The earth belongs to the living — and those who work it

The Washington Examiner reports that an Iowa gubernatorial race has reignited discussion about what it calls "the fall of American farming" — looming, the headline insists, but not inevitable. I seize on that qualifier. Not inevitable. That is where a republican mind must plant its flag and refuse to move.

I held, and hold still, that those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of any republic that wishes to remain a republic. I do not mean this as pastoral sentiment. I mean it as a structural argument. The smallholder — the citizen who owns what she or he works — has an independence of mind that the tenant, the wage-laborer dependent on a distant employer, or the subsidy-seeker dependent on a distant government cannot easily sustain. A republic of dependent people is not a republic for long; it is a republic in name only, awaiting the consolidation that always follows dependency.

What threatens American farming today? The Examiner's lead does not enumerate the causes in detail, but inference from the shape of the past several decades is not difficult to draw. Consolidation — corporate consolidation of land, of processing, of distribution — has compressed the independent farmer between a shrinking number of buyers above and a shrinking number of input suppliers below. The family that once set its own terms in a competitive market now sets almost none. That is not a market; it is a private government wearing a market's clothing. My distrust of concentrated power was never limited to kings and national banks. Any private entity that has grown large enough to dictate terms to those who produce the nation's food has become, in every meaningful sense, a legislature the citizen never elected.

There is also the matter of public debt and the subsidy architecture built upon it. When government support flows primarily to scale — rewarding the largest operations because they are easiest to administer — it does not merely tilt a market. It actively dismantles the class of independent cultivators that a free society requires. I was wary in my own time of a national bank that might concentrate financial power and bind farmers to creditors they could not influence or escape. The modern architecture of agricultural finance and federal subsidy, if it advantages consolidation over independence, is a variation on the same error — and the citizen who benefits from it least is the one who needs a free government most.

The Iowa race, according to the Examiner, produced a result few predicted, and it sparked genuine debate. That is the press doing its proper work, and I am grateful for it. An educated citizenry that cannot learn what is happening to its own food supply cannot deliberate about what to do. The first obligation of those who care about farming, then, is to keep the information free — to resist any arrangement, public or private, that leaves the small producer voiceless in the conversation about her own fate.

The fall of American farming is not inevitable. But preventing it requires the willingness to name what causes it: consolidation of market power, the capture of agricultural policy by the largest players, and a fiscal architecture that rewards scale over independence. These are not technical agricultural questions. They are the oldest questions of republican government — who holds power, over whom, and by whose consent. On those questions, I have never been neutral, and I do not intend to begin now.