I really like food.   Without it, I am nothing.   Food is not only a life necessity, but also an important part of culture and tradition.   If all this is true, why do we treat the people who bring us our food worse than the dirt that they work?

Rednecks, welfare farmers and all the unfortunate names we might call migrant workers from south of the border; all these people are the backbone of our civilization.   More important than all the doctors, stockbrokers and lawyers in the world, we treat them all as the bottom rung of society.

Farmers are generally caricatured in popular culture as uneducated, but even beginning to think that takes a perverse sort of logic.   Every day farmers do what the vast majority of us have no idea how to do, coax tiny seeds into plants that produce nourishment for us all.   I don’t know how to drive a tractor, do you?   Do you even know what a thresher does?   This is essential knowledge that without farmers would be lost to our country forever.

Besides just growing the crops these supposedly “uneducated” farmers have to keep track of markets, work through government red tape, find ways to market their goods and get it the consumer and finally find a way to make ends meet on the pitiful amount that we pay them.
Of each dollar we spend on food in the supermarket, less than seven cents of that ever gets to the farmer, and if we are thinking about the people that then work for the farmer that amount is even less.   Our lack of respect for those that pursue the agrarian arts ultimately translates into second jobs and huge debt.   In America we benefit from the lowest food prices in the world, yet we scream like banshees about “welfare farmers” every time we pass a farm bill.

The real problem with subsidies is not that they help farmers too little, but that they benefit very few farmers and mainly not the ones that need the help.   If we insist on paying rock bottom prices for our grocery store food then we have to find other ways to keep American farms afloat, and if that means doling out taxpayer money then perhaps that is what needs to be done.

Or maybe we could pay our farmers up-front, by starting to pay the real market value for our food, and making sure that money gets to these professionals.   In the short term this will mean buying at farmers markets, farm stands or CSAs, but hopefully we can find ways to reform our food system so that more than seven cents of our food dollar gets to farmers.

As peak oil approaches and our world moves to a place where wheat from China, asparagus from Chile and sugar from Costa Rica cease to make sense, we will be forced to recognize the important contributions that farmers make to our society.   The problem is, if we don’t start valuing their work now, we won’t have any farmers left later.