Farmers will do what farmers do, pandemic or not
“Looking out the door, sitting on the porch every morning, things don’t look that much different than any other year”, said retired Wonewoc, Wisconsin farmer Jim Goodman. “There’s still a lot of machinery going by and trucks filled with fertilizer and seed sprayers. It doesn’t appear to me that farmers have cut back on acres or input costs that much, even though crop prices are bound to be lower this fall. It seems there is as much corn and soybeans (planted) as any other year.” His solemn answer to the question, does he feel the pandemic affected Wisconsin farmers?
Last August Driftless Now sat down with retired Wonewoc Organic dairy farmers Jim and Rebecca Goodman. That was pre-pandemic and concerning Farm Aid 2019 being held at Alpine Valley. (article http://bit.ly/FarmAid2019)
Goodman though, is curious this fall what the prices are going to be like. “I can’t imagine it’s going to be very good because foreign markets have shut down. With slaughter plant closings, there probably isn’t going to be much of a demand for animal feed. Milk dumping is not a good sign. There is too much being produced at a price that cannot really support farmers. Things have looked like they always have, always pushing for higher production and time will tell how much of an effect the pandemic has on lowering prices.”
As to the small farms who have always sold direct market or at farmers markets, Goodman feels they lost a certain amount of sales in restaurants, and believes people are trying to make those direct connections as much as possible to buy from smaller farms. “A lot of folks like that I’ve talked to, said that they are having difficulty keeping up with demand for things like eggs and pasture raised beef,” Goodman shared. He feels this is the time when some of the small farming is going to start to pay off as people become more concerned about the safety of their food.
“Whether it actually happens… I’m sure there is plenty of push from what you hear in the news. The big producers want to return it to how it was. I guess it’s up to the consumer,” Rebecca added.
Noting with recent payouts per hundred weight of milk standing around $14 or less, Jim acknowledged the market is certainly not anywhere near the cost of production.
Though the Cares Act and a more recent 3-billion-dollar relief specific for agricultural is a good start on helping to stimulate the economy, many question how much the relief will really help farmers in Wisconsin and across America. Jim feels it will help some of the people that get the money, but questions how they are targeting those dollars with the recent food box program under the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). “I don’t know if you listened to the radio, but they had a news story in Wisconsin that the money seemed to go to much larger farms rather than small farms. I was on a webinar that the USDA put on about a month ago where they talked about this program. They had a couple people from the USDA explaining how it worked. Basically they were buying large amounts of food, which is good because people need help, but the only way farmers could get food into that program is if you had a lot to sell, either from a large vegetable farm or someone who could get a lot of people together to supply that food. There wasn’t much way for a small producer to get in.”.
The public directly connecting with their local farmers Jim noted, seems to be picking up, and stressed that small producers may have the best opportunity moving their products when connecting locally to customers. His feeling overall, the $3 billion dollar program is not going to help many small producers much at all.
“I think Rebecca stated it pretty well that the agriculture industry wants things to go back to the way they were before with more big farms, more caseloads, and processing plants. If anything, this pandemic has shown that that system is pretty fragile when processing plants close down, store shelves suddenly become empty of food, and farmers suddenly have no market. It just seems nothing short of ridiculous to say ‘we just want to go back to what we had’. It’s pretty clear that what we had wasn’t working very well. The prices were too low, this pandemic points out pretty clearly that the system can fail, and we know that it’s not the last crisis we are going to face.”
Jim continued, “Whether it’s another disease pandemic, whether it’s a weather-related thing, the social unrest we are seeing now, things are going to happen again. Unless we take the steps to change the food system to one that is a little more resilient, we are going to see the same things happen to a greater or lesser scale.”
Jim feels the country needs to use this opportunity to change, not just the food system, but the social and healthcare systems. “All these problems that this pandemic is pointing out are woven into our social structure and we need to take this opportunity to change them rather than just saying we just want to go back to normal because there isn’t going to be a normal anymore,” he added.
Having been involved with Farm Aid for many years Jim stated, “Like so many organizations today, they are really disturbed by the racial disparity that is still tolerated in America and are trying to focus even more than they have in the past on equal treatment towards farmers of color. That’s something they have been doing all along, but I think they see that as a critical need right now.”
Deeply involved with the organizations Family Farm Defenders (FFD) and the National Family Farms Coalition (NFFC), Jim and Rebecca shared there is some discussion about the last $3B farm package, and that FFD and NFFC have been tracking how perhaps the money isn’t going to the smaller producers or the mid-size producers as it should be. “I think even with those original aid packages, the money went to the USDA to distribute as they saw fit. The track record that they have has pretty much been supportive of big over local producers,” Jim said, and feels there is no reason to believe that any subsequent packages wouldn’t be distributed that same way. He stated the organizations seem to be concerned about the executive order forcing packing plant workers to go back even if they were in danger of becoming ill. “A person shouldn’t have to choose between getting sick and having a job!”
With the current administration’s tough stance on immigration, Jim said he has a feeling the NFFC and FFD both would pretty much agree that no one is illegal. “The immigrants make up the vast majority of farm workers, being documented or not. I don’t think we will have to wait until this fall to see problems as we have already seen at the packing plants. We are going to be seeing some problems as well real shortly because some of the vegetable crops are going to start coming in, whether it is in California or down south or here in the Midwest. Immigrants do a lot of that work because other people won’t. They won’t do it because it’s too hard and it doesn’t pay well enough. The immigrants do it because most of them are farmers. They know how to do it and are good at it. Plus, they were forced out of Honduras, or Guatemala, or Mexico, or where ever for economic reasons or reasons that they feared for their lives if they stayed there.”
With immigrants making up a large percentage of the nation’s agricultural workforce, Jim feels that will not change. “I think that a lot of the big dairies are probably concerned too because cows need to be milked every day and you need people to do it. Immigrants are very good at it and they depend on them to keep the farm(s) running. Unless we have comprehensive immigration reform, the system again is going to prove itself to be pretty fragile.”
Being retired Organic Dairy producers, the Goodmans still have their fingers on that markets pulse. “I was on a call about a week ago with Cedar Grove Cheese, and they said that the demand for organic cheese is really strong. I’m not sure if that is the case for all organic dairy products as well, but at least at the retail level people are buying more food to be cooked at home. I think this pandemic has people concerned about the safety of their food, but I can’t say for sure that’s the only reason why organic demand has gone up. If demand does go down, one reason might be that people are not getting paid their regular wage and have less income to buy organic food. If I were still farming, I would (still) want to be an organic farmer. I wouldn’t switch to conventional,” he said.
As for the future of Wisconsin agriculture, Jim had this to say, “I think most farmers are going to continue to do what they’ve always done and assume that things will get back to the normal they’ve always known. I’ve heard and read about this. I talked to one farmer who thought the price would be so low this fall that it would be cheaper to buy the feed. He seeded the ground that he was going to plant corn on and left everything else and said he was ‘just raising hay this year’, but that was one farmer, so, I think there is some of that. I hope there are farmers that have planted small grain-wheat, barley, whatever- because those crops are things that people can actually eat as opposed to corn and soybeans, some of which goes into our diet in processed foods, but most goes to feed the animals. I think farmers will do what they’ve always done and hope for the best.”
Rebecca added, “I’m just living the life of an 80-year old here, more of a home-body than I planned at this point in my life. I don’t spend nearly as many hours in a day thinking about these things as Jim does. He spends probably 90% of his day thinking of these issues. My biggest issue is what I’m going to have for dinner, and what book I'll read next,” she said with a chuckle.
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