"When all was said and done, it came down to one word: Price!"

In 1994 some 83.4% of America's farm households had earnings from farm income which would have placed them well below the nation's poverty level. Another 10.8% had farm income earnings which would have given them less than $1000 over the nation's poverty level.

Meanwhile, between 1991 and 1995 the average annual median for return on equity (profitability) for the food manufacturing industry was 15.3%, for all U.S. industry, 12.5%, while for U.S. agriculture the average annual return on investment was a minuscule 1.98%.

Any study addressing itself to "what's happening to America's small farms over the past several decades," such as the National Commission on the Small Farm recently appointed by USDA Secretary Dan Glickman, which ignores or fails to carefully consider the two above stated facts is destined for irrelevance.

These two overriding issues --- income and price --- are not only at the heart of what has become the nation's permanent agricultural crisis, but they are inextricably bound together within the issue of defining class status in rural America and the widening gap between rich and poor in our present day society.

Were it not for off-farm income the American farmer today would closely resemble the majority of the Third World's farmers --- impoverished and enslaved to an ever-increasingly large globalized transnationally-owned and controlled food manufacturing system. USDA figures for 1995 (latest figures available) showed that "average operator household earnings from farming activities as percent of average household income" was 10.6%.

For nearly a century now the inability of farmers to receive a consistently fair and equitable return on their investment has left them with basically only three options: selling their land and exiting from agriculture altogether, attempting to borrow money from public and private lenders in an attempt to remain in farming, or seeking employment off the farm in an effort to economically survive and also hopefully to retain their family's farm.

Their inability, however, to receive a fair and equitable return on their investment (to say nothing of simply being able to meet their production expenses) has little to do with the fact they are "efficient" producers, but more to the question of what they are being paid for what they produce.

In 1984 former Texas Agricultural Commissioner and chairman of the Democratic National Committee's Agricultural Council chaired a series of eight nationwide farm policy forums on agriculture. In his final report he concluded:

"When all was said and done, it came down to one word: Price. Other important issues were discussed at the forums sponsored by the DNCAC during the past six months, but the overwhelming consensus among participating farmers was that the other concerns --- overproduction, soil and water conservation, high interest rates, lack of credit, entry by young farmers, the depressed farm service industry, and the farm program's high cost, to name a few --- could and would be solved when farmers received a fair price for their products."

"A fair price for their products." That is what is at the root of the family farm crisis in America and that is the issue that Secretary Glickman's Commission should not in the least be reticent about confronting for in confronting that subject they also need to face squarely the questions of how agricultural commodity prices are set and who sets them?

In announcing the Commission Secretary Glickman stated that "the question is not big versus little, but: Can we find a meaningful way for the two to coexist. I'd like to think the answer is yes." The secretary might "like to think" that, but the current reality is quite different, for by its very nature corporate agribusiness is not designed to "co-exist," despite its many reverential testimonials to the resourcefulness of the American family farmer, with family farm agriculture.

Long in the making, the dire situation that now faces thousands of our food producers and their workers who today toil in the fields and sheds of rural America did not, as some politicians and the media often suggest, occur overnight. Rather, America's permanent agricultural crisis stems from two basic long- standing facts:

1) the accelerated erosion and destruction of our nation's rural economy and its "family farm system" of agriculture is the result not of failed programs and policies, but precisely the opposite. It is the result of carefully developed and successfully implemented policies designed by corporate agribusiness to first concentrate its own economic power and then ultimately to eliminate from agriculture its abundant and productive human resources, and

2) U.S. farm policy has been based for over a century not on the reality of what actually was taking place in agriculture and within the national economy, but rather on self-serving, contorted explanations of that reality by various policy planners and implementors who have represented an ever- narrowing body of "communities of economic interests."

For decades, consequently, we have witnessed a wholesale exploitation of our agricultural system by corporate agribusiness and its "communities of economic interests" directed not only at driving farmers, workers and consumers apart, but also at the same time attempting to divert the taxpayers' attention away from the root causes of the farm crisis.

It has done this by preaching about farming practices, "excessive" government regulations, by creating artificial divisions within the farm community, and by replacing a fair price in the marketplace with an ever-escalating unfair burden of debt.

At the same time, unfortunately, most farmers and consumers have failed to fully recognize or understand the ulterior motives of such corporate/government/land grant college planning, in the past 100 years, and the success of these particular "communities of economic interests" in obtaining their primary goal --- namely, destroying farmers' economic and political power through forced liquidation caused by enforced low commodity prices.

In his book The Myth of the Family Farm: Agribusiness Dominance of U.S. Agriculture, (Westview Press, Boulder, Colorado: 1981) University of Wisconsin-Eau-Claire geographer Ingolf Voegler points out, "in the United States the myth of the family farm continues to be used for the benefit of a relatively small group of large-scale producers and agribusiness firms, while the vast majority of rural and urban people, believing the myth, pay the economic, political, social and environmental costs of this fantasy."

Clearly, farmers, consumers, labor and business have always had a very real and equally-shared interest in agriculture. For most consumers, however, that interest is seldom expressed in concrete action, except when it concerns matters of health, such as the recent concern about the e-coli bacteria in meat, cleanliness or excessive price increases.

Farmers and labor, however, in each's never-ending struggle to organize and promote beneficial societal change, have frequently exhibited varying degrees of mutual and self-serving interests. The fact that farmers, consumers and labor have failed to consistently collaborate and act together in the pursuit of their common interests is one of U.S. agriculture's enduring tragedies and has unfortunately, throughout recent history, led to a patchwork and often conflicting series of public policy initiatives.

At the same time corporate America, which traditionally has always felt threatened by any change in a carefully nurtured status quo, has come to increasingly see agribusiness and the supply and control of our food supply as one of its own most vested and important interests and has thus fashioned its policies accordingly.

As University of Missouri Rural Sociology Prof. William Heffernan reminds us:

"As the agribusiness organizations, including banks, with which commercial farmers interact to obtain supplies and markets for their products gain a disproportionate share of the power in the relationship, they do not necessarily use it to maximize profits. More often they use the power to enlarge their share of the market or gain more control of other parts of their economic, social and political environment to assume survival of the organization."

Historically, we have seen the farmers' plight as a never-ending struggle by ever-decreasing numbers to assert whatever remaining inherent economic and political power they may yet possess, a power which for decades has been in the process of being systematically stripped from them.

For just as Americans have mythologized and romanticized farming as a profession, they have at the same time also tended to basically denigrate the farmer as an individual. As Voegler reminds us:

"The conventional account of contemporary U.S. agriculture is widely accepted because it is based on the national ideal of the family farm derived from the Jeffersonian concept of agrarian democracy and from a small amount of truth. When a myth is widely accepted, this small amount of truth is perceived as the whole truth!" (emphasis added)

Voegler further suggests that the "family farm" myth, so persistently perpetuated by corporate agribusiness, has been avidly supported by four other myths, namely, the work ethic myth, the free enterprise myth, the efficiency myth and the equal opportunity myth.

Together, belief in these myths form the basis of what many in agriculture have come to call "conventional wisdom." This so- called unquestioned "conventional wisdom" holds that family farmers operate in an economic system that is both moral and one that rewards individual initiative and effort.

Such long-standing duplicity on the part of corporate agribusiness, as Laura B DeLind, a specialist in the Department of Anthropology at Michigan State University, argues makes family farmers readily susceptible to (and firm believers in) agricultural programs, services, technologies and research that promote "efficient," business-like farm management and production. In turn, such strategies of commercial "self- improvement" serve an economic and political system dominated by corporate capital.

"The family farm, like the `emperor's new clothes,' does not exist, at least not in any analytically or programmatically useful way. It is a torturous twisting of reality, under the guise of `conventional wisdom,' and it obscures far more than it reveals. By accommodating all major organizational variation within a single conceptual category, the systematic reasons, particularly the economic and political reasons, for operational differences among farming enterprises are obscured. These latter are built, not on personality, managerial ability, or individual effort, the perceived `quality' or ownership, but on differential control over the processes and resources of production."

Efforts in recent years, such as Glickman's present commission, to help save the vanishing numbers of "the modern-day independent, yeoman family farmers" have in a significant way only tended to draw public attention away from the larger question of economic concentration and the policy and power relationships that such concentration exacerbates. By depolicitizing the plight of the family farm while reinforcing such "conventional wisdom" these efforts have tended to effectively help maintain a "status quo" compatible with the interests of corporate agribusiness. As DeLind concludes:

"The category family farm must be pried apart. It must be opened up so that its internal contradictions can be seen, not hidden, and used as a basis for identifying and comparing the relative class positions of producers. This would provide a keener awareness of the structure of agriculture (why and how policies do and do not work and for whom). In addition, any long term action to reform the system --- to bring about a more equitable distribution of power and income --- must rest on class-based alliances which cut across the `family farm' category and which are not coincidental with it."

Clearly, these self-supporting "family farm" myths designed to give family farmers a false confidence in their position in the economic affairs of the nation have been in fact carefully manipulated through the years by our economic system's various " communities of economic interest" to strip away farmer's real political and economic power.

Farmers have always cherish the belief that their self- sufficiency, rugged individualism, efficiency, and hard work were the cornerstones of this nation's rural value system and that their reward for abiding by such an ethic would be amply and periodically demonstrated in the returns they earned in the marketplace.

Yet, even as most farmers have faithfully abided by such precepts and have continued to exhibit a great variety of work skills, frequently putting in far more hours than their urban neighbors while often battling unpredictable weather, their incomes from the so-called "free market" system have perennially averaged little better than half as much as their fellow industrial workers.

Vince Rossiter, a Hartington, Nebraska banker and former agricultural chairman of the Independent Bankers Association, during his years was perhaps the most consistently articulator concerning the consequences of America's permanent agricultural crisis.

"A large percentage of farm operators have been written off like a worn out and obsolete piece of machinery, as the agricultural industry is uncoupled from the other more important business and professional sectors by economists. The farm economy is viewed as having too many resources, both human and financial, which must be eliminated, wasted if necessary, in order to bring farm production into balance with available demand, before agriculture will be able to prosper again.

"If the market doesn't do this, then the government should intervene and phase it in as rapidly as possible, so they say, in spite of the agony it causes, and the adverse reaction it has on the entire economy. A reporter named Hillgren of the UPI said it best recently when she wrote, `When are we going to realize that these surplus resources in agriculture have faces, and responsibilities and ambitions like other members of society?'"