Sommaren Trädesåker (Summer Fallow)
Darwin Holmstrom
[dropcap]W[/dropcap]hen I started working on our family’s farm, we didn’t call it “organic farming”; we called it “farming.” Sustainable methods were the agricultural norm in the provinces of the Upper Midwest until the early 1970s. It was labor intensive, which meant us kids went to work in the fields picking rocks or hoeing beets by the age of five. I didn’t mind. It was more fun than sitting in the house watching reruns of Dragnet or Adam 12.
Things started to change around the time I turned eight. Like nine out of every ten farmers back when the draft was still a thing, the military conscripted Dad. Dad lost much of his hearing firing .50 caliber machine guns without ear protection in the army, but he did get medical assistance from the Veteran’s Administration as a going-away present. In the late 1960s the VA started a program that paid farmers $250 per month to attend what they called “ag school.” That was a shit-pile of money in those days. One night each week Dad drove into town for ag school and heard lectures given by representatives from Cargill and Dow Chemical and International Harvester. Today we’d call these “infomercials,” but in those pre-internet days most farmer/veterans didn’t grasp the concept of commercial, much less infomercial. They had every reason to believe everything anyone wearing a suit told them. If said suit could project numbers on a screen through an overhead projector, well, there you go, carved in stone as if handed down by God his own self. Dad’s generation was no more inclined to question representatives of Agco or John Deere than it was to question whether or not Lot was really all that righteous.
When the ag reps told these veteran-farmers to take out operating loans so they could buy tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of revolutionary products like anhydrous ammonia, Round Up herbicide, and other toxic substances that caused gangrenous tumors on the containers it came in, promising them they’d increase their yields by a bazillion percent, they stood in line after “class” to sign the papers. They signed everything away with a smile, many of them sporting their first certifiable chubby since Marilyn Monroe went to be with Jesus. The banking system pissed itself with excitement over the opportunity to loan these men ridiculous amounts of money and hold their farmland as collateral.
Like almost all the other independent farmers, we lost the farm that had been in our family since my great grandmother emigrated from Sweden with my grandfather gestating in her belly. Today virtually all farm land in America is owned by gigantic corporations practicing a form of agriculture that more closely resembles the raping and pillaging of my Viking ancestors than the sustainable farming methods my great grandparents brought from Sweden. The corporate oligarchy achieved its goal of owning everything there is to own by conning the jordbrukare peasants into abandoning practices that had sustained the land for thousands of years, then drove them into bankruptcy by financing the purchase of miraculous chemicals.
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