There are many definitions of an island. One is to be in isolation. Another is to be surrounded by another reality — something drastically different from what you represent.
You could say that George Naylor is an island. A farmer growing organically in the U.S. Corn Belt, George exists in a vast sea of industrial agriculture, surrounded by thousands of acres of genetically modified monocultures of corn and soybeans dependent on heavy chemical spraying. This sea is also an ideological one, where agribusiness propagandises the public with slogans of “We feed the world”, “Get big or get out”, and “Defend agriculture”.
However, if you are referring to an island as isolation from others, you will not find that in George. His commitment to others is evident in his history of leadership roles with organisations including the National Family Farm Coalition and the U.S. Farmers Association, and his presence in the American Agriculture Movement’s famous tractorcade across D.C. in 1979. George edited the policy booklet for the United Farmer and Rancher Congress during the farm crisis of the 1980s, unifying the voices of 2,600 farmer delegates.
But where George stands out most is deep in the cultural soil of farming communities. When George enters a room or even is brought up in conversation, whether folks agree with him or not, (and many don’t,) he is always respected. You can disagree with George, but you will never doubt his devotion to what he feels is just.
Last August, we visited George in Churdan, Iowa. His signature striped blue overalls don’t hold a match to his smile and firm handshake. We walk his farm, look at family photos, debate politics, and, of course, eat homemade pie paired with George’s homebrew. It’s these human moments that represent the perspective that George brings to the much needed dialogue on agriculture.
Many want to talk about soil health, pesticide use, cheap food, GMOs, and corporate consolidation. But for George, the conversation does not start there. It starts with recentering the dignity, rights, and value of the people that grow food in the first place. It starts with parity*. This struggle did not start with George and it won’t end with him, but he carries it as his own, because he knows deep down that the ills of the dominant industrial food system are enabled through the exploitation of farmers.
*Parity is defined as “the quality or state of being equal or equivalent.” In the context of agriculture, parity is the idea that farmers should be paid a fair price for their product — one that covers their costs and provides them with a decent livelihood. It’s a measure of economic justice that balances the “prices received” and “prices paid” by farmers.
So it’s surrounded by the sea of industrial agriculture that we found ourselves sitting with George and his wife Patti (a farmer and epic researcher), hearing the unbelievable stories of their lives. On the wall, a newspaper clipping of a photo of George and Subcommandante Marcos of the Zapatistas. It’s there that it has never been so obvious — no matter what the surrounding environment is, George Naylor is no island.
Every day, it’s becoming more and more clear that our global food system is dysfunctional. There’s growing recognition of the ways in which chemically-intensive, large-scale monocrop production is massively contributing to ecological collapse and threatening our collective survival. What are the problems you see in the American agricultural system today, and where do you see these problems rooted?
The free market. The idea that we don't want the government involved in the economy. That it can run on itself. Because if the government’s involved in the economy, that’s socialism. And we know how that works in the Soviet Union, for example, and “We sure wouldn’t want that”, you know? My dad used to visit with friends and neighbours on the square of our county seat on a Saturday night and he’d be talking to somebody about agriculture, and somebody else would overhear what they’re saying and go, “Oh, you Bolsheviks”.
There’s always been a conservative bent among American people that you don’t want to have the government involved in the “business” of agriculture but the truth is that the government’s always been involved. So the problem is the idea that an economy can run based on free markets, and we know that even when they say that, even when you have the most conservative people running the government, there are many times when it intervenes. Big corporations today especially often have big contracts with governments that underwrite their activities. And then we know how the Federal Reserve has bailed out big banks and also bailed out private corporations.
How do you believe the government’s role in agricultural policies have impacted food production and pricing in the U.S.? And how have they influenced farmers’ decisions and behaviours?
Most of the farm belt (small-town rural U.S.) farmers have been producing storable commodities and livestock, and they don’t really need to have much encouragement from the government to do stupid things; because a farmer is going to try to increase their income to avoid bankruptcy by producing more commodities. And if agrochemical corporations create new inputs pitched to help them do that, like new forms of nitrogen fertiliser, well, then that’s what they’re going to do. And it’s the same with very toxic pesticides. Marketing campaigns and propaganda from agribusiness ensures that there’s no hesitation on the part of farmers to use these toxic chemicals. No worry!
World War I drove up demand for food — both for soldiers abroad and for other countries engaged in the war — which subsequently increased farm prices. Then prices collapsed beginning in 1920, but the damage to the land (caused by the large-scale industrial monocropping encouraged during the war), especially in the Great Plains, produced the historic Dust Bowl. On one hand, you’ve got farmers following the logic of the market, which creates a disaster, and then on the other hand, you’ve got big businesses influencing government to not intervene – “to keep the government out of agriculture”. So I think the most fundamental reason that farm prices are consistently low is because of the market; farmers will do what they have to, to stay in business, and they will, as usual, externalise costs.
My folks quit farming in ‘62 because farm prices had gone to hell, because the Farm Program no longer supported parity prices (prices balanced for inflation). And when farm prices did get better in the early ‘70s and Earl Butz (former U.S. Secretary of Agriculture) said “Plant fencerow to fencerow”, he wasn’t really influencing farmers’ behaviour. They were doing what just came natural when the prices were high. They ploughed up the pasture and sold the cattle which then made cattle cheap. And then even more farmers said, “What the hell do I need pasture for? I can’t make any money raising cattle”, so they ploughed up even more pasture and it was a downward spiral until you hit the bottom.
When farm prices are low, farmers are going to try to figure out how to increase their yield and some farmers are going to quit so there’s more land out there to be rented or bought. The remaining farmers are going to try to get bigger to increase their income. That’s just the logic. What’s the reason? It’s the market, stupid!
When many of us think of the rallying cries of Big Ag, we think of slogans like, “We feed the world”, “Get big or get out”. These narratives uphold a culture of overproduction that forces farmers to constantly compete to produce as much as possible. What does this culture of overproduction do for other prices — say, the price of food or farmworker wages?
For a long time, when the food system wasn’t as complicated and monopolised as it is now, cheap farmgate prices (the prices that farmers receive for their agricultural produce) resulted in cheap food. Back in the day before soybeans became a major commodity, people used lard and butter for cooking. But then as soybeans became a big commodity, food manufacturers made hydrogenated soybean oil to replace lard, and oleomargarine to replace butter, and these became a big deal. And so I remember when I was out in California as a kid, we’d go to a grocery store and they would have piles and piles of oleomargarine stacked up that you could buy for next to nothing. And so people stopped buying butter, because the alternatives were really cheap — a lot cheaper than butter. So for a long time, farmgate prices resulted in cheap food prices. But over time, you got the meat sector being more monopolised and now, almost every food item is produced through manufacturing. Today, there is almost no connection between what the farmer earns and what the consumer pays.
As far as farmworkers go, if the farmers can’t stay in business, they’re not able to pay the farmworkers what they deserve. And so, even if farmers got parity, it wouldn’t be a guarantee that farmworkers got a better wage, but at least it would be possible. Whereas if farmers are living hand to mouth, there’s not much chance of farmworkers getting a better wage.
The economic theory used by the U.S. government and corporations to bust farmers off the land with low prices, claimed that society was going to benefit. The government would say, “We have too many farmers and they can’t make a living. The best thing to do is to get off the farm, go to town, get a job.” And then the key question became how they were going to get families off their lands. And their answer was to squeeze them off by lowering prices. The new policy beginning in 1953 was to follow “market-oriented policy”, which meant breaking the New Deal parity price floor system – the promise of prices that would keep up with inflation. This, of course, was a self-serving idea for big business, because all those farmers that went to town to get jobs — they helped keep wages down. When you get farmers down economically and they move to cities for jobs, you’re keeping wages down. And like I said, they’re not able to pay farmworkers very much either. So there’s a connection.
Economists will say that low farm prices are somehow good for the economy, but that’s absolutely not true. If you look at what your national income is composed of and you change one of those components, there will be a multiplier effect. And so when you lower commodity prices, local businesses suffer and it has a downward pressure on other parts of the national income. They’ve had to use the Federal Reserve, deficit spending, and military spending just to keep a semblance of the economy rolling, despite that drag on the national income.
This dimension you’re talking about is very tethered to the U.S.’s championing of free market capitalism (often known as neoliberalism). How does neoliberalism affect the relationship between farmers and how has it changed over time? And how has it affected the relationship between farmers and consumers, given that agriculture was once much more localised and farms, farmers, and consumers are no longer as connected?
Well, you know, neoliberalism has taken the idea that farmers are just producers of commodities to the extreme. We’re just out here as the raw material procurement arm of the industrial food system, and most people don’t make the connection that farmers produce raw materials, not food. Thanks to neoliberal globalisation that homogenised global commodity markets and destroyed every country’s food sovereignty, whatever you eat and get at a grocery store could come from anywhere around the world. So this whole idea of “know your farmer” is simply not practical. Most people aren’t going to know their farmer, and maybe they never did. But there was a time when, of course, some farmers would be supplying things like milk, maybe chickens and eggs to their local economy. So there was a real connection there.
I always tell a story about my dad when he went to New Jersey to work for the Signal Corps during World War II. So he’s out there at a deli and the guy behind the counter says, “Oh, where are you from?” And my dad says, “Iowa”, and he says, “Iowa! That’s where my meat comes from”. The fact is, people kind of knew where a lot of meat came from, but it wasn’t local by any means. And so this idea that farmers are always producing food for local markets and local consumers has not been the general rule.
Now it’s obvious what industrial agriculture is, when you see $500,000 tractors and $500,000 combines. As the market system has created larger and larger farms, farmers will even bring in people from South Africa or Brazil to run their machines. And so industrial agriculture or capitalist agriculture is way more apparent than maybe it used to be. In capitalist agriculture, a lot of the work is done by hired labour. Farm management companies will use artificial intelligence to replace farmers and their judgments about farming. It’s all about the motive to accumulate wealth. That’s the market for you. And there’s no other question involved. “How am I going to make money?” Global big business managers think, “Oh, what the hell, so a lot of people got to die and we got to tear up ecosystems? We got to deplete the cod fisheries? We’re going to almost make whales extinct? Too bad.”
This economic model is clearly failing the majority of the world’s people — farmers and consumers alike. Your organising work has centred the concept of parity as a solution. When many of us picture parity, we imagine it purely in market terms. But your idea of parity clearly goes beyond the scope of economics and markets. What does a system of parity look like?
If you look at Fred Stover (farmer, organiser, and former head of the Iowa Farmers Union during the late 1940s and early 1950s during which the government had parity policies in place), he talked about how the opposite of parity is disparity. If you were to get people to focus on that idea, that we don’t want to live in a society that’s based on disparity, then parity isn’t so difficult to understand. Why would we want a society of disparity? If parity is seen as the opposite of disparity, then you could apply the idea of parity across the board. And then there can surely be the importance of parity wages, for instance, which would be like a living wage that won’t be eroded by inflation. And it’s almost like an identical way of thinking of labour and commodities. The meagre minimum wage in this country hasn’t been increased since 2009! Is it any wonder that “poor people” suffer from inflation? This abandonment of parity contributes everyday to income inequality – a dysfunctional society.
It’s thanks to globalisation, thanks to the idea that free trade should determine global commodity prices, that countries don’t really have any control over what their farmers get for their commodities. The market has applied that logic to every farmer all around the world. It drives people from the countryside into the cities where they can become cheap labour. And then consequently, the big corporations use wage arbitrage* to send jobs to places where they can get the cheapest labour. And of course, those people that are that cheap labour have had to leave their rural communities, their sustainable lifestyles, where their society had a real caring culture for their fellow citizens in their villages. So that’s one thing that's missing from a lot of the dialogue around sustainability and development.
*Wage arbitrage refers to the practice of companies taking advantage of wage differences between different geographic regions. People living in rural areas are forced to migrate to urban areas in search of better wages, but the large influx of the rural population drives wages further down due to increased competition for jobs.
We’ve moved people out of rural communities where there was a sustainable society and culture to the cities where there might be a job, and there might not be a job, and they come almost empty-handed. And so they’re willing to do just about anything to get something to eat. And they fit right into the system of exploiting other people and exploiting the environment all for the benefit of accumulating wealth for big corporations. That’s become the norm all over the world now. And, you can read about the consequences of it, but if you’re beholden to this logic, or you don’t know any better, well, that’s just the way things work. That’s what happens when human beings do what they want to do for their own benefit.
On a local level, I’ve seen the consequences of sub-parity prices (prices that increasingly lag behind farming costs and the cost of living). When I used to go around to other countries and talk to farmers. I would say, “I’m coming from the future. I can tell you what’s going to happen if your country goes along with free trade”. I hardly have any neighbours anymore. And everything is fencerow to fencerow farming, and cheap grain feeds the livestock in corporate Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) and feedlots. We got our waters polluted, and our communities, which were once based on local town schools, churches, and small businesses, are now on life support.
Inflation is real, even when the Federal Reserve says everything’s under control. They say they want to have 2% inflation per year. And off the top of my head, I can’t tell you what that would do to your wages over 10 years, but it’s significant. Why is minimum wage the lowest it’s been in real dollars since 1945? Just think of the hardship that's imposed on low wage working people. They’ve had to take on more jobs, they’ve had to deny their family the time it takes to raise young people, with respect for their parents or respect for the other parts of society. Parents are always away from home working, kids are out on the street. Economic disenfranchisement creates more violence in the home as well.
When a community is economically depressed, things don’t work the way they ought to work. And it’s basically just out of control. And here in Iowa, that's what's happened. “Get big or get out.” Farmers are competing against each other for more land and they just drive the rental prices up. They even have cash rent auctions, where you’ll go to the courthouse and an auctioneer will say, “Here we got this piece of land, now who’s willing to pay the highest rent per acre per year?” And whoever is most stupid, or most greedy, or thinks they can manage chemicals, GMO seeds, and giant machines (and giant debt) that goes with it, they’re going to bid the highest price for that land. And so somebody who maybe had been farming that land for decades, they’re gonna go, “Oh, God, I can’t pay that kind of cash rent. Are you kidding me?” And they get out. So then the land gets farmed by the people who are the most ruthless, and who most disregard the environment and their community.
The market is going to dictate that commodity prices are going to be low in general. I call it economic gravity. It’s as sure as physical gravity. We know that Newton’s apple falling from a tree was inevitable. Well, it’s the same thing with wages and commodity prices in this society. They’re going to fall, fall, fall, unless we as a democratic society do something to counter that economic gravity.
The logic of a market is going to end up in a disaster, not only for workers, and farmers, but the environment too. And so there has to be a collective way to organise and deal with that, where we say to ourselves, “We’re not going to exploit our fellow human beings. We’re not going to exploit the environment and ecosystems just to make our private wealth greater”. Because it is not going to work if you think that it’s okay to live in a society that’s based on disparity. Disparity is not a sustainable way of living, and it just leads to bigger and bigger problems.
And so the operational program to counter that would be a parity system, both for wages and for commodities. And we can apply that to typically low priced fossil fuels – every resource we’ve been using like there’s no tomorrow. And a parity system states that we're not going to exploit other people and the environment, just to have cheap shit. So the system is going to say instead, “Oh, you don't get to buy shit cheap anymore. You don’t get to buy cheap commodities. And we’re going to make sure that the farmers are going to get that better price and they’re going to be able to be stewards of the land. And we don’t have to worry about the possibility of a drought or whatever causing farm and food prices to skyrocket. We will have food security reserves. That’s as simple as it can be. And then the same way with wages. We know that economic gravity is going to make wages always cheap. The logic of labour is that big corporations can lay people off and close down plants, if their return on investment doesn't justify keeping those plants open. So they externalise their costs to working people. And so low wages and low commodity prices are inevitable, unless there’s a social and political system to prevent that. And parity does that.
This article by George Naylor which explores the concept of parity in agriculture, what it means and what it does not mean. Naylor defines parity as the idea that the prices of agricultural products should cover the cost of production and provide a decent standard of living for farmers. He explains that parity is not about artificially increasing prices or returning to a bygone era. Rather, it is about fairness, stability, and sustainability in the food system. The article also discusses the challenges facing farmers in achieving parity, such as corporate concentration and lack of government support.
This booklet by farmer-organiser Fred Stover from 1953, discussing the importance of achieving parity in agriculture for promoting peace and stability in society. Stover argues that economic inequality and the concentration of power in the hands of a few corporations are major threats to social and political stability. Stover also delves into the history of parity in the U.S. and identifies the current obstacles that farmers face in attaining parity. Overall, Stover stresses that parity is crucial not only for farmers but for the well-being of society as a whole.
The Hungry World: America’s Cold War Battle against Poverty in Asia, a book by Nick Cullather detailing the history of the Green Revolution. Cullather argues that the agricultural system created in the U.S. and imposed on the rest of the world has become a new and powerful tool of international politics.
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The claim that the "free market" is the problem is completely empty of facts and is an ideological statement, not one based in any empirical reality. Why? The American agricultural system doesn't have a free market and hasn't for at least a hundred years. It is largely controlled by giant conglomerates facilitated by what ..? The government.
I liked how nuanced this conversation got, however I don’t fully feel like “parity” was explained in an understandable way, and I also think that there would need to be a large psychological shift in the powers that be to actually change a system in that large of a scale. I’d like to see more bottom up solutions presented on what the average joe can do rather than lament that we are being screwed over (which we always are).