How Today’s Food System Prevents Farmers From Being Land Stewards
By: Niara Ratliff
Tags: Farmers, Agriculture, Environment, Rural, Social Justice

Niara Ratliff is the Summer 2021 Communications Intern with the Public Justice Food Project. She has a passion for food justice and is projected to graduate from the University of Exeter in 2022 with a B.S. in Human Sciences.

There are many ways to be a farmer.

A farmer can grow crops or herd livestock. A farmer can own the land they work on or rent it from someone else. There are small-sized farmers, large-scale farmers, independent farmers, contract farmers, Indigenous farmers, Black farmers, immigrant farmers, and white farmers. They can work as farmworkers, pasture-based farmers, commodity crop farmers, or subsistence farmers.

No matter the farmer’s background, ethnicity, or specialty, they hold one thing in common: their connection with the land.

To feed people, farmers must work with the land. This can be done in a regenerative way, or an extractive way — as is predominantly used by industrial agriculture today. Farmers in the former category may consider themselves land stewards: someone who manages a piece of land intending to make it last.

Managing land in such a way prioritizes the protection of the ecosystems that coexist beneath our feet. It preserves soil, species biodiversity, and crops’ variability and keeps surrounding air and water bodies clean. But land stewardship is more than a conservation act, it is the key to the long-term health of our food system and our communities. Without healthy soil, our food can’t grow. Without a diverse set of crops, we struggle to survive unpredictable disasters. And without clean resources, a communities’ health is endangered. Land stewardship honors the interdependence between humans and the Earth.

Farmers hold a unique relationship with the land, given that their livelihoods depend on it. With that comes expertise on how to steward it. All farmers can be stewards of the land, but the corporations that control the food system today make it difficult for farmers to do so. The system instead favors exploitative practices in exchange for short-term profit and long-term devastation.

This mindset has long been part of this country’s food system, but it accelerated when food production became industrialized. Following both World Wars, military technology moved from the frontlines to the fields, spurring a new era of industrial agriculture. The government helped the food system become highly centralized and mechanized, relying on producing large yields at a low cost.

Small and independent farmers were pushed out to give way to large-scale industrial farming. And since then, industrialized animal agriculture has caused major damage to farmers and the land. Industrial animal agriculture utilizes large-scale factory farms, which degrade the soil, increase greenhouse gas emission, and is responsible for a substantial loss of wildlife and deforestation worldwide.

On a factory farm, you’ll find a disturbing amount of animals squeezed into a meager amount of space. Due to their confinement, manure is produced in excessive amounts. What was once a healthy source of fertilizer becomes toxic waste. This shows up in the surrounding communities’ drinking water and the air they breathe. While the Food Project has won lawsuits that protect communities through better regulation, industrial animal agriculture continues to poison many rural communities’ water, soil, and air.

Industrial agriculture now dominates the food system, and farmers are forced to play by these companies’ rules in order to receive a paycheck. For many rural farmers, the trend towards corporate consolidation means that they can no longer compete in the market by themselves. For example, many independent farmers have to enter into a contract system, answering to big corporations in order to sell their animals. Tyson Foods, for example, dictates entirely the conditions in which chickens are raised, how many must be produced, and the little compensation that farmers receive in return. Their instructions impose the exploitive methods that make industrial agriculture profitable. Yet the low wages and lack of access to the market leave contracted farmers with little freedom to say no.

A fundamental piece of the work here at the Food Project is using litigation to destroy the myth that corporate agribusiness speaks for farmers. We took on the nation’s largest poultry company, which abused its power to lure contracted poultry growers into profitable deals, only to cheat them into a lower compensation.

But it’s time for farmers to get paid to protect the land. Regenerative agricultural practices, like pasture-based farming, allow farmers to work with the land in a sustainable and climate-friendly way. It removes carbon from the atmosphere, instead of adding it, prevents the toxic waste accumulated in factory farms, and makes the soil more resilient for future use. That’s why here at the Food Project, we advocate for sustainably managed pasture-based farming to be incentivized in the agricultural system as a way to produce food that heals the land and allows farmers to steward it.

Land is at the root of every farmer’s livelihood. It’s in their best interest to ensure it lasts. However, leaders of the industrial agriculture industry have long decided that those who work with the land have to do it in an unsustainable way in order to survive.

Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) farmers have specific knowledge to contribute when it comes to land stewardship. They have historically been given disproportionately less access to land and thus had to use sustainable methods to make what little they were given last. Indigenous communities have long-standing traditional practices that feed people and the Earth in a way that “only takes from the land what it is willing to give.” They work with the land in a way that prolongs its ability to give. In fact, recent movements for sustainable agriculture — regenerative agriculture and permaculture — borrow techniques that Indigenous peoples have long used.

But discrimination in the American food system has always hindered BIPOC farmers from being land stewards. The foundation of agriculture in this country was built on the backs of enslaved, Black laborers. Though they brought their agriculture expertise with them, they were given no opportunity to practice it.

In addition, BIPOC farmers face more barriers than white farmers do when it comes to owning — and therefore being able to steward — their land. Ninety-eight percent of Black-owned farmland has been dispossessed. Removing barriers from all BIPOC farmers that prevent them from practicing their own forms of land stewardship is an important mission of the Food Project. We are currently fighting to make sure that farmers of color keep owning their land by demanding the USDA remediates past and present discrimination against BIPOC farmers. The dispossession of land from farmers of color hurts us all.

Land is at the root of every farmer’s livelihood. It’s in their best interest to ensure it lasts. However, leaders of the industrial agriculture industry have long decided that those who work with the land have to do it in an unsustainable way in order to survive.

Our food system should heal, not harm. We need to give farmers the freedom to do what they do best: care for the land. To ensure all farmers can do this in the future we must uplift land stewardship, oppose industrial agriculture that denies farmers the ability to practice regenerative methods, and realize that short-term, profit-based extractive practices do not outweigh the long-term health of people and our planet.

So yes, there are many ways to be a farmer, but a farmer forced to work under the industrial model of the current food system is one who won’t be able to feed us for much longer.