'Agriculture of the middle' is disappearing, speaker warns CU audience

By Rachel Solomon Einschlag '04

Despite America's food surplus and growing waistline, most of the nation's farmers are suffering, according to Fred Kirschenmann, a farmer and director of Iowa State University's Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture.

Fred Kirschenmann speaks in Warren Hall, Jan. 28. Robert Barker/University Photography

Addressing a group of concerned farmers at Warren Hall Jan. 28, Kirschenmann declared that the United States must save the "agriculture of the middle." These are the midsize farms that encompass more than 80 percent of the farmland in the United States, yet sell fewer crops than are harvested on the top 20 percent. Agribusiness -- large, consolidated farms -- increasingly is pushing the midsize farmer out of the market, he said.

Kirschenmann is leader of a new national initiative, Agriculture of the Middle, designed to renew America's disappearing midscale farms and related agricultural and food enterprises that are too small to compete in the globalized, bulk agricultural commodities markets and too big to rely on direct marketing to consumers. The project is funded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education program. Kirschenmann's collaborator on the project is Thomas Lyson, director of the Cornell Community, Food and Agriculture Program, which hosted the talk along with the university's Small Farms Program.

Small farms, however, said Kirschenmann, who also is president of Kirschenmann Family Farms in Windsor, N.D., are doing well by selling directly to the market, and "people choose to buy food grown locally over other growers. People in the marketplace are romancing the local food and farmer, which overrides other options."

He suggested applying direct-marketing strategies to midsize farms to improve their business, a process that involves developing trust and product memory with consumers, in addition to good taste. "You want a product that has a story with it," Kirschenmann said. "Who made the product? Is it environmentally safe? Safe to humans and animals? This adds value to the product."

Although large farms often are thought to be more efficient, said Kirschenmann, actually they are not. The point of diminishing returns for farm size, he explained, hovers just over the middle. Midsize farmers are spending their incomes on expanding their farms due to the false belief that size equals prosperity. Each year, the midsize farmer buys more resources to make more products and, in turn, more profit. Soon, the farmer no longer runs a midsize farm and is forced to consolidate.

Between 1997 and 1998, midsize farms in Iowa, ranging from 260 to 500 acres, experienced a 29 percent decrease in annual sales. But small farms, 1 to 100 acres in size, experienced an 18 percent year-to-year sales increase, and large farms more than 1,000 acres in size saw a 71 percent annual sales increase.

Kirschenmann warned that to let the midsize farmer disappear is to jeopardize the future productivity of America's farmland.

"We have to deal with [agriculture of the middle] because it is at the core of all other food and agriculture issues," Kirschenmann said.