NFO-138 (AV10636): Farm -- Church and Main Street

[music] the national farmers organization the organization that awoke America presents us farm report a public information program brought to you in the interest of agriculture rural business and the well-being of our nation by members of the national farmers organization in this area and others interested in having farmers receive cost of production plus a reasonable profit the national farmers organization takes pride in inventing a marketing system to meet the needs of the 20th century NFO Collective Bargaining for agriculture special guests on us farm report our Monsignor Lewis Jay Miller national catholic rural life director of South Dakota and Erhard PPfingsten the vice president of the national farmers organization here now is vice president PPfingsten today we have with us on this US farm report two very distinguished man Monsignor Miller from Elkton South Dakota he's a director of the National Catholic rural life conference when senior the National Catholic rural life conference has concerned itself very much with the problem that we have in agriculture and what is it is doing to the entire of rural America would you tell us why and the church's view on this problem [unclear] concerned about people on the land because she regarded in this day and age yet that the family is the primary institution and that stewardship of the land must be planned with the family in view and for that reason and the reason is that there is a special adaptability of the farm home for nurturing strong and wholesome family life and I think it's the reason for the universal interest in regard to land use and the rural welfare in other words of the farm is the native habitat of the family and that's the reason why the church is concerned about it because whenever you can enable a family to exercise its initiative and responsibility in the stewardship of land you have a situation that is good for people yes just to kind of comment on that a little bit I think it brings out in a roundabout way we have as a nation come to the point where we're now trying to make the as a people serve the dollar and now forgetting the importance of the people themselves that this is what it's all about the welfare of people everywhere yes let's put it this way mm-hmm and that would come I think under the title of the future of this family on the land I don't have to remind you Erhard or any of you and the public that in this country we have inherited in this generation a family farm system of Agriculture due to the fact that for our people wanted land we had land to give away and we had a national policy that saw to it that land came into the hands of family the present situation perhaps could best be Oh dramatically stated by an experience I had recently up at the University of Fargo in North Dakota I was scheduled to address a group of clergy at a three-day at a three-day clergy conference of the University on the subject of the family farm and a changing community well I didn't know at the time that a week before the Chamber of Commerce of that good city of Fargo had sponsored a agribusiness forum for several days and the head of the or the two speakers on the program one was the head of JIK company which is controlled as you know by Kern County Land Company of California and the other speaker was the head of the Board of Trade in Chicago whose clients make their money after the farmers are foolish enough to give their stuff away for three quarters of what is worth and the headline in the Fargo forum the week before read by all the clergy who were attending this conference read quote family farm concept has been displaced now these are not these are intelligent people Erhard I mean they have in their thinking they have phased out family agriculture and you and I are supposed to be in the business of resurrection well I think the way it's the way it is moving I think it has been done unless that we come about with a marketing system that does put the farmer into a position if barring that I think it has been done it's just a matter of cleanup from that point on I like the the talk that John Galbraith gave that Wisconsin was about ten years ago now but what he has to say I think is still valid even more so today and he speaks to the choices that we have in agriculture and one of them he says involves the factorization of agriculture and he points out that if speaking especially to our state university of agriculture he says that if they are promoting this kind of specialization and huge collectivization of animals and specialization grain all that kind of thing he warns them that they should be honest with the American public and not speak of mere adjustment you know to changing technology but he says they should speak of a total revolution because they're involved the uprooting as a CED report indicated of two million family and I talked to an economist the other day about our state college in the head of our Economics Department and he told me that's the CED report removing 2 million from the farm is now regarded as conservative so this is this is is what we're headed for unless we wake up and then he goes on to say the other alternative and it's one that he calls an agriculture of compassion he says would involve and could involve an agriculture of modest size commercial units but then he goes on to say that if that is going to be we would have to have a national government policy on behalf of such a modest sized agricultural plant and then he further indicates that these modest sized operators would have to agree in some way to work together in order to protect their own interest even after they get real big in size it's still going to take mutual cooperation at that point and of course as you will know this is what we have the NFO been driving to is to get the farmers to cooperate and protect what they have but not just the farmers themselves I think it's the entire rural America what's your view on that how it's going to affect the rest of the rural towns all of the Midwest in fact of course I just to predict anything as is quite hazardous but done I've lived out in South Dakota for 26 years and during that time I have seen this happen when I first came out there thousands of families used to have a meat chicken check you know Saturday nights the wife would come in to town with two or three dozen or a couple crates of meat chicken and sell them at the local produce store and that little check in the course of a year maybe meant from 200 to 500 800 or $1000 for thousands of families well that disappeared number of years ago already well that cash is no longer in the community well I can really attest to that the good part of my education was paid for through that old egg check and those chickens that you're talking about my mother did it and today if she were alive I imagine she would starve to death herself on what she could make out of chickens and eggs to say nothing raising a family and educating them well let's go a little further I mean in the last couple years I've seen the egg check gone and the egg check in southeastern South Dakota for ten thousand or more families meant all the way from five hundred to a two, three, four, five thousand dollars and I talked to one of the better hatchery men in the center of our state they hatched their last eggs about a week or two ago and they're out of the business and of course the reason is my one lady the head of a big consumer group in California told me that outside Los Angeles there's one factory a 1 million hens under one roof so in other words I've seen meat poultry factorized eggs are practically factorized they are now trying to apply the same principles of factorization to hogs and cattle one of the recent figures I read that in feedlots 44% of all feedlot cattle are now in lots of over 1,000 on the way Island I think maybe the impact can best be brought across to you people is that we are in danger particularly in the Midwest of losing not just our egg livestock industry or our meat poultry livestock industry we are in danger of losing our entire livestock industry and when that happens or if we permit or if the American public permits this to happen as a national calamity I just asked you people in rural America you businessmen your small town merchants of various kinds who are in the very in the same plight in the farmer what is left to be done if the chickens and the hogs and the cattle are in huge concentration what's next to be done to the people out in the on the countryside there's only one thing and that is the raising of raw grain and grains with huge modern equipment don't need near the personnel that are modern diversified farming operational players now getting back into what you were pointing out there that it was not unusual to have a $5,000 check uh safe for a year for a farmer off of these the chicken the egg business and so forth now what I wanted to bring out here is that it affects the man on Main Street who think she doesn't have anything involved out there in the country because this $5,000 is something that that farmer or no other farmer in that community is going to spend with a business man up and down Main Street so they go along with it I think the most recent figure that I saw on how it affects the rural town one of the agricultural colleges put out the statement that for every five families that leave rural America one businessman has to go with them or all of them take a proportionate cutting income and I think this should kind of be said or the fact that their rural community is not keeping up with the increase in the population that the rural community is declining in population while the industrial centers are growing I think is evidence of this but since you pointed out there that the livestock industry could very well go the same way or that the plan is there I would like to point out what the situation is in meat right at this day that I think is a very alarming situation in the years gone by of course basically every farmer with a livestock producer and when we have that situation we here in America or the farmers in America we're producing all of the meat that this nation needs but since 1952 for 15 years or over 15 years there has not been one single year not one that we have produced enough to feed our own nation we've started importing to make up what the American farmer was not producing till in 1965 I believe we got up to where we were importing about 14-15% percent of all of the meat consumed in the United States and today we are even much beyond that and the only reason that is important is because we're not producing enough certain they're not piling it up here so we have actually while we're claiming to be such great benefactors to the hungry people of this world we're actually robbing hungry people of this world by retiring our own acres here which would produce the grain that would feed this livestock and importing it from somewhere else and I'd like to go just a little beyond that and show you how intensive this is if we had last year produced all of the meat that the people of this nation needed it would have taken 15% more grain and 15% more roughage now at the very height of our government programs when we retired the most acres to alleviate the farm problem through the supply and demand system we retired 11% of the productive acres just 11% so it would have taken last year or in 60-66 and 65 15 percent more grain and 15% more roughage so when all those acres brought back into production we could not have produced that meat so we do have the market here for it and we would actually be helping the situation and the rest of the world if we did do that but I'm bringing this in merely to point out that we are definitely on the way not only of eliminating that production from the Midwest or from rural America but we're actually becoming dependent on other nations in this world for a decided part of our meat supply and in relation to that same point Erhard I think there's a long-range effect of this factorization of Agriculture that we have not given sufficient fair thought to and that is that once you get all your animals congested in one area I mean in huge concentrations we end up specializing in grains in the soil and I remember on the way to Ames when this spring driving through a dust storm and what and seeing all the wind erosion in the ditches that we drove god help me this is truth another fella and I drove 47 minutes before we saw a patch of grass about 40 acres of bone grass and no animals there were no chickens to be seen no cattle no hogs and we picked up the Des Moines Register in a filling station and a great big headline something to the effect black dust clouds over Iowa and the reporter was interviewing two soil conservation specialists and the soil conservation specialists were asked for what can we do to prevent the soil erosion and he estimated that it was 1/8 of an inch from 15 million acres in one day equivalent to 22 farms thousand acres of each 7 inches deep blew off in one day and the soil conservation men said it would require three things keeping the ground on top eruption keeping your stubble mulch on top and putting back down although you are the cultural word for it manure well were you gonna get the manure when all the cattle are in factories the pigs are in factories the chickens are in factories and in other words what we what this specialization and factorization of agriculture has already done it's begun to rob the next generation of fertile soil I mean this is something that you people out there you may not be on farms but your children next generation are going to have the food to need the food from these farms well I think in this connection I know very well what you are talking about about there was dust I was breathing them so I hope to see we're there but I think we might go back to the 30s when your state of South Dakota practically emptied out right on account of this dust storm and at that time we had reached about the same point where through low farm prices the effort was being made to take everything that you could possibly get off to where the water was no longer being held up nothing there to stop this erosion and so in the '33 when that dust storm began on a Sunday afternoon that fall by three o'clock in the afternoon it was so dark in western Iowa about I would say 40 miles from the South Dakota line I was at Ottawa at that time that we needed lights in mid-afternoon to see and then through those dust storms our drainage ditches there just leveled off and the fence roads that did have weeds or grass in them they drifted just like snow banks did at that time well I think if you those who would remember anything at all about what it did to the economy of South Dakota it was literally destroyed at that time when the people started leaving started going out now I don't think it even has to be for dust storms to drive them out if they leave for any other reason I think you'd have the same economic effect on South Dakota or any area in the Midwest because after all it's the people there that keep the community that build the schools the churches everything involved there and then in the long reign as far as I'm concerned this nation was built on agriculture and I think it's a very basis of it it is through the Homestead Act that you mentioned earlier in the program if the land was given out to these people and got it to settle and and you have the the very reverse program there to get the land in the hands of the individual and now when you reverse that situation I think we'll go just exactly the other way and you know there's an interesting it's a rather an ironic thing I talked to a fellow who came back from the Peace Court in Brazil he was down there for two years and he was indicating that practically every communication they got from the Department of Agriculture here in the United States well they're urging these people they get in the land and here we are in this country because of a lack of a national policy with regard to the kind of an enterprise we should have to produce our food and fiber we don't have a policy and like Brameyer professor Breymeyer says we're drifting into a factory a type of agriculture and new people in the city aren't going to be given a right to vote for what you want either and we had our whole legislature in action last year to determine whether or not you should be allowed to shoot Turtledove it in South Dakota and we decided finally after due deliberation that you could but American people are not being given the chance or they have the chance but nothing's being done about it at to enable them to determine what kind of an agriculture we should have factories in the field or people or in agriculture with compassion and I think this is a matter of concern for everybody whether you're on a farm or whether you're in the city because you might say a word about this whole misunderstanding you know what your guide to efficiency you've got a lot of people not a clergyman and businessmen who are actually confused they're accepting that the centralization and factorization of Agriculture on the basis that it's supposed to be efficient yeah no I think that should be clarified on this national policy that you mentioned Leon Kaiser Ling who is probably the most quoted economist in the United States and was formerly the head of the or the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers I think his I like his term even better he says we're flying blind and I think this is what we are doing exactly no long-range program at all but it's it's it's all of America you mentioned here in foreign countries we have a policy and this is a national policy of ours to make it possible for these people in depressed countries to get that land back to get it out of these enormous holes holdings and this annoys me no end that actually in this country we have the complete reverse of this situation here we're telling them they got to get bigger and bigger and bigger and there is no end first they told us when we were operating with two row equipment we had to get 4 row equipment then they start talking about six row then eight row and a lot of numbers left yet there's no end to that and actually there none of us doing anywhere near as well as when we were operating on the smaller scale and I think this may not be a popular idea I think farmers should realize that these admin y'know who are selling those huge equipment and everything else they appeal to the farmers pride you know be a big profit corn farmer show your neighbor what a big pull you got so what does the farmer do who falls for that and many of them have mr. butt's told the governor association of properties and what was happening and he reminded them by falling for that big image and forgetting about the needs of other people who would like to farm also see what happens they end up with a capital structure so large that they have laid the groundwork for the takeover by investor capital in other words Johnny looks at the nice big 300 thousand dollar complex is bad his bad built and he's got a college education he wants to farm man we can't command that kind of capital so actually entry into agriculture was going to end up the if you were wise enough to choose a father and mother who owned a big spread then you'll be in farming then those are the only people who will be in farming so that the the big operator really and the simple tight oftentimes at the farmer falls floor is is laying the groundwork for his own destruction well I think actually a good many of them are lying to themselves really when it comes to how well that they're doing they have the belief you know that the big boy is doing fine which just simply does the figure just simply doesn't bear it don't bear out the figures that came out a year or two ago came from the Department of Internal Revenue showed that actually a smaller percentage of the enormously large farms were making showing any profit at all much smaller than the family type farm so I think they're being deceived and I think something that should be brought out here when you're talking about this efficiency in these corporation farms which is so highly recommended that they're not making this money in agriculture this is money coming from outside sources the enormous large corporation that you mentioned before that's rubber rubber money and oil money that's kind of money coming in there they're not making it either so the problem really is purely and simply nothing else but price right here in America our forefathers didn't have any trouble improving this land and building these farms up and now with the prices that we have today we can't even keep them up after they have been built so I think the real problem is price and this is what we're going to have to work on and we store that price structure and good and here is an area that sometimes farmers don't like to think about but just like any other people they live in a society and above all and our age is an organized society that if if other groups have organized in order to protect their own fairly turn on their labor and their talents the farmer has a face the fact he must do the same thing just thinking about production all the time is actually a way of neglecting his own family because I like the way Pope John put it in his letter on the social order and he said that nobody listens to an isolated voice nowadays if you're not organized well you're just neglected so the farmer must exercise his moral responsibility in order to achieve justice in the marketplace because any group in an organized society that is unorganized cannot expect to achieve justice for labor or for as in the case of farmer for the investment that he has and this of course is something that goes against the grain of many farmers because they aren't accustomed sometimes with the restraints that that organized action demand well this is really though when you get right down to it this is democracy in itself this is what our nation was built on our very government on people working together for their mutual benefits so I cannot quite see it that they could even begin to think of it as a restraint but as you say there is a distaste for doing something about their problem I think that's no more than like in the little kid who when he's sick he doesn't like to take that medicine it's bitter you don't like the taste of it but he's got to take it if he's going to get well and so as you said all other industry labor everything in this nation is very very highly organized and the farmer is still an individual in the market going to giant corporations who are set up for the sole purpose of making a profit and asking them what are you give me now regardless of what anybody likes to believe about supply and demand setting a price it is still a human being that finally puts the figure on it and when the seller doesn't put the price on the buyer is going to and the man who puts the price on when he has exclusives say as it is in the farm market today the buyer has the whole safe you can bet it's going to be in their favor so the farmer has absolutely no choice but to do what industry is done getting together organize work together labor definitely and I'd like to make this observation none of us like restraints perhaps but you know restraints are a part of life you know and a farmer or if if farm people will not submit to civilized restraints within a bargaining structure of some kind for obtaining a decent price they have the other alternative of facing that they have right now look at the restraints that thousands of families have the submit to right now because of a very unjust return for labors in their operation I mean their the wife has half of the almost half the farm wives in our in one of our counties nearby are teaching school I mean these are restraints that the average farmer wouldn't want to but that's the kind of restraints that he'll had to submit to if he's even eat gotten existence on the farm if he fails organize well the farmer does have the opportunity to get a price through organizations through collective bargaining and NFO is set up nationwide right now that the farmers can have a price tomorrow morning once they decide they wanted to get in and cooperate with us so I urge each and every one of you join the NFO you farmers you businessmen in rural America support it and get the farmer to see that he has to do something our problem is simple once we're organized to face it the US farm report has presented as its special guests NFO vice president Erhard Pfingsten and Monsignor Lewis Jay Miller South Dakota national catholic rural life director members of the National Farmers Organization invite you to tune in again next week at the same time for more facts on agriculture and rural America which is the gear wheel in our economy that produces the majority of our nation's new wealth the national farmers organization has been recognized as the leadership of Agriculture and represents new thinking in a new generation of farmers