Another Good Year

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Agriculture, Arkansas, books, Brooks Blevins, history, History of the Ozarks, John T. Woodruff, Missouri, Ozarks, Vance Randolph

It has already been another good year for writing from the Ozarks, and it’s only March. I have several books that I plan to write about in the coming days, but a good place to start is with this one, the third volume of Brooks Blevins’ History of the Ozarks.

Subtitled “The Ozarkers,” this volume takes us into the late 20th century, what we might call the modern history of the Ozarks. And there’s something in it for everyone.

The book opens with the legendary 1934 contretemps between Springfield businessman John T. Woodruff and folklorist Vance Randolph at the first-ever regional folk festival in the Ozarks, during which Woodruff accused Randolph and his associates of tarnishing the image of the Ozarks with their descriptions of Ozarkers as ignorant hillbillies, superstitious, barefoot moonshiners who idled away their days waiting for the next opportunity to coon hunt. The fact that Randolph’s portrayal came from actual interviews with actual Ozarkers, of course, was a difficulty to this accusation. But the conflict presages and sets the theme for the book: the divide between the modern Ozarks as perceived and the modern Ozarks as lived.

The “real” Ozarks have never been a place as simple as Dogpatch, U.S.A., and we all know that. This book shows just how complicated the history of the real Ozarks has been, with waves of immigration and internal migration, a constantly shifting economy based on the extractive industries of mining, farming, and timber, and an array of conflicting perceptions both from outside and within. So much has happened within the last century in the Ozarks that the book has to move swiftly from incident to incident and theme to theme, and sometimes I wished for it to slow down and devote more time to the things I am interested in the most; but such is the nature of historical writing. The book clocks in at about 300 pages and could easily have been three times that long, and still wouldn’t have covered everything.

One section I especially appreciated was its careful delineation of the changing agricultural economy. When I was a kid growing up in Madison and Reynolds counties, the typical farm was very much “mixed agriculture”: a pen full of hogs, a field with a few dozen cattle, a chickenhouse, maybe some row crops in the bottomland, even sometimes a specialty crop like sorghum or ducks. That model has nearly disappeared these days, replaced by farms that are strictly pasture-and-cattle or rows of giant chicken or turkey sheds (or occasionally, feeder pig operations) with the farm operator in a feudal contract with one of the big poultry juggernauts. Dairy farming has nearly disappeared. The societal impacts of these economic changes are hard to see at first, but when you consider them carefully, one obvious implication is that it becomes harder and harder to maintain a self-sufficient life in the remoter regions as farming becomes more dependent on connections to the larger industrial-agriculture machine. Thus rural counties empty out while population centers remain viable. In addition, these large operations, which seek to minimize labor costs through mechanization, rely on low-skill immigrant populations for their workers, leading to the pockets of impoverished immigrants we see in places like Noel and Aurora. The ripple effects of this demographic shift are hard to miss.

A History of the Ozarks: Volume 3 is now resting on my shelf alongside the other two volumes, but I don’t expect it to stay there long. It’s going to be taken down again and again as I re-read its accounts of Ozark historical events and refresh my understanding of the region’s rich, troubled, and treasured history.

The Way Back

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Agriculture, Alan Guebert, corporate agriculture, environment, Jared Phillips, Verlyn Klinkenborg

A confluence of opinions came my way over the past couple of days.

On Monday, the agriculture columnist Alan Guebert, whose column “The Food and Farm File” appears in my local newspaper, took note of some alarming statistics that have been largely overlooked in the national media. The statistics came from a University of Massachusetts study that found that about 30 million acres of the cultivated land in the Corn Belt (which includes all or part of eight states) has completely lost its topsoil as the result of erosion. That’s about 35 percent of the cultivated area.

This study prompted an essay by Verlyn Klinkenborg in the Yale Environment 360 newsletter, which took note of some critical issues. Primary among them is that this shocking statistic is largely viewed in economic terms by those few who paid attention to it, as a “possible $3 billion loss to Midwestern farmers.” While that statement is true, it’s also terribly narrow, as Klinkenborg points out, because it views topsoil loss only through a short-term, economic perspective, not a systemic one. When you see an issue only as economic problem, you see only economic solutions. Losing topsoil? Add more fertilizer and ammonia. As Klinkenborg puts it, “The catastrophic loss of an irreplaceable resource — what you might call an essential part of our common earthly heritage — is construed as an annual loss of income to the farmers who operate those farms. The narrowness of these assumptions — driven by official U.S. Department of Agriculture policy and the shared economic interests of chemical and seed companies — has made it possible to farm in a way that is little more than slow strip-mining.”

Topsoil loss is not merely an economic problem, of course. It’s also a symptom of a climate catastrophe in the making, an increasing dependence on the industrial agriculture model that concentrates food production into the hands of an ever-shrinking number of mega-corporations, with the individual farmer relegated to the role of indentured contractor, as we already see in today’s chicken industry. In his previous week’s column, Guebert took note of this trend as it appeared in another form, the growing use of rural areas as dump sites for corporate waste.

Then this morning, my friend Jared Phillips, who is both a historian at the University of Arkansas and a farmer, made some observations on Facebook. He noted that 41 percent of the population of Arkansas is rural, and of its 75 counties, 62 are fully rural while the other 13 have large rural areas within them. “These areas have been losing population pretty steadily for a generation or more, and most of the jobs that remain are on average worth 14% less than urban jobs,” he wrote. “Most manufacturing has left, replaced—if it is—by service sector gigs. Small towns are emptying, the population is aging, and land is either going vacant or being bought up by absentee landlords needing a tax break (like the Walton family). Ag—one of the largest contributors to the state economy—is suffering as well, despite all the cows you might be seeing in the highlands or the soy crops in the news. Just look at dairy—milk is the state drink but the state has lost over 90% of its dairies since 1950.”

These things are connected. To corporate agriculture, the depopulation and impoverishment of rural areas is a good thing. It holds down the cost of labor, and it opens up more land for despoiling. As if to demonstrate that phenomenon, an opinion piece in the Missouri Independent today chronicled the efforts of JBS, a giant Brazilian meatpacking company (the largest in the world, in fact), to get around the environmental hazards of opening a hog factory (let’s not call it a “farm,” for God’s sake) in Livingston County that would house more than 10,000 hogs at a time, despite the presence of shallow groundwater at the site. JBS has been assisted in its efforts get around environmental regulation by none other than the Missouri Department of Natural Resources, which is considering a rule change that would allow the hog factory to be built despite its threat to groundwater in the area. Given that the state’s record in this area has been to comply with whatever Big Ag demands of it, I would guess that JBS will probably get its way, another giant facility will be opened, and nobody will ever want to live within a five-mile radius of the place again.

Drive through rural Missouri in any direction and you will see this pattern. Drive through any rural part of the country and you will see this pattern. Small towns emptying out, with only a Casey’s and some Section 8 senior housing as the remaining stable operations. Is there a way back from this path?

I think there is, but it’s not easy. It would require rural people to become more activist in their politics and to demand that their representatives work to make their section of the country more attractive and livable. Phillips reminds us that the rural decline has occurred under both Republican and Democratic administrations, and has in fact become a de facto element of agricultural policy. Democrats ignore rural areas because they think of them as lost voters and they have become more focused on keeping people in the cities and suburbs happy. Republicans ignore them because they think rural voters can be bought off with continued agricultural subsidies and the usual drum-beating about gun rights and social issues. Rural people don’t need any more fake legislation guaranteeing the right to own more guns, or “freedom to farm” crap that only shields large corporations from accountability. What they need is aggressive effort on the part of government — local, state, and federal — to make rural places as prosperous and livable as urban and suburban ones. This means help to schools, hospitals, highways, broadband service, and all those other elements considered basic to a comfortable modern life. Without that effort, we will continue to see the slide of rural America into an empty, degraded landscape, dotted by the occasional monster animal feeding operation among the depopulated fields of corn and soybeans. Until the topsoil finally reaches a point where no amount of fossil-fuel fertilizer and ammonia can blast out a crop.

Limits and Localism

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Agriculture, Arkansas, diversification, farming, Ozarks, small farms, sustainability

“On Limits and Localism” is the title of an excellent, thoughtful article by Lindi Phillips that recently came out on the Arkansas Strong website. It talks about farming in the Ozarks, and how the old traditions of small, diversified farming gave way to the standardized monoculture of national agriculture. And then it connects the weaknesses of that system to the issues of the current pandemic. It is well worth the read!

Find it here. “On Limits and Localism.”

Empty America

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Agriculture, economics, Henry C. Thompson, Lead Belt, lead mines, Missouri State Parks, New York Review of Books, rural life, Wendell Berry, wind farms

Browsing a used book store a few months ago, I came across this book, which is a 1992 reprint of a 1955 book by Henry C. Thompson, who wrote historical columns for St. Francois county newspapers, was a life member of the State Historical Society of Missouri, and worked for many years as an electrical engineer for the St. Joseph Lead Company. He served as the semi-official historian for the company, and his papers are now housed in the State Historical Society’s collection at Rolla.

Reading Thompson’s book (which is a collection of his columns), I was struck by the cyclical nature of the mining industry. An entrepreneur makes a find or develops a new technology, which permits extraction of a new amount of minerals, and then eventually the mine plays out, leaving devastated workers and land behind to cope as best they can. Here’s what the old St. Joe mine looks like today:

Photo from the Missouri Department of Natural Resources

In a brief but striking essay published as a letter to the editor of the New York Review of Books, Wendell Berry makes a key point: “Rural America is a colony, and its economy is a colonial economy. The business of America has been largely and without apology the plundering of rural America, from which everything of value—minerals, timber, farm animals, farm crops, and ‘labor’—has been taken at the lowest possible price.”

It is tempting to view this trend fatalistically, as the consequence of the inexorable march of progress and improvement, a sort of social Darwinism of the landscape. The downtrodden, less fit for the rigors of the modern economy, must either “get big or get out,” in the words of Eisenhower Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson, as quoted by Berry. Another way to see it is conspiratorial, the “they’re out to get us” mentality which was played on so successfully by Mr. Trump in last year’s election. I prefer to see the emptying out of Rural America as neither. The immense “agribusinesses” which have come to dominate American farm life, and the companies which remove the resources and which employ the labor (domestic if they’re cheap enough, imported if not), aren’t really out to destroy rural economies. They just don’t care whether they do, as long as the product gets extracted. And if it plays out, they can just move on, leaving behind the remnants of equipment and the people who ran them.

The empty lead smelting plant at Glover, Missouri.

But while the logic of capital is not conspiratorial, neither is it inevitable, although it is immensely powerful. Rural communities across America are looking for ways to reinvent themselves, as I mentioned in an earlier post. The old St. Joe mine, pictured above, is now a state park, where vacationers ride dirt bikes and four-wheelers over the old mine tailings, and where the history of mining in Missouri is detailed in an excellent state historic site.

But to reach the State Historic Site stage, that mine had to reach a state of economic unviability. History’s closest companion is usually sadness, and one can’t think of these vast old enterprises without thinking of the laborers who built and ran them, just as I can never drive by one of the great wind farms now foresting our landscape without thinking of the human farmers who can no longer make a living on that acreage.

A wind farm in Michigan.

The extractive relationship between city and rural is a significant theme in my next novel, The Language of Trees, so perhaps this theme is just on my mind more than usual. But I do hope that our great American rural landscape is due for a cultural renaissance, although I don’t know where that renaissance is going to come from at present.