Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Spring 1998
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 18, No. 2, Spring 1998, pp. 139-53.
Abstract
Ben Hogan balanced a mix of milk cows, corn, soybeans, sheep, and turkeys, avoided borrowing too much, invented his own machinery, and maintained an orderly farm, keeping his fences "horse high, bull strong and hog tight." Above all, he worked hard: "He worked and never slowed. He bulled his way through the house before sunrise each morning, growling to his sons to get out of bed and do the chores." He motivated the sons, who worked as hard as he did, by telling them "You're the laziest damned rednecks I ever laid eyes on. You're the weakest goddamned mollycoddles I ever seen." He souped up his tractors so "he could plow or disc or cultivate more acres per day than anyone else in the county." By the time World War II started he bought out three other farms around Nowell, South Dakota, expanding his operation from 160 acres to 480.1
Like millions of other Midwestern farmers during the postwar price plunge, however, Hogan's fortunes collapsed. When his credit dried up, he borrowed money from the Nowell-Safebuy processing plant, which had purchased his mortgage from the bank. The loan stipulated that the turkeys he raised with the borrowed money could only make their way to the Nowell-Safebuy, where the company could choose the turkeys it wanted and refuse to buy the undesirables. Ben hated the arrangement: "There ain't a dirt farmer got a pot to piss in, what with prices are this year. ... A man either keeps raising turkeys or he don't get no loans. A man can't make it without loans. There's no telling how many farms gone under that way since the war. And the Nowell Safebuy ends up with 'em all." When feed costs increased, Nowell farmers could not make their loan payments and filed suit against Safebuy. The judge ruled that the contract gave Safe buy "undue bargaining power to set prices on the products it buys and undue power to depress prices in a regional market it virtually controls" and refused to "enforce unconscionable bargains." The company then decided on a new corporate strategy, actual ownership of the turkey farms, bypassing the family farmers completely and creating a larger, more efficient, integrated corporate farming institution.2
The strategy of the Nowell-Safebuy described in Douglas Unger's novel Leaving the Land is not new. Corporate attempts to take advantage of scale in American farming are as old as the Republic, but their limited successes kept public criticism at a minimum. The years after World War II, however, marked a "major turning point in American agricultural history" when corporate farming-agricultural production conducted by large-scale industrial corporations in lieu of family farms-became a heated public issue.3 "[Y]ou would end up with what they had in Poland," predicted the manager of the Grain Terminal Association, "where a large number of great big, fat landlords owned the land, and it was worked by millions of peasant's-complete feudalism." Senator Gaylord Nelson (D-WI), a prominent leader in the effort to curb corporate farming, constantly attacked the "trend toward corporate farms" and attempts by corporate agribusiness to "complete the vertical chain from seed to supermarket."4 Such fears resulted in a series of studies and long public debates over the issue and prompted significant legislative action, especially at the state level. In retrospect, contemporary warnings about the" emotional appeals" of the anti-corporate farming advocates and the "crisis atmosphere" they created seem justified.5 The changes that took place were more influenced by the consolidation of existing family farms than any outside "corporate invasion."
Comments
Copyright 1998 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln