Family Farm - Family Farms in The 21st Century

Family Farms in The 21st Century

It is arguable whether any sort of "idyllic" life existed for most of the millions of family farms that have disappeared in recent decades. At the beginning of 20th century, an average farm in North America produced much less food per acre than it does nowadays. A likely conclusion is that for a time in the middle decades of the last century, a large number of farms achieved a temporarily comfortable position by capitalizing on rapidly emerging new technologies, markets, and growth-oriented philosophies. As growth and "production efficiency" kept increasing, this position began to reverse noticeably, at least by the 1970s. The number of farms, and of farm families living on the land, has dropped every decade in the United States since 1920. In part this was a function of economies of scale and competitive pressures. In part it may be perceived as an indication that "family farming", in its raw, realistic form, is just plain hard work, with limited social and cultural opportunities, and competes poorly as an occupation and a "lifestyle" with urban and suburban opportunities.

In the current situation, for the independent "family farmer" to regain any sort of practical economic independence, it would seem necessary that the entire food industry be restructured. Furthermore, given the extreme number of defunct family farms, it is not so much a matter of saving or preserving the family farm, but of using the remaining knowledge, expertise and farms as the framework for the "new family farm." A serious question, however, is whether the entire food system should be "restructured" in order to preserve a failed or perhaps mythological ideal, or whether the population of the world, now approaching 7 billion people, will be sustained by a return to labor-intensive farming and local mom and pop marketing practices. The answer, however, can hardly be considered immediately obvious, especially since many of these 7 billion people might find they prefer growing food to current urban lower-class options such as data entry, food service, and telemarketing.

As an example of the evolution of the "family farm", the history of North Dakota is illuminating. Although originally developed as enormous "bonanza farms" in the 1870s, these were broken up and sold off into smaller holdings and other parts of the state were homesteaded in quarter section (160-acre (0.65 km2)) farms. The state was predominantly farmed by individuals and families by the 1920s and 1930s. The state enjoyed a populist boom in the early 20th century, as farmer-controlled legislatures seized control of the marketing and sale of agricultural products and placed it in state-sponsored "cooperatives" to enable smaller producers to escape the grip of the railroads and the industrialized food merchants. These retrograde polices have long since been abandoned as unrealistic and unsustainable. In 2007, most farmland in North Dakota remains owned by individuals. Corporate ownership of farmland has been illegal since a statewide voter initiative in 1933. The scale of agriculture in North Dakota, however, is a far cry from the idyllic conception of an intimate hands-on family operation of mixed agriculture. The typical dry-land wheat farm in North Dakota consists of several thousand acres with equipment on a scale to match. The produce of these farms is assembled on 120-car trains and shipped to distant markets as part of the international stream of commerce.

Farms such as this typically are aggregations of fifteen, twenty or more homesteaded quarter sections of land which at one time contained "family farms", as witnessed by the numerous abandoned farmsteads, ghost towns, and abandoned country churches and cemeteries memorializing a much larger rural population that is long since disappeared forever.

The thousands of abandoned or obliterated farmsteads and other evidence of rural depopulation in North Dakota, including many now-vacant and deteriorated homesteads which were thriving family farms into the 1970s, are a counterpoint to romantic notions of "family farming" in the 21st century.