Allan Nation edits The Stockman Grass Farmer, one of the finest and most practical agricultural publications in this country.  He very kindly made time on November 8, 2001 for me to interview him about what American agriculture needs.  I offer his remarks here without my questions.
   Then on November 15-17 my wife Susan and I attended the Stockman Grass Farmer seminar in Memphis.  All the speakers were good, but a large number of them conveyed information so valuable that one speech alone would have paid for the whole trip.
   The Stockman Grass Farmer is published monthly in tabloid format.  You can subscribe for $28 a year ($50 for two years) from P.O. Box 2300, Ridgeland, Mississippi 39158-2300 or call (800) 748-9808.  Their website is at http://208.55.3.192/cgi-local/shoptmc.pl/SID=022422/page=http://www.stockmangrassfarmer.com. 

   Farmers don’t take the initiative to learn on their own, so they are always over-capitalized.  They suffer from “heavy metal poisoning,” that is, they constantly have to pay for mountains of equipment they use only infrequently.  Their ownership of land also overcapitalizes them.  The land value must be discounted according to its productive value.  Real estate development has jacked up prices of land with a mountain top view.  That land happens to be out in the country, so competition from real estate development has raised land prices so high that agriculture can’t buy that land and make it pay.  [That most farmers must borrow to stay in business doesn’t help, either.  Most are caught so tight in the usury trap, that they end up working all year for nothing more than the bank and a new note.  – F.S.]
   Farmers today can’t do what their daddies did and prosper.  They’re in a deflation cycle but they are still playing an inflation game, so they produce too much.  They also want to own land before they have the productive ability to use it.  Before you buy land, you have to be able to make it pay.  It makes far more sense to rent than to own until you are able to make it pay.

ATTITUDE IS EVERYTHING   Farmers’ attitudes are the biggest problem, and that’s a product of years and years of government subsidies.  CRP – Conservation Reserve Program – has functioned as rural euthanasia.  Think about it.  The government rewards those who have destroyed their land.  You let erosion ruin your land?  Fine!  We’ll give you a subsidy!
   What about the environmental effects of using so many agricultural chemicals?  Plowing destroys organic matter.  The nitrogen you put down as fertilizer doesn’t go to the plant directly.  Rather, it breaks down organic matter and that nitrogen goes to the plant.  Only putting land back into pasture can rebuild its organic matter.  In the South especially we tend to lose organic matter because of our high summertime heat.

WHO’S TO BLAME?   The state of American agriculture is the farmer’s own fault.  He must begin to take responsibility for his own foolishness.  Too often farmers suffer from the Rich Man’s Son Syndrome:  if I get into trouble, Daddy will bail me out.  Farmers say, If I get into trouble, the government will bail me out.  Even farmers don’t trust farmers, because they know farmers’ attitude is “Everybody is cheating me so I’ll cheat everybody I can.”

WHICH WAY OUT?   Once you go down the high-capitalization farming road you can only come back through bankruptcy.  What is their only choice?  To turn away from it.  There is something at work I call the Law of the Economic Paradox.  The exact opposites of economy work, but they don’t work in the middle.  The Amish can make money farming.  Huge agribusiness can make money farming, but those in the middle can’t.

GRASS IS GREENER   It’s not the application of nitrogen that’s hurting but all the bare ground.  Forty percent of all the grain grown in the wold feeds ruminant animals.  Why not pasture?  We’ve bred animals for fast weight gain on grain.  Why not select those that thrive on pasture?
   Land put into pasture doesn’t need as muchfertilization.  In Argentina they put land into grain for three years, then in pasture for five to seven years, and they can grow corn without nitrogen fertilizer.
   High capitalization farming ties up money in things losing value -- land, tractors, equipment, etc. – as opposed to assets gaining value – lambs, calves, and cows.  We have to abandon the high capitalization model for a low capitalization model.  Abandoning the high capitalization model gets around the environmental problems completely.
   But it is always easier to change people than to change people’s minds.  The old generation will have to pass away and make way for a whole new generation to take over.  Old paradigm minds don’t change.  Their psychic and physical investment in the status quo is too great.  Nothing but a radical change will work.  Just like a mature forest, agriculture needs a hurricane to clear it out and let the trees underneath grow. 
   The best course would be for the government to completely takes its hands off agriculture:  benign neglect.  Get the government out, then stand back and let whose who must fail, fail.  As long as the government subsidizes farming, new people won’t enter. 

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