A long post about a very hard decision

This is a long post. I have to tell you something hard. I kind of don’t want to because it’s a downer, but I feel like I must do it because it’s true, because it’s not something you’ll hear a lot these days, and because it may be helpful to others in the long run.

Ed is starting a new job on Monday.

Why? Because despite all the hype about small farmers and local food, farming as a full time occupation still does not pay a living wage. Although farmers have become mini-celebrities in the media, and in their communities, many farmers find that their work is not valued enough to allow them to make a living at it. At some point, many farmers face the heart-breaking decision of having to stop farming.

Farmers don’t get into farming because of money. They get into it because of love. But in the end, after much struggle, the truth stands clear: love is simply not enough to pay the bills.

Back to a more personal level:
The job Ed got is at Franhauffer Institute, which is located a couple of miles from our farm. They do research on fuel cells and water purification systems, and he’ll be working in a lab. He is excited to start.

I will continue to farm, homeschool, homestead. The girls will help me, and we’ll have our workers too.

I feel heart-broken that Ed had to take this job. But after several years of marginal income, he realized that if he wanted to have any chance of getting back into a technical field, now is the time. He’s been out of engineering for 7 years, and this job came along and is in a field he’s interested in. For me, this is nevertheless very hard.

We have put so much into farming: time, energy, money, and emotionally we put a lot into it too. This has been coming for some time. When he first mentioned the idea of looking for another job about two years ago, I sobbed. The he stopped mentioning it and I thought everything was ok. But he was always thinking about how financially precarious our situation was until it got unbearable for everyone. After countless sessions of trying to figure out how to make things work; after many arguments, we both started feeling like farming is taking too high of a toll on our family. For Ed especially, the facts became very clear:

·         our income places us below poverty line;

·         we cannot afford health insurance (we do get free insurance from the state, with limited benefits, based on our low income);

·         we cannot save for an emergency, the kids’ education, or retirement;

·         we have raised our prices as much as we think the market will bear

Farming demands a very high, relentless amount of work, which is valued so little that often it is not enough to pay farmers a living wage. I am here to tell you from my own personal experience over the past 7 years, and from the experience of other small-scale environmentally minded farmers I know, that financially, full-time farmers are barely scraping by. Part-time farmers is a different ball game. Here I’m talking about those who must support the farm as a business as well as their own (often minimal) personal expenses with the income they generate from farming.

The main problem we and many others face is low food prices. As a small farm we are competing with industrial agriculture. Yes, people are willing to pay more for our products; but not as much as it takes to sustain this type of farming. The bench mark for everyone is the grocery store price; and we just cannot compete with that. Industrial agriculture sells food so cheaply because it exploits people, animals and the land in order to produce it; workers are paid below min wage, and the agricultural practices devastate animals and the land. We pay our workers more than min wage, and our farming practices are environmentally sound.  We just don’t fit in with the industrial model, and the true price of producing the food we do does not either.

I could write much more about all this, but this article highlights the story of a farming family like us that decided to stop farming, for basically the same reasons Ed decided to get a job. It clearly illustrates the disconnect between the local food craze and the farm economic reality on the ground. I pulled out some passages that really felt true to our situation.
 
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No one wants to think about farmers calling it quits. It muddies the heroic glow cast around our food producers. It cuts through all of the feel-good chatter about food systems and local economies. Each time a farmer quits, a little piece of our new agrarian dream dies. But however hard it is to discuss, the rate at which farmers are walking away from their farms—whether by choice or by force—may be the most important measure of whether or not our food systems are actually working. Because although farmers’ markets are springing up everywhere, the average small-scale farmer is barely surviving.
For farmers like Jim and Tina, who believe in producing food by stewarding their land responsibly and supporting biodiversity, a direct-market relationship with customers who support those production values makes sense. But if our farmers cannot charge prices based on the cost of real production numbers, this model falls flat.
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A 2011 study showed that southern Arizona farmers and ranchers on average sell a collective $300 million of food products per year, yet spend $320 million to raise those crops. The same study finds net farm income trends have been negative since 1989, which means that our farmers have consistently lost money producing food. According to the same study, southern Arizona farmers and ranchers reportedly lost $106 million in 2009.
National numbers reflect our region’s numbers. According the 2012 Census of Agriculture, farmers earned just 10 percent of their income from farm sales, while approximately 90 percent of their income came from off-farm occupations. The projected median farm income for 2015 is negative $1,558. Nearly half (or 1 million) of the 2.1 million farms in the U.S. require at least one member of the family to work off the farm.
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Behind the scenes, farmers spend hours at the computer, wearily adding up market totals and expenditures. It is here in this solitary lamplit space that farmers visit some very dark emotional places. It is impossible to convey the deep anxiety for everything at stake, the fear that accompanies the risk, and the wounds that this stress inflicts upon a psyche or a family.