In the 1940's our family farm was small, small dairy (12 cows), small poultry (1,000 hens), but with our garden we got by. I remember my mother fussing, she was a good fusser, about people from the city (a milk deliveryman, IIRC) buying a nearby farm and building a two-story henhouse. This must have been during a peak in egg prices, possibly tied to a war, WWII or Korea. (This has a chart of inflation and deflation in egg prices since 1947. Note how the prices vary from year to year.) She'd gripe that people would see good prices and would jump into farming, expanding production (of eggs, in this case), resulting in overproduction and low prices. This would hurt the established producers, like us, while proving the naivete of the city folk.
My mother had German ancestry, so when she experienced schadenfreude when Hurricane Hazel in the 1950's came through and caused the collapse of that henhouse, she was doing what Germans do. By then egg prices had dropped. Our neighbors never rebuilt. After dad died, mom kept on with the hens into the 70's, but the infrastructure, the trucker, faded away.
I think poultry was the first agricultural commodity where there was a turn from small farms to vertical integration through contract farming and large operations. The first, but not the last. Dairy has followed, as have hogs. Don't know about beef. In field crops there's been a somewhat similar process of consolidation, though I think not with vertical contracts. Instead I think there's been a move to more sophisticated marketing, futures, etc.
What's the trigger for this post? This dailyyonder piece discusses the impact of these trends in Iowa, including the observation that hog farms have decreased by 90 percent since 1977.
My title is from the mantra about the Jews from Martin Niemoller. He was saying to act early. I'm pretty sure there was little or nothing anyone could have done to stop these trends.
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