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American Cataclysm, 44(3), (January-March 2003): 40-57.
By E.G. Vallianatos Small rural towns in the United States are falling apart because agribusiness has been sucking the life out of them. Consider, for example, Arvin, a small rural town in southeastern Kern County in the fertile Central Valley of California. In 1940, factory-like farms surrounded Arvin. Arvin, however, did not share in the prosperity of those factory-like farms. The average farm size of Arvin was 500 acres. Only thirty-five percent of Arvin farmers owned their land. Only four percent of the people of Arvin were native Californians. Sixty-three percent were Dust Bowl migrants with less than five years of residence in the town. They earned little and did not have much interest in their community. Even the managers of the large farms were absentees. If any businessmen lived in Arvin, they went to Bakersfield and Los Angeles for recreation. Arvin's school teachers found the town so distressing that most of them lived in Bakersfield, commuting 22 miles daily. The elementary schools, churches, and the economy of Arvin were impoverished. Arvin had no high school. The town had no elected political leadership of its own. It was unincorporated. Its large farms converted it into a slum and a colony.
We know these things about Arvin because of Walter Goldschmidt, an anthropologist with the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) in the early 1940s. Goldschmidt studied Arvin. 1 He compared his findings with what he discovered in another rural town that was dominated by small farms. This was Dinuba in northern Tulare County in California's Central Valley.
In 1940 the average farm in Dinuba was 57 acres. More than three-fourths of the farmers of Dinuba owned their land. Dinuba's economy and culture were vigorous and democratic. Its elementary and high schools were good. The teachers lived in town and made outstanding contributions to the culture of the community. Dinuba's residents were middle class persons with good income and strong interest in their town. Nineteen percent of the people of Dinuba were native Californians and 22 percent Dust Bowl migrants. The median length of residence at Dinuba was between 15 and 20 years. Dinuba's prosperity was the prosperity of its small farms.
Yet Dinuba and Arvin were similar rural towns. They enjoyed the same climate and fertile land. They were equidistant from small and large cities and had access to highways and railroads. They had the same industrialized farming, relying on laborers to do the hard and dangerous work. They specialized in single crops, which they produced exclusively for cash sales. Dinuba raised fruits, especially raisin grapes, some cotton and vegetables. Arvin produced largely cotton, potatoes, fruits and vegetables, grapes, and grain.
The sole factor that made Arvin and Dinuba different was the size of the farms -- Arvin had large farms and Dinuba had small farms. Ninety-one percent of Arvin's land was in farms larger than 160 acres but only 25 percent of Dinuba's land was in farms of over 160 acres.
The economic, social and democratic consequences of farm size in Dinuba and Arvin were dramatic.
Dinuba's small-farm economy supported 62 business, Arvin's large-farm economy 35. The volume of retail trade in Dinuba for a year was $4,383,000 and for Arvin $2,535,000. The small-farm community spent over three times more money for household supplies and building equipment than the large-farm community. More than one-half of the breadwinners of Dinuba, but less than one-fifth of the breadwinners of Arvin, were independent businessmen, white-color workers or farmers. Less than one-third of the breadwinners of the small-farm community were agricultural workers while nearly two-thirds of those gainfully employed in the large-farm community were agricultural workers. Dinuba had three parks and two newspapers. The town had paved streets, sewage, and streetlights. Arvin had but a single playground loaned by a corporation and one newspaper. Arvin had practically no paving, streetlights, or sidewalks. It had inadequate water and sewage facilities. For these reasons, Goldschmidt said, Arvin was "less a community than an agglomeration of houses."
Goldschmidt believed the family farm was "the classic example" of American small business. He was convinced that its spread over the land "has laid the economic base for the liberties and the democratic institutions which this Nation counts as its greatest asset."
USDA, however, did not see the family farm as a national asset. It fired Goldschmidt and tried, unsuccessfully, to suppress his work. There's no mistaking, however, Goldschmidt was right. Arvin was not merely a disintegrating rural community in California's Central Valley but the nightmare of rural America. Agribusiness was killing family farming and industrializing the countryside. Even the government, USDA, was becoming a subsidiary of agribusiness.
This was bad enough, and not merely because of the concentration of land and power at the hands of a few men. Goldschmidt accused agribusiness of destroying the "American character" which, he said, "was forged in its rural hinterland: the frontiersman melding into the freeholding farmer created a pattern consisting of egalitarianism, personal independence, the demand for hard work and ingenuity, self-discipline, with the ultimate reward in a personal success."
Despite the national importance of the freeholding farmers, however, the United States abandoned them to agribusiness which either kicks them off the land or, Goldschmidt says, remakes them into "organization men in overalls."
I met Goldschmidt in 1987 in Florida at an academic conference. I asked him if the country had a chance to break up agribusiness and distribute its lands to small family farmers, in other words, do to America's large farmers what the American general, Douglas MacArthur, did to the large farmers of defeated Japan. He said my proposal was not feasible without a willing dictator-president. I was stunned and rejected his argument. But, deep inside, I knew he probably was right.
I was in Washington, DC, in the mid-1970s when the Small Business Committee of the Senate held extensive hearings on the fate of the family farmer. Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin was one of the very few voices behind Congress' belated interest on family agriculture. Witness after witness would describe the crimes of agribusiness against family farmers and rural America. Yet, listening to the testimony of the defenders of family agriculture, I felt like I was at a funeral. It made no difference how passionate the testimony was. The victim was already dead. And no one was there to listen. Congress and USDA pretended the tragedy of family farming did not exist.
Yet that tragedy affected me profoundly. I spent the best years of my life studying agrarian issues. Moreover, I paid a heavy price for defending the idea of family farming in my work at agencies of the federal government. It was not merely USDA which sided with giant agriculture throughout the twentieth century. The entire government of the United States was afflicted by the agribusiness disease.
America's agricultural tragedy also brought me in touch with my own Greek upbringing - entirely agrarian and almost ancient - and I felt the pain of witnessing the undoing of America's rural culture.
Something sweet in the bitterness of farming
The Greeks anchored their civilization on the values of the land and very small farms. Plato and Aristotle considered the small farmers the best citizens of the Greek republics. Xenophon (430-354 BCE), a student of Socrates, a historian, and a general, was right. He said agriculture was the mother and nurse of Greek civilization. He was also convinced farmers were generous people.
Very small family farmers, not philosophers, put together the democratic foundations of the Hellenic polis (state). From that agricultural beginning, the Greeks crafted the values and political institutions that suited their temperament and ethos - piety for the gods, citizen armies, the civilian control of the military, private property, art, theater, philosophy, science and literature. These were the ideas that made Greek civilization so powerful and lasting.
Agriculture was hard work, however. The overwhelming reality behind everything the Greeks did was their precarious agrarian life - making a living on tiny strips of land at the feet of hills and mountains, rarely on valleys. Menander (c.341-291 BCE), a comic poet, captured the Greeks' agrarian struggle. He described the Athenian farmer, the Attic man of the land, "working with stony soil, full of thyme and sage, but getting a good deal of pain and no profit." Yet Menander also saw sweetness in the "bitterness of farming." That sweetness was the democratic liberties farmers enjoyed - and the harvest. All agricultural festivals were propitiations to the gods for the blessings of freedom and for increasing the fertility of the land, for a good harvest.
In the month Skirophorion (June), Athenian women celebrated Skirophoria, a festival honoring Demeter, the Greeks' greatest agrarian goddess. The women threw various offerings, including piglets, into pits. During the Thesmophoria agricultural celebration in the month Pyanepsion (October-November), those same women collected the bones of the pigs from the pits and mixed them with their cereal seed sown at this time of the year. The women prayed to goddess Demeter for the fertility of their crops. In the month Anthesterion (February-March) the Athenians broke the isolation and anxiety of winter and prepared themselves for the coming spring with their spectacular three-day wine festival which they called Anthesteria, the feast of flowers, in honor of god Dionysos.
Summer was harvest season. Hesiod, a shepherd and an epic poet from Boeotia who thrived 2,700 years ago, says the countryside resounded with feasting, singing, playing the flute, and having fun -- men on horseback moving about, others going hunting hares with sharp-toothed dogs, family farmers furrowing the divine earth. The crops would stand tall, the reapers mowing them down, the stalks grain-heavy at the top, this being Demeter's gift of food to the Greeks. Men would toss the grain sheaves on the threshing floor, others, sickles in hand, would harvest the vines. Workers carried baskets for the white and black grapes picked from the row of vines. And the vines were full of lush grape clusters. Men were treading grapes; others drew the liquid wine, while still others were having wrestling matches. Summer was also time for leisure in the countryside, a season, Aristotle says, of thanksgiving for a good harvest, Greeks gathering for sacrifices to honor the gods, offering them the first fruits of their hard labor.
Only when Greece lost its freedom to Rome, large farms began to undermine local democratic institutions and the independence of the small family farmers. With the Romans, large farms and the slavery of the small farmer brought down their republic. Pliny the Elder (23-79), a Roman natural history writer, complained that large estates ruined Italy and the provinces. Yet imperial Rome made large farms the icons of its aggressive policy in the Mediterranean.
It was Christianity, much more than Rome, however, that wrecked the agrarian and religious foundations of Greek culture. It took Christianity and Rome about 800 years of warfare against the Greeks to force them to delete Dionysos from their vine farming and culture. This ethnocide came to an end during the twelfth century. More than 200 years later, George Gemistos Plethon (1355-1452), a Platonic philosopher in Mistras, the provincial capital of Peloponnesos, urged the Roman Emperor to abandon large farms and return to small family farming for the Greeks. In fact Plethon's agrarian proposal -- probably the most radical agrarian reform idea in the Western world -- would have abolished not merely plantations but farm workers and private ownership of land. Modest-sized farms would be available to families to earn a good living for as long as the members of the family did all work. Once a person or a family stopped working the land, it reverted to the state.
Plethon wanted to bring the Greeks to their senses and back to their Hellenic culture. He urged the emperor to discard Christianity and return to the Greek gods. That way Greeks, rather than mercenaries, would fight the Turks who were threatening the empire, and Greece, with extinction. The Roman Emperor did nothing and the Turks swallowed the empire in 1453, a year after Plethon's death.
Despite the harrowing vicissitudes of the Greeks at the hands of the Romans, the Christians, and other barbarians, including the Turks, they never lost their agrarian character and virtues.
I will never forget my pleasure as a teenager in treading on the grapes in the stone linos, a small enclosure built right against one of the walls of my house in the mountainous village Valsamata of the Greek Ionian Island of Kephalonia. Linos was the son of Apollo and the teacher of the great musician Orpheus. Linos was intimately related to the music and enjoyment in the making of Dionysos' sacred wine.
It was that essential celebration of life and agrarian culture that Dionysos brought to the Greeks that the Christians suppressed. In fact, Christianity was so brutal towards the gods-venerating Greeks, that after it made them Christians, it imposed on them so many saints' days when they were forbidden to work, they barely had time to raise their food. Yet linos and the happiness of wine making survived.
The linos in my house was like a small swimming pool with a well sunk in front of it for the grape juice. My cousins and I - and sometimes one or two other men - with bare, clean feet would get in the midst of those small hills of golden and black grapes and start our labor of love. We would march in that mass of soft fruit until all of it was pulp. The feel of the grapes was heaven. The sweet aroma of the flowing juice hung in the air like millions of drops of ambrosia. And for me, the experience was the closest thing I could do to worship Dionysos. The laughter, the games, the food, and the wine made for exquisite labor that connected us intimately to our Greek culture. In the sweet heat of late August, the entire village and island echoed this ancient tradition, celebrating the harvest of grapes and the making of wine.
Treading on my father's grapes was my way of tasting the sweetness of my father's farming, a way of life for most Greeks down to the early 1960s. My father's farming was the ancient Greeks' farming - the same humility on the benevolence and wisdom of nature, the same ten hours a day of work on strips of land that together made no more than 9 acres, the same love for donkeys, mules and horses, the same tools. For wheat we used a wooden plow and hoes for cultivation, sickles for harvesting, circular stone floor for threshing, pitchforks and wooden shovels for winnowing. The sacred olive tree was a symbol of peace for the ancient Greeks. They used small cuttings from the olive tree to award the Olympic champions. The olive tree was food, oil, wood, and fuel for light to us and our ancestors. We had a wooden press, similar to the winepress, for the extraction of oil from the crushed olives. However, b