A Wound That Still Bleeds

OVER THE COURSE of 2017, I spent a lot of time thinking about how the catastrophe of November 2016 came about and a lot of time listening to country singer-songwriter Margo Price. Somewhere along the way, the two activities came together.

Price’s artistic rise roughly coincided with Trump’s political one. She won the Americana Emerging Artist Award for 2016 with her first album,Midwest Farmer’s Daughter, and her second, All American Made, was released to much acclaim in October. She makes the kind of rough-hewn, class-conscious country rock that is one of my minimum daily requirements. Both of her albums are anchored by intensely autobiographical songs (“Hands of Time” and “Heart of America,” respectively) that spring from the same historic disruption in her family’s life: the loss of their family farm to foreclosure during the 1980s farm crisis.

But here’s the kicker: Margo Price wasn’t even 3 years old in 1986 when her “daddy lost the farm ... [and] took a job at the prison.” She must have little or no conscious memory of farm life, or the foreclosure, but when she sits down with her guitar to pour out her soul, that’s what keeps coming. It’s a wound that, 30 years later, not only hasn’t healed, it hasn’t even stopped bleeding.

Maybe that’s where we need to begin if we’re to understand what happened in rural America in 2016. In the 1980s, almost 300,000 farms were lost forever. Hundreds of “failed” farmers killed themselves in shame and despair. Many small towns just dried up and blew away. It was a big deal.

But then America moved on. There was a tech bubble to inflate, and all these new gadgets to play with, and supermarket prices stayed low, so why bother with farmers?

Maybe that’s when the feeling of being “forgotten” by the rest of the country started. It only deepened in subsequent decades as corporate free-trade deals took away the factories that had been one of the only other sources of a dignified livelihood in most small towns. And finally, in 2016, a demagogue came along to open all those old wounds and fan the embers of those grievances into a roaring flame of resentment at all the wrong people.

Here’s something else to think about. There’s every reason to suspect that the whole cycle is starting again. Farm Aid, the organization started by Willie Nelson, John Mellencamp, and Neil Young to combat the ’80s farm disaster, is now talking about a “looming crisis on American farms.”

Net farm income fell about 45 percent between 2013 and 2016. As of November 2017, the U.S. Department of Agriculture projected median farm income for 2017 to be negative $1,100. And the suicide rate among white male agriculture workers, according to the Centers for Disease Control, is now 50 percent higher than it was during the peak of the 1980s crisis. In fact, in 17 states people who work in agriculture are killing themselves at a rate five times greater than the general population.

The root causes of this looming crisis are the same as they were in the 1980s. U.S. agriculture policy is set by an oligopoly of a few giant corporations that keep crop prices paid to farmers low. To survive, the farmer must produce more, which requires buying more seed, fertilizer, and equipment and buying or renting more land, which drives the farmer further into debt.

If we are ever going to have a healthy society, much less a just one, we will need to use the power of government to create a system of subsidies and incentives that allow people to make a reasonable, honorable, and sustainable living on the land, growing food products that we actually need. And we better do it soon, while we still have some farmers around.