A Farm Morning

I read in the paper the other day that Bob Moore, who founded Bob's Red Mill, has died. His is an all-American entrepreneurial success story with Biblical overtones, not only the part where he struggled to learn Hebrew and Aramaic, but more especially the part where he spurned numerous offers from mega-food producers to buy his company and instead turned Bob's Red-Mill into an employee-owned outfit.

By coincidence, I happen to have a hefty bag of Bob's Red bulgur in the pantry. Fetching a few ancient cookbooks from the basement, I opened Paula Wolfert's Mediterranean Grains and Greens to the appropriate page and read, "There's no particular reason for eating bulgur." What? Oh. I had misread the line. It actually says, "There's no particular season for eating bulgur." That's better.

Bulgur seems to be an ecumenical grain, popular among Turks, Armenians, Jews, Arabs, Kurds, and aging hippies, which are more numerous than you might suppose. I didn't read Wolfert's analysis of the four or five types of bulgur, but skipped to the recipes, where "Zeliha GunGoren's Scallion Bulgur Pilaf with Golden Raisin Hosfaf" caught my eye. It sounds pretty good.

By coincidence, the previous night I had been reading The Dawn of Everything, in which anthropologists David Graeber and David Wengrow explode several myths about the nature of early humans by simply examining the archeological evidence. The huge structures found at Göbekli Tepe, in southeast Turkey, for example, which date from 9500 BCE, don't look much like the kind of things that small bands of egalitarian nomadic hunter-gatherers would have built. The even more massive structures at Poverty Point, Louisiana, which Hilary and I have visited, also date from before the agricultural revolution which, in the standard view, led to cities, hierarchies, and all of our current urban and environmental woes.  

Graeber and Wengrow seem to know their stuff, reaching back deeply into the literature, quoting Levi-Strauss, Radin, Lowrie, and other anthropologists whom I've actually heard of, in an effort to scuttle the conventional account of human development—a simple-minded scheme that ignores most of the evidence. In short, a far greater variety of ingenious patterns of social organization have been devised by humans across the millennia than we've been led to believe.

Did the seasonal inhabitants of Göbekli Tepe eat bulgur? I don't know, but maybe I'll find out soon. The Dawn of Everything is a long book. 

 Meanwhile, I was cheered to read in the Star Tribune this morning that the average Minnesota farmer made $141,869 last year, more than twice the 2017 level, and also almost twice as much as the national average. And here's another reason to celebrate: Minnesota farmers planted 760,00 acres of cover crops last year, thirty percent more than five years ago.

There are more big farms than there were five years ago, and also more farms between 10 and 49 acres.  I imagine this odd fact reflects the bifurcation of production methods between mega-farms and those who are following a more sustainable path. You can buy cheap food or good food. You can work to preserve the health of the environment or follow in the footsteps of Louis XV — après moi le déluge.  I face that dilemma every time I go shopping for carrots at Cub.

The Guardian published an article the next day crunching the numbers on a national level. Among its conclusions:

"The steepest decline – 17% – was among the smallest farms with less than 10 acres. The US globalized agricultural system favors large and corporate-owned operations, as smaller farms struggle more with boom and bust prices, extreme weather linked to the climate crisis and access to government subsidies and other credit."

I don't know anything about farming, but it seems to me that a farm of less than ten acres is going to have a hard time staying afloat regardless of the weather or market conditions.

At times the analysts seemed to miss the obvious, while attaching undue importance to meaningless categories of their own devising.

For example, the Guardian observes that "the number of farms enrolled in USDA conservation programs that pay farmers to leave environmentally important areas such as wetlands fell by 7% between 2017 and 2022. Smaller farms saw the steepest decline, which is likely due to high commodity prices on the global market that offered short-term economic gains."

Does anyone really care how many farms in each arbitrarily created category are enrolled in conservation programs? No. From the environmental point of view, the question is, how many acres are enrolled in these programs. The Guardian observes that the acreage increased by 17 percent, but complains that the increase was mostly due to larger farms planting more nutrient-rich cover crops between growing periods for cash crops. Well, isn't that what the program is all about? Larger farms, by definition, have more land, so we should be happy they're doing their part, and more, rather than aping the quest of smaller farms for "short-term gains."

In the end, the health of the agricultural sector is a tough one to assay, with corporate profits, cheap food, environmental health, and a manageable lifestyle ceaselessly jockeying for priority. 

I get emails from the Ninth Federal Reserve District on a regular basis keeping me up to date, but I'm pretty sure it's a tough business any way you look at it. And I must confess I'd rather settle back in my easy chair and read a few lines from Virgil's Georgics:

Winter's the lazy time for husbandmen.
In the cold season farmers wont to taste
The increase of their toil, and yield themselves
To mutual interchange of festal cheer.
Boon winter bids them, and unbinds their cares,
As laden keels, when now the port they touch,
And happy sailors crown the sterns with flowers.
Nathless then also time it is to strip
Acorns from oaks, and berries from the bay,
Olives, and bleeding myrtles, then to set
Snares for the crane, and meshes for the stag,
And hunt the long-eared hares, then pierce the doe
With whirl of hempen-thonged Balearic sling,
While snow lies deep, and streams are drifting ice.