By PETER SCHUTT

I love to hunt wild ducks in Arkansas – it’s what I grew up doing starting in the early 1960s. When I say “love” I think I really mean love in the deepest sense, as the cypress and oak bottoms along the St. Francis River were pretty much pristine back then, and the killing of the ducks in hindsight was secondary to being alone in that beautiful setting.

It was still a time when, all along the road we drove to the hunting grounds, I recall seeing black people lined up in November cotton fields, picking by hand and stuffing the white stuff into huge bags slung over their shoulders. Probably working for pennies a day, they at least were making some sort of a living and able to feed themselves. Their old tenant houses weren’t fancy, but they all were in the country, near nature and their work.

The cotton mostly went to Memphis, where it was graded, sorted and traded on Front Street. I had family and my family had many friends in the cotton business. It was some fashion of a local farm economy.

Likewise, lots of our vegetables came from local “truck” farms. Mama would go to the “Curb Market” on Scott Street to get seasonal produce. She would know, personally, the farmers who grew the best tomatoes or butter beans. She would look them in the eye and smile and love what they sold her; and she appreciated the experience.

Not much of what we ate back then came from Mexico or Florida, other than citrus. In fact, for many years there were local truck farmers, especially in West Tennessee, who grew vegetables not only for the local market, but also for PictSweet in Brownsville, which bought, flash froze and packaged them for distribution.

Nowadays, most all the vegetables processed by PictSweet come from Mexico. Haywood County locals couldn’t compete with the low prices of Mexican produce so they went on to something else. It’s all about the price you know.

Most people today don’t know from whom or where the food they eat comes. They don’t think about where the money they spend on food ends up or where the farmers who grow the food live or who they are.

 

Today, I make pretty much the same drive to go duck hunting. Now, driving through Arkansas in the fall and early winter is like driving through a deserted wasteland – there are no people anywhere. The field hands have been replaced by large tractors and attachments that do the work of dozens of men, using only one driver. That driver sits in a climate controlled cab, and the machine is guided by a GPS system.

The tenant houses are gone or nearly so. The farm workers have moved away – mostly far away. Farming towns such as Cotton Plant, Hickory Ridge, Cherry Valley, etc., are either ramshackled and mostly deserted. The St. Francis River and other drainages have been “controlled” by elaborate dredged canals that get flood water off the woods and fields as fast as possible.

The former field hands of the 60s, one would think, have a better life now that they’re out of tenant houses. But drive thru some of the remaining farm communities like Cotton Plant or Jonestown or Tunica, and see the living conditions the descendants of these folks enjoy today.

Of course, cotton fields have mostly given way to corn, soybean and rice. The cotton trading on Front Street in Memphis is gone. The corn, beans and rice get loaded on barges and shipped to granaries, or ethanol plants or feed lots. And so on.

Practically none of the crops grown in our area are in any way part of a local food supply.

Farms are now industrial size and farmers are now agribusinessmen. The land is just a growing medium, there to take “inputs” ranging from toxic herbicide and pesticide to chemical fertilizers. There are no earthworms or dung beetles or much of any life in the millions of acres of “row crop” land in the South, or Midwest.

Farmers work pretty much isolated from the people who consume what they grow. I don’t think I’ve met a one who has had someone look them in the eye and tell them how good their corn or soybeans are. Farmers in agribusiness more or less work for the banks and the seed and chemical companies. The price they get paid for what they grow is determined by traders far away from the Mid South.

The farmers are the least compensated part of a far-from-local food system.

By contrast, at Winchester Farm we are making good progress towards being an integral part of the local food system, although we are not there yet. For example:

• – All our cows are born on the land and fed off the land. We don’t have to buy much feed.
• – We don’t owe any bank for the equipment we use. In fact, most of our tractors are 30 years old and were made in Memphis. When they break, we fix them on the farm.
• – Our employees all eat some of what is grown on the farm. They are all from the local area. They have had people who buy our food tell them how good it is.
• – When something does break on the farm, we usually buy recycled parts, or use local repair companies.
• – We sell our meat and eggs locally. Local people eat the food. The money we receive goes to support the farm.
• – Our land is not just a medium for applying various poisons to it, in order to “increase our yields”. Rather it’s a living, connected system, full of earthworms, dung beetles and other life.

In other words, as John Muir described a hundred years ago, when we try and identify one part of our land community, we find that it is attached to every other part of our land community.

No one on our farm is alone. We are all together.