The farm
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 27: Food Chain
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Sarah Kanowski
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Sarah Kanowski's biography and other articles by this writer
‘Who cares? I mean, who the fuck cares?' This is more exclamation than question. Patrice Newell is exhausted. Exhausted and angry. Angry at ineffectual government, at obtrusive bureaucracy, at ignorant consumers, at naive environmentalists, at greedy industrialists. Possibly at me. I've rung to discuss visiting her farm, Elmswood, and have caught her at a bad moment.
She has just finished a ‘spectacularly difficult' garlic harvest. November brought the Hunter Valley six consecutive days of temperatures higher than 43 degrees, the bulbs over-heated, and there has been a marathon packing of four hundred boxes. The intense physical labour of all farming, but particularly organic farming which replaces pesticides with human toil, is something of which most Australians are ignorant. ‘People say, "Oh, you've kept your figure," and I say, "Do you know fucking why?"'
Garlic is Patrice's new focus. Bought direct from her website it retails at $38 per kilogram. Chinese garlic, which holds 90 per cent of the market in Australia, sells for around $2 a kilo. This is a price differential she acknowledges as insane. ‘People ask why it is so expensive and I just say, "Are you kidding me?!" I don't know any farmer who is making any money, so don't you dare bitch about the price of food!'
It is the week before Christmas, the temperature has climbed back up into the 40s, sleep is impossible and Australia Post is threatening strikes which will wreak further havoc with the garlic orders.
A month later when I am seated in Patrice's cheerfully overflowing kitchen, the view – across a cascading crepe myrtle and a scattering of Balinese temple gods and Spanish pots collected by her partner, Phillip Adams – is of the surrounding hills, a staggering ten thousand acres of which belong to her. As she cooks up an omelette with eggs from their chooks and herbs from their biodynamic garden, this seems to us city visitors the pastoral made real.
It is beautiful, certainly, but no idyll. Patrice has written three lyrical and instructive books about life at Elmswood[1], but there is a telling omission from her most recent, Ten Thousand Acres: A Love Story. She had planned to include a section on the business realities of farming but was unable to find the right tone. She and her editor eventually agreed that talk of figures and futures could not be made to fit, and the section was scrapped.
Finding the right tone for our discussion of farming is what we are struggling with as a society. There is a cultural dissonance between the lingering urban idolatry of the cocky, the bushy in the Akubra, and our insistence on cheap food at the expense of environmental devastation and farm failure. In his 2001 Boyer Lectures, Geoffrey Blainey commented, ‘My view is that the rift between country and city is wider than at any time in the last one hundred and fifty years.'[2] And nowhere is that rift wider than between the way the city wants to eat and what that does to the country.
Farming has always held more than financial value in Australia. For the first Europeans, the transformation of empty wilderness to fertile farmland was a moral and religious duty, as much as an economic benefit. It was also considered key to the improvement of convict character. The wool pioneer John Macarthur lobbied colonial commissioner JT Bigge on the redemptive benefit of farm work: ‘I am confirmed in the opinion, that the labours which are connected with tillage of the earth and the rearing and care of sheep and cattle, are best calculated to lead to the correction of their [the convicts] vicious habits – when men are engaged in rural occupations their days are chiefly spent in solitude – they have much time for reflection and self-examination, and they are less tempted to the preparation of crimes than would herded together in towns, a mass of disorders and vices.'[3]
The tree change phenomenon is a contemporary echo of those earliest assertions of the moral superiority of rural life to the unwholesomeness of city living. People want to escape the city, to find meaning through life in the country. Patrice Newell's books describe exchanging an urban world, which centres on being seen, for a life based on careful, exact and reflective looking. In Ten Thousand Acres, she quotes Phillip saying, ‘The farm's been good for you.' Adding, ‘Certainly it has kept other worlds at a distance; it can obliterate their sound and fury. And it makes me conscious of my limitations.' But while most modern tree changers do not intend to make a serious income from their rural land, Patrice always did. It was this determination that shocked and amused her city friends back in 1987. They could well understand the appeal of a country weekender but not of a serious, working farm.
The family farm was the site of our nation's earliest dreams of prosperity and social equity. The issue that dominated the first colonial parliaments was land reform, and in the 1850s thousands joined the campaign to wrest the fertile land of south-eastern Australia from the hold of established pastoralists. The resulting Selection Acts were intended to create a society of self-sufficient producers, though in practice they served more to entrench the wealth and power of the squatters. Nevertheless, successive governments promoted the creation of a large number of small holdings run by independent farmers. While the rhetoric remains to this day, policies intended to encourage the ideal of the yeoman farmer have been in decline since the 1970s when global trade began to triumph over national schemes of price fixing and controlled production.[4]
The economic health of the family farm, and of the country towns these farms depend upon and support, are now trapped in a downward spiral. This is the conclusion drawn by social researcher Neil Barr in his recent book, The House on the Hill: The Transformation of Australia's Farming Communities[5]. Barr's family began farming in Australia in the 1850s. He grew up on a small, struggling stone-fruit orchard outside of Melbourne, and has spent thirty years ‘pondering over the joy, despair, and paradoxes of farming life'.
Barr's analysis is considered, clearly argued and quietly catastrophic. His starting point is the stark fact of declining commodity prices. He uses his parents' experience as an illustration: when they bought a farm in 1953, ten acres of productive orchard was sufficient to earn a reasonable family living. The falling price of fruit joined with the rising cost of growing it meant that before too long the amount of land required to make an income rose to fifteen acres. It kept rising. Barr's parents gave up when it reached thirty.
The same unhappy coupling of falling product prices and rising production costs applies to sheep, wheat, dairy farms and most other agricultural pursuits. The declining price of agricultural products is the main reason why agriculture's share of our economy is now 4 per cent, down from 14 per cent in the 1960s[6]. ‘Get big or get out' became a truism of modern farming: if farmers survive it is by buying out their failing neighbours. Only one in two farming families will pass the business on to a successor within the family[7]. Agricultural economists argue that farm dynasty failures are necessary for overall market sustainability; what we need, in fact, is for many more farmers to leave their land[8].
Barr's analysis untangles the net of social developments which are contributing to the transformation of rural Australia. As significant as international trade laws is the domestic revolution that has taken women away from the kitchen and into paid work, and the resulting impact this has had on our relationship to food. Time spent preparing the evening meal, for example, has dropped from two hours in the 1950s to one hour in the 1980s, to between twenty and thirty minutes today[9]. Combined with shrinking households and the loss of culinary skills, the result is a rising demand for supermarket convenience food and fast food. With shoppers increasingly turning away from raw produce to processed food like frozen chips and tinned tomato sauce, farmers are getting an ever smaller proportion of the money we spend on food.
The farmer's financial position is further weakened by the places we like to shop: supermarkets. Seventy-five per cent of domestic vegetable purchases are now made in supermarkets, overwhelmingly in the two big chains, Coles and Woolworths[10]. Supermarkets have established direct contractual supply arrangements with producers, bypassing the old wholesale fruit and vegetable markets and livestock saleyards. It is in the economic interest of supermarkets, as it is for the food processing industry, to deal with as few suppliers as possible. Rapid consolidation, in the parlance of economics, is the result. Get big or get out, all over again.
Supermarkets further reduce their costs by transferring risks, such as that of quality control, to suppliers. In January 2010 the Sydney Morning Herald ran a front page story revealing that each year a million tonnes of Queensland bananas, a third of the crop, is rejected by Coles and Woolworths for not meeting exacting product specifications, which stipulate acceptable length, girth and colour. Woolworths' spokesman Benedict Brook pointed the finger at the consumer: ‘The fact is customers, given the choice between fruit that is bruised and fruit that looks pristine, will choose the [the pristine fruit].'[11]
Add to this mix investors cashed up from the mineral boom and the compulsory superannuation contributions of an ageing population. This has fuelled the remarkable growth of Managed Investment Schemes which seized upon the tax attractiveness of investing in large agricultural businesses. Capital invested in horticultural Managed Investment Schemes quadrupled between 2000 and 2005[12]. This means traditional family farms are now in direct competition with the corporate sector for land and water.
In these MIS farms the model of family ownership is replaced by a network of distinct investors: some owning a share of the income from the farm produce, others the farm's land and water, and still others invested in its management and marketing. The only landscapes these investors see are the troughs and peaks of their annual statement.
Barr concludes, ‘there is only one type of farm business that will survive in the mainstream food supply chain.'[13] That is, the large, extremely efficient, technology-driven corporate farm.
Where does that leave small-scale farmers who cannot, or do not want, to expand? One choice has been to move into boutique agricultural products, ranging from alpacas to organic figs, to ostriches. But Barr is cautionary about the long-term financial viability of this response. There are limited opportunities for producers outside the supermarket-dominated integrated food supply chains, with the rise of alternatives such as farmers' markets seen as a niche option only. Where signs of significant success do appear, supermarkets move in. Witness the explosion of organic food. In the United States, the biggest retailer of organic groceries is now Wal-Mart[14].
Another option, put plainly, is to give up.