When the Tater Tanks

“You’re usually a glass half full person, Tom. What’s up? Is everything ok?” I was on the phone with my ag banker. We’ve been with their banking co-op for over 25 years and have always had a really good relationship. Notably, as an ag bank, they envisioned the success of an organic beef production and were hugely instrumental in giving Caryl and I a foothold for building momentum.

“Oh…I’m OK. It’s not about you. I’ve just been in meetings for the past week with potato farmers here in southeast Idaho. It just gets depressing.” 

I completely understood. Potatoes and most carbohydrate commodities are in  a rough “bearish” market climate right now, which means most farmers are sucking wind. That includes corn, grain, sugar beets, and, of course potatoes. Compounding the problem are widespread drought conditions throughout much of the West, and highly elevated prices for crop amendments such as fertilizer and “cide” chemicals (herbicides, fungicides, and pesticides).

Side note: we use none of the above, and still managed to double our production over the last 10 years (that wasn’t a brag, btw. It certainly wasn’t anything we knew how to do. We had to learn HOW from a host of others. More on that in another newsletter).

As a banker, Tom was struggling to justify “carrying” such commodity- and chemical-dependent operations for another year, given the bleak market outlook and high costs. Would the bank be able to forward them the quarter to a half a million dollars it took each year to operate? Would the farmer be able to pay it back despite depressed market conditions?

These were completely valid questions, and neither of us had answers. Thankfully, Caryl and I haven’t taken operating loans for nearly a decade, and instead decided to ride the stressful tide of a “hand to mouth” existence, meaning that the sales of our beef on a monthly basis could literally make or break us. 

I’m grateful that there’s always been enough to get by. There’s been really tight times and a little of the “robbing Peter to pay Paul (poor Peter!)” on rare occasions, but we’ve always been able to happily stay on the “same side of the street” with anyone we bump into on the sidewalk and visit with in our hometown of Salmon, Idaho. 

Few people in agriculture have that luxury. They don’t only owe the bank; often, friends, neighbors, feed stores, and seed dealers or equipment brokers have borne the burden of unpaid agriculture related production bills. 

Why is this happening? What is going on? Why are prices dropping? 

Analysts simply attribute it to “commodity surpluses” resulting from production efficiencies. And that is true. There are surpluses due to increased yields. Production has become king; more bushels per acre on dryer ground, bigger machines to plant and harvest. Bigger farms. Machine automation. Robotic farming is next. Drone spraying. 

Are bigger machines and fatter yields better? What if it costs more per bushel or ton to produce? Does “Go Big or Go Home” make economic sense in farming? It can to some degree, simply due to economy of scale. But for most family farmers, jumping to those production scales simply becomes out of reach. They can’t make the quantum leap to get there. 

And their banker won’t fund them. 

But wait. There’s more. There’s another niggling fact that the analysts don’t like to talk about, and the farmers don’t either. A quiet revolution—a “sea change”—is slowly but perceptibly happening in our food consumer society. It’s not in the processors that are the likes of mega-food companies like General Mills, Coca-Cola and Unilever. It is in each of us: individual eaters of food, making informed decisions about their health. They are listening and learning not so much from mainstream medical practice, but from podcasts, Instagram health “influencers” and naturopathic physicians. There are some isolated (often, actually isolated by their peers) voices in the conventional medical profession who have also sidled up to the new practice of ” holistic health.”

These eaters of food are researching and directing their own paths to wellness. They are individuals, friends and families forging their own way out of the labyrinth of debilitating symptoms caused by autoimmune disease, diabetes, autism, heart disease and cancer. In their quest, many have found alternative self-care procedures that filled a void left by conventional medicine. 

Most of them first focus on what seems obvious to them: the low-hanging fruit, which is what they eat.

And the almost ubiquitous message about food they extracted from their ventures into this place of discovery? Cut back on the carbs. It’s the starting point for many of their journeys. It’s the easy first step.

The second recommendation they perceive is to cut back on processed foods. These are breakfast cereals, frozen pizzas, French fries, TV dinners, pre-made pasta meals, Olive Garden, Panera Bread, McDonalds or Dominos. 

And it just so happens that those are the final product outlets for all of the commodity crops listed above. We don’t often eat raw corn, wheat, sugar beets or potatoes. With the exception of a small fraction of potatoes, there’s almost no household consumption of these foods. They all enter a factory first to be processed.

So it’s double-ended damning of commodity farming; not only has their growing protocol become so productive that they have unparalleled surplus, but their end point customer base is losing interest in the foods they produce!

It’s not a great situation to be in for a farmer–or a bank. And the bank is always going to win. And that leaves the farmer…bankrupt.

What’s the solution? 

Conceptually, it’s actually quite simple. As farmers and ranchers, we have to once again focus on the fact that we grow food. Commodities are NOT that. As a farmer, “food” means that people could (in theory, at least) walk on to your place and acquire something to eat. They could eat a tomato from your field. They could eat a fresh killed chicken (maybe they want to kill it). They could pick a bag of apples. They could harvest beef or lamb for their chest freezer. They could pick up some milk and butter. They could buy a bag of flour with your name on it.

They may not do that, because in this age, the eaters of the food have lost touch with where their food comes from (and how to reduce for their cupboard or freezer) as much as farmers have lost touch with the fact that they could grow food. 

But we could go back to the way it was: an elegant system of market and barter. Farmers and ranchers could grow sustenance. And the eaters could buy it. It’s really simple, actually. Especially since humans have been eating food off the land since the beginning of their time on earth, except for the past 50-75 years. 

Let’s think about our spud farmer. He or she could still grow some for the table. Those southern Idaho volcanic soils could easily raise almost any food crop: onions, garlic, beans, carrots, cauliflower. They could pasture livestock. The climate will grow fruit and also grow any kind of grain. I have a good friend in southern Idaho that mills her own organic grain into flour. She sells it handily to bakeries, households and stores. 

Caryl, my wife, was raised in NW Indiana. On their farm, they raised cows, hogs, chickens, eggs, apples, beans, corn, grain, popcorn, sunflowers, asparagus and melons. This was just 60 years ago, and long before that, even (and that was before widespread refrigerated transportation. Now, on the same land, the new owner of the farm raises corn and soybeans. That’s it.

I think we could do that again, especially given the resurgent paradigm of raising food on living soils. The tools are available for a new generation of farmers to learn how to actually farm for food production once again. 

Lets do this. And let’s halt the entrusting of our food supply–and wellness to the likes of Whole Foods, Wegmans, Albertsons and Sysco.

Happy Trails.