Farming Among the Doubts : LOSING GROUND Agricultural Policy and the Decline of the American Farm<i> by Hugh Ulrich(Chica Review Press: $18.95; 278 pp.; 1-55652-059-X)</i>

My father, whose job in Roosevelt’s Farm Credit Administration in the 1930s took him from Maine to California arranging government loans for farmers, once assessed the results of his work in a typically idiosyncratic phrase. Even with the help of the loans, he said, the survival of those farms was “among the doubts.”

Today, at the end of the decade that continues to witness the worst farm crisis since the Depression, the future of American farming, particularly of relatively small-scale family farming, is more than ever “among the doubts.” From 1981 to 1987 alone, farm population in the United States declined by 15%, and the number of people living on farms is now fewer than 5 million for the first time since the early 1800s. And, since 1920, the number of farms has dropped from 6.5 million to fewer than 2.2 million.

By now, it’s apparent that neither sporadic attention in the news media to the decline of the farmer nor the mid-to-late-’80s’ spate of books and films celebrating his or her attachment to a rugged way of life has reversed these alarming trends. And nothing can, argues Hugh Ulrich convincingly in “Losing Ground,” except fundamental changes in American agricultural policy.

Many previous books and news analyses on the subject have tended to focus primarily on the traditional American values and heroic qualities of the farmers who remain. Such accounts are reassuring in that they essentially imply that many farmers will survive because of their financial judgment and strength of character, and that together they will continue to form the Jeffersonian backbone of our democracy. In the Missouri farmer of Richard Rhodes’ recent book “Farm,” we have a splendid embodiment of this sort of Great Agrarian Hope, and several reviews of Rhodes’ book have naively reinforced the popular notion that personality will prevail over policy, that as long as such heroes exist, so, surely, will family farms.

Such contemporary mythologizing, in fact, is reminiscent of the genesis of the myth of the Noble Savage: romanticizing the “primitive” life in equal proportion to its destruction. As Ulrich demonstrates, the real situation--not only for family farms but, in the long run, for corporate farms as well--can only become increasingly desperate if our current national farm policy continues. And it is the shortsightedness of farmers themselves--and their powerful lobby in Washington--that has exacerbated the crisis, along with politicians, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, farm-related industries, the American media and the general public, none of which, as Ulrich sees it, has made a systematic effort to understand the root causes of farm woes or addressed the catastrophic social and environmental consequences of continuing to conduct farming-as-usual.

A Chicago-based columnist for Agweek and a commodity-trading adviser, Ulrich offers an overview of American farm policy from shortly before World War I to the present, deftly broad-stroking the economic and political forces that shaped policy and that subjected American farmers to the fluctuations of what has become a kind of world farmers’ market.

Farmers and government, he argues, formed a century-long partnership built on “blocks of flawed thinking.” Examples: a policy of not doing business in the crucible of the free market but of manipulating it by trying to ensure profits with government price supports; a system of easy credit that addicted many farmers to heavy indebtedness; the twin and mutually contradictory programs of paying the same farmer not to plant some of his farm so as to reduce market glut, while encouraging him to enhance production on tilled acres with nonbiodegradable chemicals and massive, soil-eroding farm equipment.

The chickens have come home to roost. Once the dominant exporter of grain, the United States now faces stiff international competition in a marketplace that strongly resists our manipulation, rendering our artificial system of price supports for American farmers--many of whom are dependent upon them--increasingly costly and unworkable. The longstanding reliance of farmers on government loans has been stretched to the financial breaking point--not only for many farmers but also for the government’s own farm-credit system.

Without an accompanying stress on land-protection measures, the acreage-reduction program merely lines the pockets of farm owners with undeserved taxpayer dollars. The blanket government and chemical-industry endorsement of chemicals to increase productivity has led to wide-scale ground-water pollution. And, thanks to the use of heavy equipment, fall plowing and other destructive tillage, we are losing our fertile topsoil at a faster rate than nature is replacing it.

Unless there are broad policy changes that conserve our resources, Ulrich contends, the long-term viability of even corporate farming in America is very much in doubt. For family farming, however, and all that it has traditionally suggested about the nature of our democracy, the situation is more immediately ominous.

At 38, the average American farmer is six years older than the nonfarmer, and evidence abounds that many older family farmers are not being replaced by younger family members. At the same time, being competitive in the current system usually requires significant farm assets--but how many young people can afford to buy a million-dollar operation?

So who will carry on the family farms? With farm assets already concentrated among a tiny fraction of the population, Ulrich’s undeniable answer: corporations.

It is not a happy thought. “Freedom,” Ulrich observes, “is a very fragile thing; it needs to be planted in something that will sustain it. Land ownership among the many is a major prop that helps a free nation to maintain its foundation and integrity.”

Ulrich’s proposals for change are both sensible and urgent, but as a major new farm bill is legislated in Washington in 1990, they must be rated a dark horse against the sacred cows of traditional policy. His goals, which range from reducing erosion of topsoil to below the natural replacement rate, to doubling the U.S. farm population, would be achieved through a series of surprisingly practicable, distinctly nonutopian measures, ranging from requiring all subsidized farmers to use “conservation tillage techniques,” to new farms initially purchased and created by the federal government, essentially a 20th-Century homesteading act for that admittedly small segment of the population motivated to become farmers.

“Losing Ground” suffers occasionally from a flippant tone and some horrendous writing. (“For the United States, it was the supply side of the coin that contained all the flies in the ointment after the late 1940s. Productivity, always such a mixed bag for farmers, seemed to get a big second wind from the price stimulation of the war. After the war ended, it broke into a spring.”)

No matter. This is a book that generally rises to the importance of its subject, that treats history with clear-eyed respect and that asks the right questions of the present. It is worth its weight in 10 previous books on American agriculture.