Travelogue: Kingfisher County, Oklahoma
Welcome to the end of the nineteenth century. The breadbasket of the most powerful economy in the world; the grain-export market that disrupted the whole European status quo; the spiritual home of mechanized agriculture; this it what’s left of the land of milk and honey for countless immigrants both internal and external. Activists that complain about American agriculture subsidies have never been here. This was truly the land of the American dream. Hard work and feeding a hungry hegemon in exchange for free land and real independence. Quite possibly the last place on planet Earth where a man of limited means could be his own master. Thus it was for a while.
The last fifty years(one could say 100) have not been kind to the family farm in wheat country. As economies of scale increase, both commodity prices and profit margins decrease. These days one must have a thousand acres under the plow just to make ends meet. As margins reduce, the small freeholder is squeezed out little by little. This is a life that has been dying throughout the twentieth century, and continues to die still. The average age of the Kingfisher County farmer (so I am told by reliable sources,) is 65. That’s right, the mean age is Sixty-Five years old. The young no longer see the world of their fathers as a life that can be led. Industrialization, it seems, is a piper that must be paid.
These, the folk that fed the draft through wars great and small, the grist of the Norman Rockwell world of self-identification, the George Baileys, the Sargent Yorks, the stable world against which Truman Capote and Andy Warhol felt secure enough to react, is almost gone. Ironically destroyed by their own success – the sweat of these men’s brows made food almost free, and thus food was no longer important. Produce comes from California and Mexico (as opposed to the self-sufficient gardens of generations of women,) staple crops come from anywhere – the corporate Dakotas, Arizona fields irrigated by their taxes in the New Deal, or the steppes of Asia liberated by the threat of the steadfastness shown by these very men when they carried M-1 carbines across Europe and Asia. The world has become free and no longer needs the American farmer – just the protection of the Navy manned by his costal brethren fed for generations on his produce.
Whither from here? The tentacles of urbanization have spread even this far from the cities – that and there is always energy. Food gives way to fuel as the lifeblood of the Southern (North) American steppes. It’s not the same, though: Oil and gas are dirty, hierarchical, and exploitative. Food was such a pure and beautiful product.
Enjoy that next hamburger – men paid for it with their lives.
The last fifty years(one could say 100) have not been kind to the family farm in wheat country. As economies of scale increase, both commodity prices and profit margins decrease. These days one must have a thousand acres under the plow just to make ends meet. As margins reduce, the small freeholder is squeezed out little by little. This is a life that has been dying throughout the twentieth century, and continues to die still. The average age of the Kingfisher County farmer (so I am told by reliable sources,) is 65. That’s right, the mean age is Sixty-Five years old. The young no longer see the world of their fathers as a life that can be led. Industrialization, it seems, is a piper that must be paid.
These, the folk that fed the draft through wars great and small, the grist of the Norman Rockwell world of self-identification, the George Baileys, the Sargent Yorks, the stable world against which Truman Capote and Andy Warhol felt secure enough to react, is almost gone. Ironically destroyed by their own success – the sweat of these men’s brows made food almost free, and thus food was no longer important. Produce comes from California and Mexico (as opposed to the self-sufficient gardens of generations of women,) staple crops come from anywhere – the corporate Dakotas, Arizona fields irrigated by their taxes in the New Deal, or the steppes of Asia liberated by the threat of the steadfastness shown by these very men when they carried M-1 carbines across Europe and Asia. The world has become free and no longer needs the American farmer – just the protection of the Navy manned by his costal brethren fed for generations on his produce.
Whither from here? The tentacles of urbanization have spread even this far from the cities – that and there is always energy. Food gives way to fuel as the lifeblood of the Southern (North) American steppes. It’s not the same, though: Oil and gas are dirty, hierarchical, and exploitative. Food was such a pure and beautiful product.
Enjoy that next hamburger – men paid for it with their lives.
posted by KP | 25.11.07
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