But not everyone agreed. Those who claim to represent farmers in this state jumped up and hollered "200 ain't enough" and rallied to defeat the plan.

I came away wondering if what the governor says is a family farm isn't a family farm, then what is?

My confusion was compounded by a recent press release from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee that jumped all over Rep. Mike Rogers for opposing the farm bill. By doing this, the Democrats claimed, Rogers was voting "against Alabama's family farmers."

Now, I thought, maybe the Democrats can tell me what a family farm is, but when I looked all I found was the party proudly pointing to how the bill denied subsidies to farmers who earned more than "an average income of $1 million over the past three years."

Folks, where I come from you don't make that kind of money family farming. You make a lot less. Which is why I never knew many family farmers.

You see, I grew up between two cultures — small-town and rural Alabama. We lived outside the city limits, but my parents worked in town. We had a farm further out. We raised some cows and grew a lot of what we fed them.

We were farmers just like most folks who farmed were farmers. Supplemental. Part-time. Extra money. Extra food. Take away the farm and we (and they) would have gotten by. Maybe not as well, economically or (and this is important) spiritually. But we would have gotten by.

But take away Daddy's off-the-farm, full-time day job and the family would have been in a world of hurt.

That was nothing new. My daddy began his career teaching vocational agriculture at the high school. It was 1940. That year he asked his seniors, a class of about 15, how many of them actually planned to farm for a living.

One raised his hand.

(As a postscript, that one did. As for the others, many of them farmed, but they earned their living elsewhere.)

He could have asked the same question in the '50s or '60s or right on up until today and received the same answer, for as the years passed farms got bigger and fewer — and few of the fewer were family operations.

Agribusiness, corporate farming, became the way to go. So the farmer who wanted to support his family farming either had to expand the operation so he could compete with the big guys (which few can afford to do) or sign on with some agribusiness operation and lose that independence that has always been considered a critical element in family farming.

Either way, the traditional family farm marched toward extinction.

Which is hardly news to the folks who speak for agriculture and its interests.

They saw it coming and adjusted to it.

Like The Progressive Farmer.

When I was growing up, The Progressive Farmer was what farmers read.

But as farms got fewer and fewer, the magazine's subscription list dwindled, advertising revenue fell and something had to be done. So in 1966, The Progressive Farmer folks started publishing Southern Living.

And you can bet that the only farmers who appear in its glossy pages are the ones who keep a few cows on the hunting land they lease down in the Black Belt.

Which gets me back to the original question.

Just what is a family farm?

Will one of you who knows, please tell me?

And if you don't know, then quit talking about them like you do.

Is that too much to ask?