Farmers Have Become Our Latest Pariahs

In the 1980s, it was the junk-bond kings. In the ‘90s, trial lawyers and politicians. Now it’s farmers we despise. I mean traditional farmers--cattle ranchers, growers of onions and alfalfa and potatoes--not the cultivators of wine grapes or tiny exotic vegetables glamorized by foodie chic.

The farmers and ranchers near my house in the high desert of northeastern California are at ground zero in the war against farmers. Roughly half an hour north of me is the drought-stricken Klamath Basin straddling the Oregon border, where, on April 7, administrators of the local water supply announced that virtually all irrigation was being cut off for the sake of three kinds of fish protected by the Endangered Species Act (ESA). About 1,400 family farmers and ranchers faced the prospect of losing both their livelihoods and their communities.

Late last month, a limited ration of water--less than a fifth of the normal supply--was released for farming. But life has yet to return to normal.

There’s “a lot of lingering sickness, like ulcers, and the kind of heartache you get from worry eatin’ on you and eatin’ on you,” says my neighbor Nancy De Ong, an egg rancher who lives just outside the Basin in Modoc County. Part of the collective memory of the last few months will be of watching people who’ve never had a problem with alcohol drinking too much. Of ranch women, as tough as baling wire, crying at public meetings. Of men being put on anti-depressants for the first time ever.

The farmers will not soon forget the long weeks in which they found themselves abandoned by both political parties. There was sympathy but little help from the Bush government. And not one of the 24 Democrats on the U.S. House of Representatives’ Resources Committee flew into the Basin for a field hearing on the crisis held in June.

But that’s not the worst of it. Farmers here, as in other places in America, feel that they can’t get a fair hearing from urban Americans; that no one even wants to listen to a farmer’s point of view.

My farmer neighbors consider the “fish vs. farmers” debate in the media and in government circles to have been conducted at the most superficial level. It’s not that they don’t care about the fish, they say, but that the question of what the fish need is a complex one. There really is no solid scientific evidence to support, for instance, the idea that the two species of local suckers classed as endangered would actually become extinct if the water level in the lake was allowed to drop.

A brilliant young ichthyologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service once admitted as much to me in an interview. He explained that suckers are a species of desert fish with astonishing powers of survival; that they have been known--without any help from human beings--to repopulate lakes that have entirely dried up in drought years by burying themselves in mud until the rain returned.

So why, I asked, do these fish need special conservation? Ah, he said, there is no proof that the sub-species of suckers that survive the droughts are the same as the ones that don’t make it. And even if no species or sub-species is wiped out in drought years, low water levels often mean that lakes and reservoirs lose their links to rivers and other “habitat corridors.” That means that the fish cannot inter-breed with sub-species in other water systems, which could mean that they lose the genetic diversity that is probably one source of their resilience. There has always been a shortage of funds for studying the hundreds of native species strewn over the vastness of the West. Until the hard facts can be established, he said, he wants the fish to be shielded by the ESA.

Farmers feel as maddened by this line of reasoning as talk-and-drive veterans are by proposals to restrict the use of cell phones in cars. These drivers believe that their freedom is being cramped needlessly, because no one has proved that telephone sessions have actually caused more accidents than eating or fiddling with CD players on the road.

The information gap about sucker fish and their habitat needsis far greater than the talk-and-drive lacuna, yet farmers are suffering more than a loss of personal freedom. The protection of fish that might or might not need protecting has created a serious financial burden for them. “Growers have had to pay for lawyers and consultants to fight for water allocations, year after year, even prior to this drought,” says Harry Carlson, a farm advisor and director of the University of California’s Intermountain Research Station in the region. “They have had to meet that expense in spite of being economically stressed by several years of poor commodity prices.”

And he doubts that the irrigation shutdown was necessary. “The amount of water being held in the name of the fish was far and away greater than what the fish need to persist. We have had other dry years in which fish and farmers were both shorted a little and both came through fine,” he says.

Farmers have been upset to learn that the world views them as insensitive to the environment. When science has established beyond reasonable doubt that some practice or other of American farmers harms the ecosphere, reasonable farmers--that is to say most of them--don’t grumble about following the rules. As new, less-harmful pesticides have become available, American farmers have embraced them. They are also learning to use less water. On futuristic farms in the Central Valley, computers estimate precisely how much irrigation a particular crop needs for the temperature and humidity of the day; fields are specially graded to minimize water usage.

But news like that seldom reaches Americans in cities. With a blinkered obstinacy, the public at large and policymakers have devalued farming’s social worth as farmers have declined in numbers and lost political clout. And America is not alone here.

In March, a farmers’ chat group on the Internet was outraged by a broadcast on Minnesota Public Radio in which a prominent British magazine editor said that farming--which contributes only 1.5% of Britain’s GDP--was an industry no rich country needs any more.

People like that editor “have no clue what growing food means,” read one of the least irate posts in the discussion. “Not just for the product. [They have no appreciation of farmers’] courage, strength. . . and respect for people and nature.” Having known many farmers and ranchers who work 18-hour days for months at a stretch, I know that to be true.

A microbiologist friend once suggested to me that his tenured post at Stanford and MacArthur Foundation funding have less to do with intellectual superiority than with his ability to work longer hours and thrive with less sleep than most people--skills he learned as a child on his grandparents’ West Virginia dairy farm.

The spirit of barn-raising lives on in rural America, not just in spring mornings of collaborative calf-branding and collective autumnal roundups, but in countless acts of neighborliness. These habits of the heart, the landscape, and American farm folk’s positively joyful stoicism are what drew me to live in Modoc--a spine-stiffening change from sitting in San Francisco or Palo Alto coffee-shops, indulging in doleful discussions with fellow-writers about the trials of the freelance life.

The people here know that they can be vital to each other’s survival. They cherish each other. Without being asked, rancher neighbors have yanked my truck out of snow banks and brought me Christmas gifts of wood for the stove that was, in some financially desperate years, my only source of heating.

But there is no room for such acts of altruism in city dwellers’ unfriendly view of farmers. A recent article in a San Francisco newspaper dug into the troubled emotional history of a lawyer imprisoned after a dog in his care fatally mauled a neighbor. Describing the man’s college career, the reporter noted that relatives said he cut classes to hide in his dorm, ashamed of having been “a bit of a country bumpkin from his days on the tobacco farm.”

That someone should feel like an outcast just because of a rural interlude in his life apparently needs no explanation. It elicits no surprise. It fits urbanites’ prejudices perfectly.