Midwest farmer speaks on rural crisis, financial collapse

…”I’ve been farming for 37 years, and 7 years ago a Wall Street investor came and bought the farm that my family has farmed for 50 years. I then talked to the investor. He said, “Give me an extraordinarily high rent and you can continue to farm.” I said, “I can’t give you that kind of rent and do the job right.” He said, “Too bad, I’ll bring in a mega-farmer.” ”

“A mega-farmer is a farmer who wants to be just like the big banks, big enough that he can’t fail. But high-risk farming by mega-farmers is becoming a reality. Mega-farm operators are pushing family farmers off the land they have farmed for decades. Mega-farmers can do this because they farm in an unsustainable manner. They work on narrow margins of profit. The risk is so great that these mega-farmers know they can’t do the right thing and make a profit, so they don’t even put back the nutrients into the soil that the crop takes out.”

“Therefore they are stealing from one of our greatest natural resources: the soil. The impact is felt severely. What’s left is poorly maintained fields, agricultural runoff, and diminishing productivity at a time when the world’s population continues to grow and we have to feed the people all over the world. Large-scale mega-farm operators are bypassing local agricultural suppliers and costing local communities billions of dollars in economic activity every year.”

“Six years ago we did a study in Logan County, right in the middle of Illinois. It’s some of the best farmland in the world, and we wondered why our communities were dying. The mega-farmers in our community who spent zero dollars in our area were taking 4 million dollars out of our community every year. In the very small town that I went to school in, the only business open now in my town is the post office. Everything else is boarded up.”

Energy Bulletin