Word: farmerly
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...BIGGEST news magazine in the country has a message straight from the mouth of Earl Butz for America's farmers: Get bit or get out. Though Time counts on its readers to forget that writers (and editors) with opinions bang out its byline-less features, the author(s) of its Nov. 6 cover story, "The New U.S. Farmer," had obviously studied up on his Adam Smith economics and his Department of Agriculture (USDA) statistics in preparation for this defense of U.S. agriculture, "the productivity wonder of the world." Couched in Timese idiom, readers might almost be lulled into believing this...
...This new farmer is smarter as well as richer than the farmers of an earlier time. One man says, "It used to be that if you had a child who wasn't too bright, you'd say, 'Son, you're going to be a farmer." But things are different...
...survey of farms in different regions of the country, he concluded that most economies of scale "are achieved by the one-man fully mechanized farm. While the most efficient farm size has increased in the last decade, due mainly to tractor improvements, this 1973 report found that most farmers need a much smaller acreage and capital investment than Pat Benedict. For instance, a vegetable grower in California produces at his maximum potential on a farm of 200 acres with less than one-fifth of Benedict's investment in machinery, and a corn farmer in Indiana on a farm...
Even more important, as Jim Hightower points out in his book on the food industry, Eat Your Heart Out, "the question is no simply who owns the farm, but who owns the farmer." Because they lack market power, farmers have been forced to sign contracts which commit the farmer to grow a certain crop for a certain price. If a farmer has had a bad year and goes into debt, a common occurance in such an unpredictable business, the corporate contractor can step in and tell the farmer how to run his farm...
Another study that Time chose not to cite found in 1970 that 22 per cent of the U.S. food supply is produced by corporate farmers and by contract. The American Agriculture Marketing Association predicts that by 1985 corporations will control 75 per cent of our food supply in one of these two ways. And even the USDA admitted in a 1973 report that only cash grain and forage crops, and range livestock will be controlled by independent family farmers in 1985. Pat Benedict, a wheat farmer, is the exception, not the rule...