Wild Oats newsletter publisher John Duvenaud was a brave man at St. Jean Farm Days last week.
He dared to speak a truth that prairie farmers generally find so touchy that it is virtually never spoken at farm meetings, at conferences, by farm groups. (I have worked at this newspaper for 17.2 years and can only remember a handful of times when anyone said anything like this.)
Here’s what he dared to say:
“You guys, aren’t you in a sweet spot now?” said Duvenaud happily, as he began a 2012 market outlook that expected continued profitability, but less so than in 2011 or 2010.
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He noted that farmers who had production problems, as with those who were flooded too severely to seed by crop insurance deadlines, or suffered some other sort of production disaster, didn’t share in the good times. But for the average farmer who got an average crop:
“We’ve had a fabulous price regime for the past couple of years. Probably, I’ll bet, a lot of you have made a million dollars just on your land inventory over the last couple of years.”
As soon as he said this there were a couple of audible groans behind me somewhere amongst the sitting farmers, and the sound of dozens of butts shifting uncomfortably in seats in the stark light of the truth.
I was stunned by what he said, even though it’s obviously true. These are the best prices we’ve seen since the 1970s bull market, and as long as a farmer can shepherd through an average crop, he’ll either make decent profits or terrific profits. That awful, crippling, depressing period of 1983 to 2005 has been over for a few years and a new reality of generally financially healthy farmers is back with us.
But few dare to say that out loud, which is why I was shocked when Duvenaud said it. Well, he’s an independent analyst, so I guess he lives up to that description. But I’ve always found it odd, if understandable, how farmers almost never want to appear to be successful. It’s a taboo subject. I don’t know of any other business that acts this way.(Perhaps fishing.)
Part of that is just traditional Christian humility, in which it seems rather ugly and uncharitable to be jumping up and down celebrating good times when some neighbors didn’t do so well, had production problems, got divorced and broke up the farm, or any of the other disasters that can strike a business based on the weather and the family. No one wants to be the arrogant guy that everybody in town, at the rink or at church despises because he thinks he’s so great and doing so well. So lots of very successful farmers have attempted to hide their success so that they don’t seem vain or uncaring about their community and those less fortunate than themselves.
There’s also a lot of pressure from some people in most farm groups to not allow the public or the government to ever think farmers don’t need help. That’s good in a way, in that there are always individuals and groups of farmers who need some sort of support or assistance, whether that’s for disasters – which really do occur with frightening frequency – or for establishing safety nets that allow farmers some way of dealing with the cyclical nature of the industry. But the concern of some to never let the government or public relax about the state of farming can snuff out any reference at all to things not being so bad, so it creates a public perception of farming as a necessarily and perennially sad-sack occupation that’s always about failure and suffering. No one ever seems to want to hear that most farmers are doing OK. Fortunately for farmers’ sake, bankers, input suppliers and other people who give farmers credit don’t buy the sad-sack story: they lend billions of dollars to farmers every year because they know most guys are going to be able to pay it back.
There’s also a desire of some both in the country and the city to idealize farming as a simple, basic, earthy occupation, and the life one of simple, honest, struggling peasants fighting the forces of greed and corruption and always losing – but retaining their unwashed virtue. I always think of this paradigm as a Narrative of Heroic and Virtuous Failure. In this ideal, the farmer is a form of the noble savage in which the more crude and peasanty he and his family is, the more virtuous he seems. I deal with this all the time when I read my daughters their favourite book: Rattletrap Car. (It’s a fun and fabulous book. If you have young kids, look for it.)
Here’s the first image of dad:
While we all have a hankering after the simple times of the past, few of us would want to farm this way now, and no doubt most of the parents like me reading this book to their kids find the image comforting but not an accurate portrayal of reality – which it’s not meant to be, of course. But for an alarming number of urban people, ones that I run into on a regular basis, this is the only image of the farmer they seem to like. They love the image of the rural rube, particularly a grubby, barefooted one like that above, but they seem appalled by the notion of a farmer making any money, using sophisticated technology, running his farm like a business. A fellow urban parent said to me the other day, after I mentioned that I often cover hog farming, that “That isn’t like farming anymore. It’s just an industry.” So running a farm like a business, operating with industrial efficiency, and making a profit seems to be something that destroys the image of the farmer in the urban mind, at least amongst some.
So I can certainly see why some in the farming community are worried about farming’s loser perception in the public eye. Urbanites seem happiest when farmers are doing badly, and are then willing to shovel some money farmers’ way, which to some is a needed thing. But it’s not the kind of image that attracts the best and brightest to a future and career in agriculture. That was a topic raised by a number of speakers at GrowCanada before Christmas, and it’s something Alanna Koch, Saskatchewan’s deputy minister of agriculture, has often drawn attention to. There’s lots of success in farming, but no one seems to want to recognize it. The old loser image is just too familiar and comfortable.
There are forces both in the country and the city that prefer the image of a farmer as a loser rather than a winner, and those are unlikely to abate soon. But it creates a weird world of farming where the broad, underlying truth is far from the public image and perception – even amongst those who know the reality.
That’s why it was unusual to hear Duvenaud speak this truth out loud, and I wasn’t surprised to see that most of the farmers in the room seemed uncomfortable when he said it. It just isn’t said, you know, that farmers are “doing fabulously, most of you, anyway.”
