The slow death of the family farm

In common parlance, people talk about that consolidation as “the death of the family farm,” usually assuming that the industrially scaled operations that replace them are run by corporations. While it’s true that most of the money in agriculture is quickly funneled away from rural communities towards large corporations, there’s an important detail this narrative misses: As the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF) and other lobbyists for Big Agriculture are quick to point out, the bigger and bigger farms that dominate U.S. agriculture are family farms, too.

That line is sometimes deployed as a shallow “gotcha” to dissuade people from talking about agriculture’s very obvious consolidation problem. But as lawyer, activist and author Sonja Trom Eayrs details in her recent book, “Dodge County, Incorporated,” the fact that factory farms are usually family businesses is central to understanding the way that industrial agriculture has run small farms out of business and hollowed out entire communities. Rather than presenting a narrative of faceless corporate takeover, Eayrs tells a story of deep community fracture, one driven by some farming families expanding their businesses by capitalizing on the flight of their neighbors.

What is a family farm, technically?

In the eyes of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), a family farm is “any farm organized as a sole proprietorship, partnership, or family corporation.” For farms to be considered family businesses, they need to be majority-owned by the primary operator — the person who makes the decisions about what happens on the farm — and their relatives. Depending on what kind of farm the family is running, the primary operator and their family members might be responsible for most of the labor; this is especially the case on row crop farms, where much of the work is mechanized. But even farms where most of the work is done by hired farmworkers, like those that grow labor-intensive produce, are considered family farms if the business is family-owned.

While CAFOs don’t get the same subsidies as crop farmers, they’re indirectly subsidized by crop subsidies that allow them to buy animal feed for low prices. They also  benefit disproportionately from government programs, often receiving pollutant-mitigating infrastructure like manure digesters with federal funds, and making money off the resulting biogas in return. Because money for these projects is often allocated where it will make the biggest difference, it goes disproportionately to the largest farms, with smaller livestock farms getting far fewer funds.

But outside of farm subsidies, larger farms often have far lower operating costs than small ones. Some of that is thanks to economies of scale, the idea that things just get more efficient in bulk. Most costs of running a business naturally go up the more business you do: A large farm will spend more on fertilizer than a small farm because it needs more fertilizer. But some costs are more or less fixed: Both farms need a tractor, but the larger farm gets a lot more revenue from that tractor than a smaller farm does. Meanwhile, the large farm might also be able to get a better deal on fertilizer, seed and other inputs if it buys enough of them. All those factors add up quickly, and the large farm ends up making a lot more money on every bushel of corn it sells than the small farm does because its costs are a lot lower.

On some level, cashing in on economies of scale is just good business. But that relatively neutral explanation isn’t enough to explain the dramatic transformation that Eayrs and others across the country have seen in their communities. Across agriculture, food processors have also pushed small farmers out of the way in favor of working with larger ones who can fill large orders.

“Family farms” vs. family farms

As CAFOs started expanding in earnest across the country in the 1980s, they looked like a way for struggling farm families to earn steady contracts and reliable income, an appealing escape hatch from an otherwise volatile farm economy. Integrators — the meat industry’s middlemen — promised farmers guaranteed buyers, technical and veterinary support, and more exchange for raising hogs the farmers didn’t technically own themselves, using equipment and facilities they would have had to pay to install on their land. Conveniently, integrators also arrived with financing options, making transitioning a diversified farm into a CAFO an even more appealing proposition.

As the first families in Dodge County started constructing barns for huge numbers of hogs in the 1990s, that quickly became their neighbors’ problem: Noxious fumes made it hard for neighboring farmers to work their land, and nitrates from the hogs’ manure contaminated local water supplies. Those changes helped push some families off their lands and out of communities they’d helped build over generations. As families sold off their land, CAFO-owning neighbors scooped it up, expanding their operations. Over time, farmers working with industry integrators have constructed specialized buildings, like a sow gestational facility, that brought more and more of the pieces of the hog industry’s complete “production line” to the county; in turn, this further dropped transportation and production costs for CAFO operators while making the area less appealing to others. As Eayrs describes, old farmhouses would go down and be replaced by new hog barns, stranding the few other longtime residents in a sea of what came to be known as “factory farms.”

In a small community, those changes aren’t just business decisions made by strangers: In many cases, CAFO owners and other farmers have been neighbors for generations. But as some families became dependent on (and quite wealthy from) the CAFOs pushing their neighbors out, that has created big community rifts.

As Eayrs puts it, factory farm owners and their families have been deputized into being Big Ag’s “errand boys.” Owners show up en masse to small community meetings around the region to drown out grassroots attempts to regulate factory farms; by overcrowding the sessions, they give the impression that those who fight against CAFOs are a tiny minority. Eayrs’s personal advocacy against CAFOs and her family’s legal attempts to slow their expansion have also been met with more personal attacks. Pro-CAFO neighbors have tried to intimidate her family by dumping garbage on their property, running them off the road with manure trucks, and hounding them with bogus complaints to the police and sheriff.

Meanwhile, groups like the Minnesota Farm Bureau have worked hard to perpetuate the narrative that CAFOs are good for communities because they bring economic development, rather than the reality that they extract wealth from rural areas. Despite all available evidence that the consolidation of small farms reduces average incomes and hollows out rural towns, groups like the Farm Bureau have worked hard to cast larger farms’ detractors as ignorant outsiders standing in the way of prosperity. They’ve even gone so far as to publish booklets like “Moving to the Country,” which pushes non-farmers to accept the constant stench and pollution emanating from factory farms as part of rural life. At the same time, families with large farms fund highly visible community events, further entrenching the notion that they’re invested in the community.

Eayrs’s story is all too common in rural communities across the U.S. and captures the tension, both on a local level as well as in the national conversation, around what constitutes a “family farm.” Unfortunately, the Eayrs family’s tenacity is what sets their story apart: Many small, diversified farms continue to fold, leaving increasingly empty towns across the country.