History of
the Family Farm in North Dakota
Family farming is the cornerstone
of this region. The Prairie was settled by families who came to till
the soil. There is no doubt that family farming is important to our
culture, our history, and our economy. So, although we continue to
move away from that way of life, when family farms face crisis we
face it with them.
The first settlement claim
west of the Red River was filed in 1868. A boom in settlement in northern
part of Dakota Territory occurred between 1879 and 1886. During those
years, over 100,000 people entered the territory. The majority were
the homesteaders of family farms.
A second boom after 1905
increased the population from 190,983 in 1890 to 646,872 by 1920.
Many were immigrants of Scandinavian or Germanic origin. Norwegians
were the largest single ethnic group, and after 1885 many Germans
immigrated from enclaves in the Russian Ukraine. In 1915 over 79%
of all North Dakotans were either immigrants or children of immigrants.
Most of these immigrant
families came from tenant or peasant backgrounds in Europe, where
leases to land were passed down from father to son. This tradition
was carried over to their prairie farms. It was a different ideology
from old-stock American farms, where the individual was emphasized,
and each generation was expected to make their own way.
The family approach to
farming meant younger generations, in return for making their livelyhood
from the family farm, honored obligations to their predecessors, making
for a continuity through the generations. That continuity made for
a stable social structure. German-Russian or Norwegian communities
built by the first-generation immigrants remained tight-knit. Intermarriage
with neighborhood families, church, parochial schools, and social
clubs cemented family and neighborhood in the area.
The ideas that come out
of this tradition; strong group identification, religious solidarity,
and dedication to farming, are part of our attachment to farming on
the prairie. In addition to the fondness for the agrarian way of life
people in other parts of the country might feel, people on the prairie
feel tied to the ideals of family farming developed in these ethnic
communities. Also of influence is the prairie communities reliance
on the agriculture economy and feelings of unworthiness and disrespect.
Farming makes us special and it makes us vital to the rest of the
nation.
"...the great cities
rest upon our broad and fertile prairies. Burn down your cities and
leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic;
but destroy our farms, and the grass will grow in the streets of every
city in the country." -- from The Cross of Gold, delivered
by William Jennings Bryan, on July 8, 1896.
Are those words any less
true 102 years later? If not, many continue to ignore their stern
warning. Family farming has faced many serious crises in the last
25 years. After crop failures throughout the world, 1973 and 1974
offered a great market. The U.S. Secretary of Agriculture was encouraging
farmers to plant "fence-row to fence-row" and to "get bigger, get
better, or get out," and farmers were listening. Farms and farmer's
incomes were growing, but so was farm debt as the industry moved toward
bigger and better machinery to work the increased acreage.
By 1980, times were changing.
A grain embargo on the Soviet Union following their invasion of Afghanistan
highlighted a trend away from food prodiced in the U.S. World food
production increased and U.S. ag exports dropped. The bottom fell
out of agricultural prices and land values. By 1982, net farm income,
when adjusted for inflation, was lower than during the Great Depression.
It is a similar story today.
Farmers are losing money on every acre of grain they plant and every
head of cattle they raise. At the end of the 1970's, a Secretary of
Agriculture's report on family farming warned, "...unless present
policies and programs are changed so that they counter, instead of
reinforce or accelerate the trends towards ever-larger farming operations,
the result will be a few large farms controlling food production in
only a few years." This warning, too, went unheeded.
As A Time to Act, a 1998
USDA report on family farming, observed, "...policy choices made since
then perpetuated the structural bias toward greater concentration
of assets and welath in fewer and larger farms and fewer and larger
agribusiness firms." There are 300,000 fewer farmers in the U.S. today
than in 1979 and, although 94 percent of farms are small farms, they
receive only 41 percent of all farm receipts.
When you read the stories
of women who farm contained in the Her Story section of this web site,
you'll read how impossible it is to make a living farming today. But
you'll also learn of their comittments to the family farm way of life,
to preserving the land their parents and grandparents preserved for
them, and for providing a homestead for their children to return to.
What tears at family farmers
and at our nation is the dichotomy of the agraian way of life we all
cherish and the corporate ideal we all pursue. We want farmers to
live off the land, to preserve the resources and heritage they are
charged with, and to represent the freedom we romanitcally impart
on the lifestyle. But we also want them to assimilate, to accumulate,
to buy, to spend, and to scramble up the corporate ladder as the rest
of us do. Finding the middle ground between those opposed ideologies
is the challenge we face in the future.
