Soaking The Rich

IN 1877 a group of small, dirt poor farmers met in a ratty, ramshackle cabin in Lampassas County, Texas, to discuss their future. Those men and women, the founders of what became The Farmers Alliance (the forerunner of the Populist movement of the '90's), were struggling to pry loose the ruinous grip of the crop lien system under which a banker could tell an indebted farmer whom to buy from, what to grow, and whom to sell to. As one of the men who had been at the Lampassas meeting said later, the farmers had come to forestall "the day... when all the balance of labor's products become concentrated into the hands of a few, there to constitute a power that would enslave posterity." The Alliancemen were fighting for the small family farm, for their independence, and for a measure of control over their own lives, as well as for economic survival.

A century later the cause of the small farmer is still alive. Curiously enough, the major source of controversy is a law passed six years after the Populist heyday, the Reclamation Act of 1902. This legislation created a federal Reclamation Service to build dams, reservoirs, and canals to irrigate dry lands in 17 western states; today approximately 12 million acres are irrigated by federally stored and transported water. The Act also contained provisions limiting ownership of federally irrigated farm land to 160 acres per family member, and requiring that owners of irrigated land live within 50 miles of their farms. But these restrictions, which were designed to preserve family farms, have never been enforced. Paul Taylor, who served as a consultant to the Department of the Interior from 1943 to 1952 and is now Professor Emeritus of Economics at Berkeley, has explained, "The central problem arose from the fact that potentially irrigable lands had largely passed into private hands long before public reclamation became a reality. This created special interests resistant to the controls over monopoly..." Today over one million acres are being irrigated in violation of the law.

Last summer, after an eight year long legal battle, a federal appeals court decided that despite a 75 year time lapse, offending landowners would either have to sell their land or do without federal water. In August, Secretary of State Cecil Andrus promptly issued guidelines for the sale of excess lands. Thousands of people turned in their names to a lottery for the newly created farms. And as late as November, Andrus was pressing Congress not to postpone enforcement of the law.

But in the meantime, a group of landowners alarmed by this prospect initiated an enormous lobbying campaign against enforcement, complete with full page ads in the Washington Post. They went to court and argued that an environmental impact statement (which would delay enforcement by at least a year) was required before the rules could be carried out. A federal district court in Fresno, California ruled in their favor. Taylor, a champion of the 160-acre restriction since the 1920's, has dismissed the lawsuit as "another one of their delaying tactics. If you include human beings in the environmental impact, the result is clear," he said recently.

Whatever the merits of the suit, it appears that the Carter administration has taken this opportunity to soften its support of the original law. Andrus now maintains that "a statement should be prepared whether required by the law or not. For that reason, we will not appeal the Fresno decision." And during his recent trip to the Rockies Vice President Walter Mondale told the recalcitrant landowners that Carter will ask Congress to approve a sliding scale of acreage limitations based on the type of land and the crops grown on it. However Mondale did not specify to what extent the President favored relaxing the 160-acre per family member restriction.

If Carter advocates significantly loosening the restrictions established in the 1902 law, he will put the federal government in the position of substantially subsidizing agribusiness: most of the farms in violation of the existing statute are large corporate farms. Irrigation is an energy-intensive and usually very expensive operation. According to the Task Force on the Rules and Regulations to Govern the Application of the 160-acre Limit, the government made an original investment of $1100 per acre to build the irrigation system, which now illegally provides cheap water for the lands in question. The fact that during the past 75 years owners of large landholdings have repeatedly sought to eliminate the restriction is an indication of how much they value this government subsidy.

Responding to this criticism, agribusiness representatives have argued that small farms are no longer economically viable. But Paul Taylor disagrees. "It's a bunch of horsefeathers to say you can't make a living on 160 acres." And a 1973 Department of Agriculture study also refutes agribusiness arguments, stating that most economies of scale can be achieved on a well-managed family farm. In California, the size of an optimally efficient farm ranged from 40 to 400 acres, in Kansas, from 180 to 570 acres, and in Montana, from 300 to 540 acres, depending on the type of crop grown. Under the present unenforced regulations a family of four could own 640 acres of fertile, federally irrigated land, more than enough for an efficient and productive farm.

If the regulations were enforced creatively, encouraging cooperative investment in land and equipment, the farms might be even more prosperous. An article in the 1972 San Francisco Sunday Examiner describes one such project.

More than a year ago, 30 Chicano farm worker families formed a strawberry co-op, borrowed $175,000 from the Wells Fargo bank and $100,000 from the federal government.

Today, the bank loan is paid off, the co-op owns its own machinery and the workers are looking this year for an income between $9,000 and $11,000 a family...

THE GOVERNMENT needs to take a renewed interest in preserving the small, family farmer, who is suffering not because of his inability to produce as efficiently as a farm of 8000 acres, but because of his inability to absorb the losses resulting from a poor harvest. An insurance company investing in agriculture as a sideline can readily cover its short-term losses with profits from other areas of its business. The agricultural strike now in progress is a cry of frustration from small farmers being pushed out of business by corporate farms with greater financial resources. According to the U.S. Agricultural Census, from 1964 to 1974 the number of resident farmers declined from 40,000 to 29,000 in California; from 11,000 to 6,000 in New Mexico; and from 156,000 to 81,000 in Texas. Though there are still tens of thousands of small farmers, they presently control a relatively small percentage of the land. In California, farms averaging 8400 acres make up 23 out of a total of 35 million acres of farm land; in New Mexico, farms averaging 14,000 acres comprise 35 of the 38 million farm acres in the state.

But to discuss the small family farm only in terms of productivity and efficiency is to ignore the most compelling reasons for its preservation. The nature of farm organization largely determines the quality of life of America's agricultural workers. Enforcement of the acreage restriction could lead to the creation of thousands of new farms and help destroy the two-class system of agriculture prevalent in many parts of the west. On farms of 14,000 acres hundreds of people who could own their own land serve instead as employees subject to the whim of a landowner who has the power to decide who works and for how much. The men, women and children who work in the fields and groves of the west often migrate from one corporate farm to another in search of work. They arrive when the tomatoes, oranges, or onions are ripe and they leave at the end of the harvest. Because they are constantly on the move, migrant children receive inadequate, often fragmented educations. Homeless, helpless and poor, the migrant worker provides the back-breaking labor needed to harvest much of the food on America's tables.

For a brief time last summer it looked as though a President had finally found the wherewithal to stand up to the corporate lobby in favor of the small farmer and economic justice. If the amendments Carter introduces to the Reclamation Act of 1902 in the next Congressional session significantly raise the 160-acre ceiling, the self-styled Georgia peanut farmer will have sided with agribusiness against the defenseless, the rootless, the unemployed, and the landless.