This is what I had come this way for—this smell, these sounds, this view. I left the city an hour ago to get here, getting on the conveyor belt of the 33, along with the mad commuters who steered downtown with all the determination of spawning salmon. Out of the city, I chose my route deliberately: the 190 to the I-90 and down the shining tongue of the 219 as it traverses the Boston and Colden hills. At the Rice Hill Road exit, I get off and jog over Zimmerman Road to Brown Hill Road, where my senses are filled with the sweetly putrid smell of manure. Up here the only sounds that rise above the cicadas’ thrumming are the occasional barking dog (who’s probably barking at my stopped car) and the lowing of cows. From atop Brown Hill, my view stretches west and south for miles. The land is a green crazy quilt of hardwood forests interspersed by a dozen or more manmade clearings. Eighty-foot-tall grain silos poke their heads above the trees taking stock of their surroundings. These are the family farms that make up Western New York’s agricultural community. And while this may seem like a pastoral picture, it’s no secret that agriculture’s in big trouble.

During the 1990s, almost 20,000 family farms folded across the nation each year. Those weren’t even the bad years. Today there are five million fewer farms in America than there were in the 1930s, which pans out to roughly 60,000 annual farm closings over those 70-odd years. In New York State alone, the number of farms has dropped by over 25 percent in the past 20 years. At the same time, the acreage of land being farmed hasn’t dropped a bit. This means that the average farm size is increasing as more and more families embrace the “get big or get out” attitude engendered by the rise of agribusiness. Fewer young people are staying on and taking over farms, too. Less than six percent of farmers in America are under the age of 35, and more than a quarter are over 65. But these are only the symptoms of deep-rooted problems that have been developing for years.

Farmer Bill

In order to better understand the range of challenges facing family farms, you have to talk to the people closest to the problems—the farmers themselves. And that’s why I’ve come out to the countryside, to visit William Schultz’s farm along Route 39 in the Town of Collins (dubbed “Shady Green Acres”). Schultz is a dairy and field crop (corn, soybeans, alfalfa) farmer, and he’s been working Shady Green Acres day in and day out for 32 years. Altogether, Shady Green Acres comprises more than 1,000 acres of owned and leased land, and more than 200 dairy cows. Standing about 5’ 10” tall, with close-cropped brown hair that is graying in the back and on the sides, Bill is the hardest-working man I’ve ever met. By ten o’clock—the leisurely time I pull into the Schultzes’ dirt and gravel driveway—Bill has already been up for four and a half hours; “a late day,” he says. Yesterday—a Sunday, mind you—he didn’t come in from working until 10:30pm. Over a cup of coffee at the kitchen table, Bill and his wife, Kathy, tell me about some of the day-to-day challenges they have to overcome in order to remain viable—artificially low milk and crop prices, the rising costs of production, urbanization of the countryside, high interest rates on loans

The dairy business is tough in America, the world’s leading dairy producer. Milk prices are at an all-time low relative to production costs. The price of milk in any given market is based on the price of milk in the Minnesota-Wisconsin pricing zone. A complex matrix of equations created by the federal government sets the price in every other zone relative to Minnesota-Wisconsin. Coincidentally, that’s also where Kraft Foods is headquartered. According to a collaborative study done by the Department of Agriculture & Applied Economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection, cheese prices largely determine the manufactured grade milk price, and is the main driver of farm milk prices in the U.S. Because Kraft accounts for around 75 percent of all sales at the National Cheese Exchange (NCE)—the country’s primary price setting mechanism—it has the power to unilaterally depress or inflate the nation’s milk prices. “Kraft says, ‘We’re paying this much for milk,’ and that sets the price,” Bill says, exasperated. “Farmers are in a real bind right now. Milk is as low as its been since the early ’70s, and price of fuel is where it is.”

The government subsidizes milk prices by giving direct payments to farmers through the Milk Income Loss Contract Program with limited success. “The milk dealers who were buying the milk from the farmers were very happy when the government said it was going to subsidize the price of milk so it didn’t go below such and such a number,” Bill says. “The reason they were happy about this is that it meant they didn’t have to worry about the farmer, because the government’s going to take care of him. So they try to drive the milk prices as low as they can get them.” To some farmers who don’t get higher subsidies this means operating at a loss.

Rocketing fuel costs are also taking their toll on the Schultzes, whose farm is very fuel-intensive. Many of the operations on Shady Green Acres require heavy machinery and tractors. Bill remembers a time when he could buy diesel fuel for 10 cents a gallon. The last time he bought diesel it was $1.96. Bill gets hit by fuel prices on both ends of his dairy business, since he has to pay both to have feed for his cows delivered and to have his milk shipped to market. As fuel costs rise, so does the price of fertilizers, which get their nitrogen from natural gas.

Rising interest rates are also of concern. “The government is coming in and saying, ‘Hey, we’ve got to slow this economy down,’ so they raise interest rates on loans, etc.”

Agriculture is pretty slow now, but since it accounts for so little of the national economy at this point, the government rarely takes farms into consideration. Though large farms like the Schultzes’ see a lot of cash flow over time, they’re often forced to take out loans to cover capital-intensive investments such as equipment repairs and field expansion. “Some farmers are in a real squeeze,” Bill says. “They’re carrying high debt, cash flow is tight and sometimes they come out bankrupt.”

There are also problems with suburbanites moving into the country and causing trouble as neighbors. “They’re coming out from the city, and buying up plots of land expecting clean air, no odor, they don’t want a mess on the road, they don’t want to follow farm equipment. They’re buying up the land, they’re buying up the farms, and then you have people who are not educated in agriculture dictating to the farmer what he can do and what he can’t do.” Some of them buy the land that farmers lease and tell them what they can grow there. Others call the sheriff about manure tracked onto the road. They complain about manure smells coming from the fields. And worst of all, they threaten law suits.

All of these pressures have come to bear on the Schultzes and their neighbors. They are in addition to the day-to-day work of managing the farm, milking the cows twice a day, maintaining equipment, finding the best market for their products, keeping the cows healthy and planting, fertilizing and harvesting the various crops. “I’m playing numerous games every day,” Bill says. “We’re playing the game right now in the hayfield. We’re still trying to make milk. I’ve got combining to do, and I’ve still got to watch the commodity markets to make the right moves at the right times. So what I’m saying is we’re playing too many games all at one time, so it’s easy to mess up.” And that’s not even accounting for the weather. “I’ll tell ya, I’d like to strangle that Mary Beth Wrobel,” he says, laughing. “‘There’s no rain in sight,’ she says. She ruined more crops last year than anyone in a lifetime could do.”

Not two miles down the road, you can see what happens when you lose the game. The old Zittel farm is mostly gone now, with only part of a silo remaining. I remember when the pasture was filled with cows, and later when the first silo came down, and then the barn. Three years ago, I sat across the same kitchen table from Bill, and asked him to recall other farms that had recently closed. This was his reply: “Uh…up on Jennings Road there was the Paulzine’s, the Steffan’s; they were two farms right next to each other. And then there were the Kohn’s; there was Joe Prezna that went bankrupt and Dave Timmel, and there was Howie Gabel that just kinda basically went broke. That’s pretty much all that I can remember, and it’s all within the last couple of years.”

And the trend continues…

Farmer Tony

You can find Tony Weiss, as I did, early on Saturday mornings, standing behind his vegetable stand at the Elmwood-Bidwell Farmers Market. A bulldog of a man with long, gray sideburns and a Weiss Farms baseball cap perched high on his head, Tony always keeps himself moving, refilling quart baskets of green beans from his truck. or topping off a busel of purple cauliflower. He’s been farming all of his 66 years, and he currently owns a 50-acre vegetable farm—Weiss Farms—that’s perched near the top of a West-facing ridge in East Eden. As a vegetable farmer, Tony’s concerns are somewhat different from Bill Schultz’s. His biggest worry is finding a market for his vegetables. “If it wasn’t for small markets like this that I go to now, I wouldn’t be in business,” he says, matter-of-factly. He sells his vegetables at three different markets now—Elmwood, Kenmore and Alden.

But it wasn’t always that way. Eight years ago, Tony says, he sold 90 percent of his crops wholesale at the Clinton-Bailey market. Now, though, he sells 80 percent through retail at farmers markets. “When I was a kid, we were afraid to go away from the truck at Clinton-Bailey, because there were so many people you’d get lost. Now you can shoot a cannon down through there and not hit anyone.”

The problem Tony’s talking about stems from the vertical integration of agribusiness and food market systems. Vertical intergration is just another way that major corporations are able to squeeze more product for less money from agriculture by contolling all stages of the production and marketing process. Grocery stores continue merging into ridiculouly powerful conglomerates who no longer buy through wholesale markets like the mom-and-pop stores of yesterday did. Instead, they deal directly with large-scale farm cooperatives and wholesalers. Wal-Mart, for one extreme example, is the world’s number one grocery retailer, with $193,295,000,000 in food sales in 1999.

On the grain side of things, megacorporations like Acher-Daniels-Midland (ADM), Cargill and ConAgra, through buy-outs and mergers, are slowly taking over every aspect of the food system—from “dirt to dinner,” so to speak—giving them unparalleled power in negotiations with farmers. Cargill, for example, packs beef (3rd in the nation), packs pork (4th), raises turkeys (3rd), raises animal feed plants (2nd), owns terminal grain handling facilities (1st), exports corn (1st), exports soybeans (1st), mills flour (3rd), crushes soybeans (2nd) and produces ethanol (4th).

“Any small farmer that doesn’t belong to a cooperative now is going to be lost,” Tony says. That brings us back to the “get big or get out” attitude that so many family farmers are embracing to remain competitive in today’s market. Many farmers believe that the family farm is still the most efficient farm model. Almost everyone involved has a vested interest in the success or failure of the business outside of simply earning a wage. The farmer can still manage all aspects of the farm while remaining hands-on and close to the land.

One anecdote Kathy Schultz related illustrated the point perfectly. “There’s a senior farmer that got big for his kids down in Cattaraugus County. A small farm nextdoor was saying, ‘Maybe we should just go bigger,’ and he just looked at the gal who was running the operation and said, ‘Don’t do it. I used to be able to know that my business was being well-managed. Now that I have many employees, I can no longer expect my requests to be fulfilled…I’ve lost control of my farm.”

“When you lose control, that’s when you’re done,” says Bill.

Tony has family working for him, as well as three migrant laborers. He doesn’t have any family to pass the farm onto, though. When I ask him why his kids aren’t taking up the torch, he responds, “It’s a lot of work. You’ve got to be a workaholic.” And he is a workaholic. Besides owning the farm, he holds a full-time wage-earning job at a towing company, a situation that’s becoming more and more common. According to the USDA, 39 percent of all American farmers work elsewhere at least 200 days each year. Tony’s thinking about retirement, so he’s trying to earn more now to increase his social security payments later. After work, there’s often more to be done on the farm.

“We pick all week, and then come Friday afternoon, Friday evening it’s a madhouse to distribute all of what we got to the next three or four markets while trying to keep everything fresh-looking. We’ve got a walk-in cooler, but a lot of times there’s not enough room for everything. Stuff that will wilt or deteriorate quickly, we’ve got to wait until the last day to harvest it or else put it in a cooler. So Friday nights are late nights, and Saturday morning’s pretty early, too.”

Tony says it’s his variety that keeps him going at the farmers markets. “My motto is if you can’t be first, you’ve got to be different. We’ve got about 80 varieties of vegetables and fruits that we raise ourselves.” That’s tricky business, too, sorting out the varieties and keeping up with their planting and harvest schedule, but it’s part of the game when survival is at stake.

“As long as these little markets keep going,” Tony says, palming a tomato, “you’ll keep a certain amount of guys in the vegetable end of farming. When people start going away from this type of thing, it’s not going to be profitable for guys to farm anymore. We’re in an exceptional area, really. It’s affluent enough that people have plenty of money to spend on food. I’ve always looked at it this way: whenever the economy gets tough, the first place people cut is their food budget. They can’t cut their rent, they can’t cut their heat. They can cut their food and their entertainment, but food is generally the first thing they cut.”

Farmer Jim

Jim Bittner’s place is strung out along Route 18 in Appleton, way up in Niagara County near Lake Ontario. When I arrive at his 500-acre tree fruit farm, he has me jump into a beatup Toyota 4Runner along with a German Shepherd named Zoe. (“My brother asked me to dog-sit for two days,” Jim says. “That was two years ago.”) About two miles down the road, we pull off the road onto an invisible track and begin a slow cruise up and down the orchard rows, Jim talking all the way. It’s immediately clear that he knows his business, and the he’s a shrewd businessman. He cuts down an orchard when it stops paying off. He has an experimental orchard, where he tries to grow unique varieties to fit into a lucrative niche he’s found.

Singer Farms has been a joint partnership between Jim and Tom Singer since 1990. By all counts, the farm’s been a success. It’s doubled in size over the past 15 years, and Jim has found ways to access difficult markets. He sells process peaches to Delmonte in Canada, and he sells to Wegmans and Tops. As we drive through this peach orchard or that plum orchard and past several varieties of apples, we sometimes jump out to look closely at the trees and sample the crop.

We occasionally come across a team of migrants harvesting the fruit, or a lone worker on a tractor spraying an orchard. In between these tourist stops, though, Jim tells his story, and reveals some of the ways the industry’s changed over the years.

He started as a dairy farmer a mile or two from here from 1980 to ‘88, but he got out of the business when his partner retired. Then it was straight into the fruit tree business, which he cracked open with hubris. Now Jim wishes he could be back out in the orchards like he used to be, though.

“I spend so much time in the office marketing our product,” he says. “You’ve got to be aggressive in today’s market, or you’ll fold.” He tells me about two other local fruit tree growers who’ve gone out of business since last season. “Nobody’s even bothering to take those orchards over.”

Another story he tells illustrates how difficult and risky farming can be, even for the guys who’ve found the right markets and grown delicious, healthy crops. “We had terrible hail storms in 1996 and ‘97 that I just finished recovering from. I think that if the banks had known what bad shape I was in, I would’ve been out of business then.”

It’s even hard for the strong to survive. But Jim’s trying hard to help farmers, as vice president of the New York Farm Viability Institute (NYFVI), a farmer-run grassroots organization dedicated to redirecting government funding to research that will directly benefit farmers. So far they’ve been successful, securing more money each year from New York State for applied research. This is a prime example of farmers helping themselves and serves as a good model for the future.

Farmer Stew

On my way to Stewart and Debbie Ritchie’s place, Native Offerings Farm, I tool down curly-Q country lanes until I reach the hills a few miles northwest of Ellicottville.

Afer I knock on the back door, a serene woman appears with a wild-eyed, half-dressed toddler wrapped between her legs. “Hi, Peter?”

“Yup, and you’re Debbie, I assume?”

She shows me to the greenhouse, where Stew is “working.” The reason I use quotes is because at the time he was tracking down a toad with his son, Sam.

Stew has a thick red beard and wears sunglasses, which he takes off when he shakes my hand, revealing kind eyes. The skin on his arms and neck is red and freckled from the sun, his face creased from squinting. He quickly delves into the unique history of Native Offerings, how he and Deb started out in East Aurora on the Elbert Hubbard farm ten years ago. They were the first CSA farm in Erie County back then. CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture, and it’s a movement to reconnect the community with its food source, the local farmer—a grassroots alternative to agribusiness.

The Ritchies esentially operate a subscription service for their vegetables. Each subscriber, or shareholder, pays a set price to receive fresh vegetables for a set amount of time. The beauty of this model, when they have enough subscribers (which they do) is that they don’t have to spend any time marketing or finding markets to sell their produce. It’s all passed on by word-of-mouth, allowing Stew and Deb to put all their working time into growing healthy vegetables.

They started with a roadside stand and a handful of subscriptions in East Aurora. Now, in their 180-acre southern location, they have around 200 subscribers for whom they grow vegetables on 10 acres of land.

Deb praises the CSA system: “We’ve got a really good, loyal customer base that grew with us. We didn’t have to rely on wholesale markets, you know, taking these low-ball prices. We do go to a farmer’s market on Elmwood, which we do very well at.”

That kind of freedom allows the Ritchies to sustainably grow small crops of a huge variety of vegetables. Altogether, Stew estimates, they grow 260 varieties. They grow 60 varieties of lettuce and extra healthy varieties of other vegetables.

All of this relates back to how Stew got into farming in the first place. “I was interested in health and nutrition, and whenever I did the research or looked into it, it always came back to diet. Concern for diet took me to organic agriculture.” He traveled around the country for a while, working on different kinds of farms—CSA farms, livestock farms, large vegetable farms, dairy farms. That’s how he decided that a CSA farm best fit his ideals. “It’s great, because you keep the connection with your customer, and get constant feedback. When you wholesale, you just put food in a box, put it on a palette, and away it goes. You don’t know what happened to it.”

The Ritchies are certified natural growers, a slightly different classification than organic. While idly fingering pebbles from the greenhouse floor, Stew explains the philosophy behind it. “Part of it is the husbandry of the land so that when you farm you increase the fertility of the land, make it better. It’s not about feeding the plant with sprays, it’s about feeding the soil. Healthy soil, healthy plant.” He mentions that their beef cattle and pigs are all grass-fed in the pastures.

Besides raising vegetables and meat, they also buy their own food from local farmers whose practices are sustainable. They also sell fruit shares to their subscribers that they buy from Jim Bittner. From other ecological and low-spray farms they purchase seeds, hay, honey, butter, grain, potting mix, eggs, meat and maple syrup. When all is said and done each week, a truck leaves the farm and delivers to four dropoff locations throughout Erie County, where subscribers can pick them up directly. From field to hand in one day.

Food citizens, unite!

One of the points that was reiterated by all of the farmers was the disjointedness between American consumers and the food they eat. Where does it come from? Who grew it? Can they trust it? Consumers often underestimate their power in the marketplace. So let’s talk about what we can do, and let’s change the language we use to start that conversation: throw out the word consumer, and talk about food citizens.

The industrialization of agriculture was originally brought on by the idea that cheap food would benefit American customers, and in turn, make the economy stronger. Negative side effects have included overconsumption, pesticide residues and the decline of the family farm and rural communities.

How cheap that “cheap food” really is is arguable, as well, when you consider the government subsidies given to farmers and the environmental problems that the public pays to clean up.

A dramatic shift in the way we think of food is necessary. We need to become responsible food citizens, who agree that everyone has a right to healthy food and so we should protect local production lines. We need to take ownership of the food we’re eating and figure out where it comes from and how it’s produced. With models like CSAs and farmers markets, we’ve got a good beginning. And there will be trade-offs, to be sure, if we start buying all of our foods locally. A bad crop of strawberries means you might not have some for the last few weeks of August, but we know where our food is coming from, and that the person who’s producing it is getting a fair price.

The price of continuuing today’s trends is too high. Farmers today are given short shrift in the marketplace. They are “price takers” in that they have very limited ability to influence the price on their commodity. All the power is in the hands of the megacorporations in agribusiness and food systems, who set prices globally without concern for local production costs.

It’s creating a kind of rural Darwinism, as farms become more and more aggressive in their competition with one another. In the end, everybody loses when another farm closes down, not just the farmers. We end up shipping in more weeks-old food from halfway around the world, and in the process our communal health suffers. Rural economies that depend on farming lost out, as their feed stores and equipment sellers go out of business, and their residents lose their jobs. Family farms employ more people on average than a corporate farm of the same size (probably due to less advanced technology). We have a responsibility to our growers as they have a responsibility to us. We may pay their bills, but they can help ensure a healthy diet for us, and keep our rural economies strong.

****

Back at Native Offerings, Stew and I walk around back of the greenhouse. He points out some hay fields in the distance, and across the road the Ritchies’ dozen or so cattle chew the grass idly. Over there Mansfield Creek cuts through his land, and over here—this plot up to that treeline—is where all the outdoor vegetables are grown. Looking over his land, you can hear the pride in Stew’s voice and realize that he’s come full-cirle. He’s improving his land while he works it, providing for his family and growing food with the full support of a conscientious customer base.

When I turn to leave, Stew reaches into a white bucket and pulls a heaping handful of red and yellow-hued cherry tomatoes out. “Some tomatoes for the road?” The future never tasted so good.