Bet the Farm

The Dollars and Sense of Growing Food in America

Beth Hoffman

• Publisher: Island Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781642831603
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

"Eloquent and detailed…precise and well-thought-out...Read her book — and listen."— Jane Smiley, The Washington Post. Beth Hoffman was living the good life: she had a successful career as a journalist and professor, a comfortable home in San Francisco, and plenty of close friends and family. Yet in her late 40s, she and her husband decided to leave the big city and move to his family ranch in Iowa—all for the dream of becoming a farmer, to put into practice everything she had learned over decades of reporting on food and agriculture. There was just one problem: money.Half of America's two million farms made less than $300 in 2019.Between rising land costs, ever-more expensive equipment, the growing uncertainty of the climate, and few options for health care, farming today is a risky business. For many, simply staying afloat is a constant struggle. Bet the Farm chronicles this struggle through Beth's eyes as a beginning farmer.She must contend with her father-in-law, who is reluctant to hand over control of the land. Growing oats is good for the environment but ends up being very bad for the wallet. And finding somewhere, in the midst of COVID-19, to slaughter grass-finished beef is a nightmare. The couple also must balance the books, hoping that farming isn't a romantic fantasy that takes every cent of their savings.Even with a decent nest egg and access to land, making ends meet at times seems impossible. And Beth knows full well that she is among the privileged.If Beth can't make it, how can farmers who confront racism, lack access to land, or don't have other jobs to fall back on? Bet the Farm is a first-hand account of the perils of farming today and a personal exploration of more just and sustainable ways of producing food.

Chapter 1

The Simple Life?

TRUTH BE TOLD, I THOUGHT I KNEW A LOT about farming. While I’d never farmed, I’d spent more than twenty years covering food and agriculture as a reporter. Traveling from California to Italy, India to Michigan, I’d visited farmers all over the world and learned about their lives, their struggles and successes. The idea of running a farm of my own felt like a gift, the culmination of my life’s work.

And so a few years back, this suburban girl from New Jersey, living in big-city San Francisco, moved to a farm in rural Iowa, learned in her mid-forties how to build a fence, and made a fool of herself asking stupid questions like “Do the cows have names?” And although much about the environmental aspects of farming were familiar from my reporting days, the daily cultural and economic surprises were startling; I felt as if I had been cast in an updated 2020 remake of the old fish-out-of-water television comedy Green Acres. I quickly realized that reporting on farming and doing it myself were two very different things.

My husband, John, grew up on said farm in south central Iowa raising corn, pigs, cattle, and soybeans. In fact, John is the fifth generation of Hogelands to farm this piece of land, with its rolling hills, pockets of forest, tall prairie grasses, and, until the spring of 2019, acres and acres of corn and soybeans. As he puts it, “I spent summers immersing myself in the creeks and ponds, and winters tramping over the frozen, snow-covered hills. Spring and fall were for hunting and gathering, finding what the woods and streams had produced in silent bounty. All of my fiber knows that farm, and it fills me up with its life.”

In other words, the farm is in John’s blood. His great-great-grandfather James Ship Hogeland first came west from Indiana in 1851 as a surveyor for the railroad. It is said he loved the beauty of southern Iowa so much that he returned and bought land after his job was done. Two generations later the land was still in the family, the farm run by Lola and Pete Hogeland. Pete was also a banker, who, family legend has it, excused his neighbors’ loans during the Great Depression in the 1930s, causing himself financial ruin. Then there were John’s grandparents, Lloyd and Ellen Hogeland, who farmed the land until John’s parents, Dorothy Lynn (known to family as both Dot and Lynn) and Leroy, arrived in the 1960s, took out huge loans, and together weathered the farm crisis of the 1980s. Hogelands worked and struggled on the same land generation after generation, forming stronger bonds with every nook and cranny of the landscape as time passed.

I, on the other hand, spent much of my life living in East or West Coast cities, going to plays and concerts, and frequenting museums. And even though I grew up in the Garden State, I did not know anyone who tended a garden, let alone a farm. “Land” to me meant a place where people built a weekend house in the country, not a multigenerational home where deep, spiritual connections to the creeks and hills were forged. While John immersed himself in the ponds of his family’s farm, I went to summer camp at the Bronx Zoo.

So my move to a midwestern farm in middle-of-no-where Iowa had many in my life wondering if I would be able to hack it. And to be honest, I wondered too. But not for the reasons they thought.

The first time Iowa entered my consciousness was the day I met John. We were neighbors in a three-apartment row house in Berkeley, California, where I had moved for grad school. He had just returned from visiting family in Iowa with his two young sons, he told me after introducing himself, a trip they took every summer. Iowa? I asked. Yes, he stated proudly—Iowa. In fact, he informed me, he planned to move back there and take over his family’s farm as soon as his children were grown.

Over the next six months, John went from being an acquaintance to a close friend to something much more. When we married, the dream of moving to Iowa was still a good ten years off, and so I said I’d think about it. In the meantime, we spent weeks every summer on the farm with the kids, rocking on the porch swing, watching the lightning bugs, and swimming in the pond at the crack of dawn. We helped build fences and chased down escaped cattle, cleaned out old sheds, and picked chanterelles in the forest. I learned to drive the tractor around in circles cutting hay and went fishing in the dimming light of the day.

All the while, I was cultivating my own connection to the land and began to dream my own dreams of farming it. There was a certain badass feeling I got from the simple act of putting on my red rubber boots and strutting out into the fields to work, a freedom in sweating more than I had ever sweat, and feeling cleansed by it. And at the end of the day, there was a deep satisfaction in looking out onto the horizon at the new fence or recently moved cows chomping on fresh grass and saying, “I did that.” I began to know in my bones that I wanted to spend more of my time outside, where my senses were alive with sounds and sights and at least some of the work I did was physical.

But there were several huge roadblocks in the way of our moving to Iowa, aside from the inevitable culture shock I was to experience. The biggest problem was that someone was already running the farm: John’s dad, Leroy, was officially the man in charge and had been for more than fifty years. Although Leroy was already seventy-eight years old when John and I married in 2010, he was a spry seventy-eight, and he had no intention of simply turning the operation over to us. He had his (justifiable) doubts about whether I would ever really be persuaded to quit my job as a university professor and move to Iowa from San Francisco. And during John’s absence from the farm for thirty years, Leroy had crafted his own plans for how the land was to be managed to support him in his old age.

The corn and soybean cropland was already rented out to a guy who sharecropped with him (an agreement in which the landowner and farmer share the costs and profits). Leroy still took care of a herd of cattle himself, and although he was interested in selling them, he, like many farmers, had no real plans of retiring. It was far more likely he would meet his maker while sitting atop a tractor than lounging on the beach or playing golf. Even if he could be convinced that taking it easy was a better way to live out his golden years, I for one couldn’t imagine a time when we would be able to make our own decisions about the farm without his input.

To add to the complexity of the situation, like many beginning farmers today, John and I were entering our fifties, and although John was strong and I was fit, it was clear we were no spring chickens. I also knew well enough from talking to farmers through the years that the physical work of farming was in many ways the easy part. The challenge actually comes from everything else required for success. Instead of a romantic life of growing tomatoes and raising happy cows, farm life is actually a job full of spreadsheets, receipts, and file folders. Making a living as a farmer in America requires a lot of business know-how, in addition to the computer time, phone calls, and networking.

That’s because, although the stories we tell about farms fail to mention it, farming is first and foremost a business. Loving the land or working diligently day after day in the heat and the cold goes only so far. To make the land your home and farming it your career takes more than passion or even high yields. It takes money.

I had seen with my own eyes how financially difficult farming could be and had met more than one farm family on the brink of losing it all during my years as a journalist. In 2016, a young farmer teared up as he told me that his farm had lost $400,000 the previous year and he would likely lose his family’s hundred-year-old dairy in Michigan. I listened in 2009 to small-scale farmers in India talk of their struggle to buy food because they could not repay what they owed to the local moneylender for their rice crop. In 2012, an organic tomato farmer in Iowa told me of how her crop was dusted with herbicide from a neighbor’s farm, ruining her entire harvest and throwing her into an expensive and lengthy litigation process to try to regain a tiny fraction of her lost crop’s value.

But honestly, I didn’t really understand how financial problems exist not just for poor farmers in developing nations or for a smattering of American farmers once in a while, but for the vast majority of them every year. I did not realize the amount of debt farms carry today—the average farm in Nebraska owes $1.3 million¹—nor did I consider closely the challenges of a seasonal cash flow or the high cost of land. Like many privileged Americans when thinking about the failure of any business, I chalked up foreclosures and bankruptcies to ineptitude and a lack of creativity. Yet in reality, going broke is just over the horizon for the majority of farms in the country.

Leaving the city and heading for the simple life of the farm, it turned out, is not all that simple. Financially, it is really hard. Farming is one of the most risky and expensive businesses one could start, and, increasingly with climate change, it is a totally unpredictable one as well.

But, I learned, American agriculture has always been this way. It has always been dominated by commodities—wheat, corn, cotton—sold to city dwellers or for export. Farmers have always struggled with overproduction and have taken the brunt of the risk and pain of low prices and devastated fields. Yet from the moment White² people set foot on North American soil, we have told romantic stories about farming, stories about family farms and their virtues, about independent farmers, about how farming can help save the planet. Stories about how the next new technology will increase yields, allow us to feed everyone on Earth, and help farms grow bigger and more successful.

Two dominant story lines—ones I call the “agrarian tale” and the “bigger is better” narrative—have not only confused the public about the realities of farming; they have also in effect trapped farmers in a limited understanding of their purpose, of the importance of their own economic viability, and of their relationship with larger corporations and with one another. Ultimately these myths distort the truth about agriculture in this country, making it hard to create something new, to form a system that is reliable and resilient, environmentally sound and economically viable.

So, I did wonder if we could make it as farmers, but not because we would lack easy access to the ballet and the closest sushi was more than thirty miles away. The most pressing question was how we could transition the farm from one generation to the next. Would Leroy ever let us take over? What would he think of our new ideas about how the farm should be run?

For me, even scarier was the thought that Leroy might actually say yes. I sat up in the middle of the night wide-eyed. What exactly were we getting ourselves into? Would we literally need to bet the farm and all our savings in an attempt to create a more ecologically and financially sound business? And what would farming really be like once we got past the romanticism surrounding it? John and I had huge dreams about what the farm might be, but would we have the chutzpah to go for it?

This book is our story of the Hogeland family farm (a term I will dissect later) and what the life of a farmer is really like. But through the telling of our personal story, the much bigger—and ultimately more interesting—story of the economics of American agriculture is revealed, a story with a long history I did not know before researching this book, even though I had reported on agriculture for more than twenty years.

I hope that in reading this book, you will come to recognize, as I have, that farmers do what they do not because they are evil, brainwashed, or, conversely, living saints. Corn farmers are not trying to destroy the environment or sacrifice themselves for the bottom lines of multinational agribusinesses. And small-scale organic farmers should not need to work for free to feed their community. There are economic, psychological, and pragmatic reasons for their choices, as well as cultural and political influences. Farmers today are pressed from all sides, and to avoid making the same mistakes we have already repeated as a nation time and again, we have to start examining those pressures. And while much of the conversation about food has turned into another divisive political blame game, we forget that systems evolve and can change course when opportunity, human ingenuity, and honesty align.

With this book, I want to talk frankly about the financial realities of farming, because farmers can make a difference only if they can make a living. They need to sustain themselves in order to sustain our land and food. From my first years on the farm, I believe that might be possible. Not easy, but possible.

Chapter 2

Land Rich, Cash Poor

A FEW YEARS BEFORE THE BOYS graduated from high school, we started talking to Leroy about leasing us the farm. We had spent a lot of time in Iowa by that point, and the prospect of farming had begun to feel like more than just a fantasy. But it was unclear how exactly we could take over when Leroy was still in charge and needed income from the farm. He hadn’t planned for retirement and didn’t have much in the way of savings, so we couldn’t just show up and farm the land without paying for it. But if we were able to work out a rental agreement with him to ensure him some income, that would mean we would need to pay rent before we even started farming and long before we would see income of any kind from the farm. How exactly would that work?

Money wasn’t the only issue. Because I had a good job in San Francisco as a professor and had lived all my life near big cities, Leroy was justifiably skeptical that I would ever actually move to Iowa. While John was able to return for long stretches of time, how and when he would be there full-time also remained to be seen.

And for the past few years, a younger farmer had been renting out parts of the farm to grow corn and soybeans conventionally (a term that indicates a farmer uses chemicals and, often, genetically modified crops). The guy arrived with his machinery and did things just the way Leroy had, using the same kind of equipment and receiving the same kinds of government payments.

Our request was different, and honestly, our plans for the farm once we leased it were pretty ambiguous too. John and I had no interest in growing corn or soybeans, conventionally or otherwise, and this departure from what Leroy considered the backbone of the business made him wary. We talked about growing small grains such as oats or barley organically, and John thought that buying the cattle from his dad was a good idea too. But there was no business plan, no spreadsheets comparing figures or making the case that we in fact knew what we were getting into. For Leroy, turning over full control of the farm for some vague, citified ideas was not only confusing; it was stupid. What if we floundered around and then couldn’t pay the rent in a year? Would he lose the farm because of our naivete?

Years earlier, when John and I first got serious about our relationship, he had asked me to record interviews with his parents to document the generations of Hogelands on the land. John had two older sisters—sisters he adored and with whom I grew close over the years. But I didn’t know much about Leroy’s upbringing or about how he had met John’s mom, Lynn (or Dot, depending on how and when you met her). She was a transplant from Galesburg, Illinois, and she ran the home after they married. Later, when she passed away in 2014, long after our talks, she was remembered lovingly for her affection for her kids and grandkids and for her delicious pies.

I sat at the kitchen table with Leroy and later with Lynn, microphone in hand, asking about what farming was like over the years. At the time Leroy was in his mid-seventies, born in 1932 and raised on the farm. He had taken over from his dad after returning from his army service in Germany during the Korean War.

Leroy is a storyteller, his memory packed with names and dates, important events, and childhood memories. He could talk for hours, weaving tales in amazing detail about his life. The interviews I conducted would create a great historical record, but they were also part of John’s sly plan for his future wife to get to know the family quickly. The ploy worked.

“We had a huge garden and also milked cows, selling some of the milk in town,” Leroy told me of his early days on the farm. He recalled being sent to town with a neighbor to sell...