The politics of the family farm

I'm three generations off the farm.

That's a pretty abstract statement so I'll put some flesh on it's bones for you.

My father and his cousins celebrated every Thanksgiving on the farm sharing a Turkey that his grandfather slaughtered and his grandmother cooked. Every Easter it was a lamb. In the summer he worked on the farm and every fall he and and his cousins would be reunited again for the harvest.

I can show you that farm in Saint Marie de Beauce. My family had already been farming it for almost a century the day the Declaration of Independence was signed. (I can also show you the gravestone with the names of seven of the seventeen children in my grandfather's family written on it. I can also show you the road that various family members used to walk down to Massachusetts and get factory jobs to avoid starvation when times got tough. And when I was a little boy, one of my great aunts from my grandmother's side of the family showed me the finger she cut off chopping tobacco when she was just eight years old. It wasn't as romantic as it can sound.)

The Serpentine One is even closer to the farm and if it were not for an untimely series of deaths in her family, she probably would have had experiences very much like my father's.

The thing is that there is nothing unusual about this. The age of what used to be my family's farm is unusual, very few families can make that claim, but otherwise that story was most people's story up to the 1950s.

And that had a powerful effect on the way people my age and older saw the farm. And we voted for farm policies that still hang over us now. If it were not for government subsidies, the family farm would have pretty much disappeared by the end of 1960s. That may seem brutal but the vast majority of factory jobs disappeared in the 1970s and 1980s with far less fanfare.

There is a parallel story to tell there. My mother's family came to North America to escape the potato famine. They worked in the city. The city of Boston. They worked in factories and then later in the service industry. Bruce Springsteen wrote a lot of nostalgic music about it but nowadays most people accept that the world had to change. No one with that background drives by the site where factories are or used to be and says, "Those were the good old days."

People do do that about the family farm. Fewer of them do so every day. In a family discussion just yesterday, my youngest sister talked about the world I describe here as, these are her exact words, "a past that never existed."

And, for her, it never did exist. Her culture is suburbs all the way down. She can watch That Seventies Show and for her that is "The way things used to be". This stuff I'm talking about today is as fictional to her as Mary Poppins. When older men in the family talk about the Second World War she rolls her eyes and laughs because she thinks they are lying, that they are just telling a bunch of tall tales. When my Uncle Bill died and the 101st Airborne, with whom he served during the Second World War, provided him with honours at his funeral, I tried to explain to her that 101st wasn't ordinary and that it was really something that our Uncle had served with them but I could see that she just didn't get it.

And this is far from unique to her. You can also see it if you read the commentary about episodes of Mad Men at a site like Slate. The people writing about the show there talk about how much they hated the flashbacks to the farm and all the talk about various wars because that stuff had no resonance with them just as it has no resonance with my youngest sister. And my youngest sister has a daughter at university! Just imagine just how far the family farm is from her.

But that past was very tangible and very beloved to people my age and older and the farm subsidies that my generation consistently voted for are as real as real can be. And they are so firmly entrenched that it is going to be very difficult politically to remove them. They might be gone in my lifetime but it's still too early to say. They maintain a farm industry today that really is a fiction. By that I mean, they maintain a farm industry that makes no economic sense. It's not the only such economic fantasy that people my age and older have kept alive and it's not even the most expensive (that dubious honour goes to public service pensions) but it is one of the more expensive ones.

I know, I know, you can go see family farms and these people are not wealthy. Typically, they are just holding on by the skin of their teeth. But most of them would have gone out of business generations ago if it were not for subsidies. And a lot of these subsidies today go to huge corporations that have nothing to do with the family farm in any case.

These subsidies cost a huge number of jobs. Every penny the government takes in taxes to support the farm economy takes money away from an economically viable job somewhere else. And these subsidies often make food more expensive. Here in Canada, we pay more for milk and bread because of government management programs in milk and wheat sales.

In Europe it is much, much worse.

I know it looks tragic to see these family farms disappearing and if you live in a small town or city you can talk to people whose entire lives were thrown into turmoil by the decline in the farm industry. There is also an awful lot of propaganda cranked out condemning Agribusiness and that reinforces the illusions. But it is an industry that should have changed decades ago. Agribusiness has its faults to be sure, just like any other industry, but, for the most part, it gives us food that tastes better, is safer to eat and is much less expensive than what the family farm could provide.