by Daniel Bush 1999

You would think Jim Woodrum is an imposing man. He is large. His hands are large. His fingers are long. His arms are thick, his belly round. And his eyes. His eyes have the force of heavy weight. You would not want him to throw his eyes against you. He would knock you down. The eyes are forceful. Determined.

When I walked toward him and called over to him, he seemed imposing. I'm sure he caught a glance of me coming, intruding on his land, but he did not acknowledge me. The words I threw over to him seemed to enter him slowly. I explained who had mentioned his name. Why I had come. I explained that I was working on a project on what it meant to be a farmer in Lorain County. I asked if he could spare five minutes to talk.

Silence. He seemed paused in the action of finding a tool.

Five. He spread the long weathered fingers of his right hand in the air.

And so I began asking simple questions about his farm. And slowly and curiously he began to open. And gradually he let me into his world.

We spoke just inside the open end of his large cavernous barn. He was holding in his left hand a wrench which he must have been about to use to fix a stubborn tractor. He is sixty one years old. Must be about six foot four. Slightly stooped over. Warn brown gray hair. He has the voice of a giant that tumbles out slow and easy in well measured words. And he has those penetrating eyes.

'It's a total of about thirteen hundred acres,' he told me, 'we own about five hundred of it, rent the other, we rent about seven fifty to eight fifty. Mostly on the grain end of it, is corn soybeans, and wheat. We keep about fifteen hundred head of hogs, on the livestock end, and about, well we feed out about three hundred head of cattle a year, for the year."

I was aware I listened to him of the rarity of this man. And it was evident in his manner that he is aware of his isolation. Woodrum is one of the five or six full-time farmers left in Kipton township. There are less than a hundred farmers like him left in Lorain County. He has survived as a farmer through a mixture of love for his work, determination, adaptability, compromise and pure stoicism.

He and his son have a full partnership and work the farm together. His wife and his son's wife and his son's two sons help out as they can. Jim's wife is a retired school teacher and his son's wife is a homemaker. They sell the produce from their farm wholesale.

'Depending on where prices range,' Woodrum states, 'this operation will gross anywhere from seven hundred and fifty to a million dollars a year. We don't make a good living at it, but we're happy.' He chuckles at this last bit in a kind of light hearted acknowledgement of his paradoxal situation. He must dedicate himself to hard and demanding work so that he can barely scrape by and keep doing hard and demandingwork.

And all of his work is haunted by the shadowy and ever present possibility of financial failure: of a crop not coming in, of drought, of prices sinking too low to turn a profit. Developers are ready and waiting to buy his land. And he keeps on, working steadily and also wishing conditions would improve. Woodrum, like all farmers, wants prices that represent the true cost of the labor expended in bringing the produce to the market.

'We're in a depression here at the prices we're selling stuff for,' Woodrum remarks. 'We received more back in the 60's for our product than we are receiving now. If we were receiving a fair price for our product, there wouldn't be no land for sale out here. We wouldn't sell an inch of land for them to build a house on. We would, we would leave the land for our children. So you know, the big thing that, if we had it [fair prices], we would sure pass it [the farm] on.'

His eyes reach the peak of their earnestness with this. They seem almost defeated.

'But what's happening is that by cheap prices that we receive and then the high price for building lots, a lot of farmers are having to sell their frontage off just to stay in business. And fortunately we haven't been there yet, and I hope we never are, but [. .] this is what's happened in Lorain County, as people retire they have no sons and no sons want to take on the operation for the fact that they can't make money at it.'

The difficulty of survival is what has made Woodrum one of the last of the old style farmers in Lorain County: a farmer who has farmed his whole life and still farms full time. His large hands and intensely focused eyes identify him as such. The hands and the eyes are the outer markers of the world he is struggling to preserve. A world which is increasingly harder to be part of and maintain.

Choosing to Farm

Every farmer in Lorain county has had to make significant choices over the past few decades because they have each faced and continue to face an increasing economic pressure to leave their farms. Farming families, in order to keep farming in Lorain County, must now have a family member who works a job off the farm or a farm that has increased significantly in size and production. Some farmers work two jobs, working off the farm full time and then additionally making time to farm. Jay Pickering is one such farmer.

Pickering works a hundred acre vegetable farm in Avon. He is also a high school science teacher. He is a well built, friendly looking man in his forties. He has large arms, a relaxed frame, is well tanned and puts on a shirt to talk with me in the storage room of his roadside market, where most of his family's produce is sold. They still sell some of it wholesale. They mostly raise sweet corn, though they also raise: tomatoes, peppers, strawberries, cucumbers, (pickles), pumpkins, and Indian corn. Pickering, when the school year starts, will teach a full day, then take a break after the school day ends to have dinner for an hour, then work well into the evening. Quitting for the day around nine or ten. His father was farmer who also worked as a school teacher until he retired, now he just farms. Pickering explains conditions:

'The trend now is there are two types of vegetable farms occurring: there's huge megafarms, which are basically businesses with a lot of capital behind them, that can afford to make pennies off of a bushel but produce lots of bushels or there's the part timers, that go in and farm because they enjoy it, but they have another job to make sure they can survive.' While the poles are not quite so extreme with all types of farms, farmers in Lorain County tend towards one end of the spectrum. Woodrum's thirteen hundred acre farm might not be considered a huge megafarm but it has had to swell large enough to encompass what, for past generations, would have been several separate family farms.

Pickering's farm would have been known as a 'truck farm' in the past. 'Called a truck farm,' he explains, 'because a lot of things we raise would be trucked into Cleveland.' The truck farming isn't occurring anymore because 'Cleveland isn't accepting as much stuff from local growers as they used to.' Distributors can get produce cheaper from other parts of the country where it is mass produced in large quantities. Farmers like Pickering, if they wish to sell their produce wholesale to distributors, must now compete with farmers nationally, and globally - that is, their produce is 1 priced against the Ýworld market. 'All the magazines you can pickup and read tell you,' Tim Abraham, a grain farmer to the north of Oberlin, explains, 'you better to learn to live with prices somewhere near the neighborhood they are now because of the world market. Brazil is willing to produce it cheap. Argentina is willing to produce it cheap. China is willing to produce it cheap. We're in a grower world market and you've got to compete with those people.' Abraham particularly feels the affect a global market which drives prices down has on local grain production. His chances of breaking even are always precarious. The dynamic of competing with super cheap production elsewhere that depresses prices, forces Pickering to work as a school teacher to keep farming. [A lead article on the front page of the August 16, 1999 Plain Dealer notes that even with severe regional drought damaging crops, produce prices have held steady. In past years drought or crop failure has forced prices to rise. This disjunction captures the degree to which the internal market has moved in and superseded produce of local growers.]

'My great grandfather,' Pickering says, 'made his living off truck farming, twelve acres. That was it. He could make his living off twelve acres, raising miscellaneous fruits and vegetables, and send them into Cleveland. Actually, my dad says he used to [. .] drive a wagon through Lakewood and Rocky River and Bay Village to sell produce off a wagon. Go down a certain street every Wednesday, another street every Thursday [and] sell to the people. But they paid enough to make it worthwhile then.'

Jim Woodrum still remembers this particular Lorain County, one composed of small farms that formed a close-knit farming community.

'When we were in high school,' Woodrum recalls, 'and rode the school bus by here [Kipton township] forty years ago, forty five years ago, there was a farm on every homestead. And on this particular road we own them all now and don't make as good a living as they did back then, you know, as the individuals did.' Circumstances have changed. 'The land,' Woodrum continues, 'is getting too valuable to farm. We'll get priced out of business. We won't be able to, we won't be able to make a living cause it's going to be too high priced land. It'll be worth more for houses than for agriculture.'

The Center Cannot Hold

The tightening economics of farming in the county has interrupted the tradition of passing the farming life from one generation to the next. Pickering explains: 'You have parents who are farming a piece of property, when they're about, let's say fifty, fifty five, their son or daughter will be going to college, let's say, and be done with college in that area, they're fifty to sixty years old. It's not like they're in a big business where they got a huge retirement fund. They're only sixty, they're going to farm another fifteen, twenty years. So their kids who just got out of college, what are they going to do for fifteen or twenty years while [their parents are] still farming? Do something else. You know, go out and get a job. Then after you get a job, they get married, then you got kids. Now you've got yourself stuck. You can't well say, "Ok., Mom and Dad are done farming, I" m going to go take over the farm, which doesn't make a great deal of money, and I've got three kids."'

'So,' Pickering concludes, 'that's where generations have lost the farming. It falls apart in the middle.' The cycle collapses. Yet the desire to hand down the farm through the generations endures. Richard Fitch, another vegetable farmer from Avon, puts it simply, it 'would be nice if my kids could continue it [the farm and the roadside market] to the seventh generation and maybe to the eighth and stuff. It's just kind of neat. My dad grew up over here, built over there. And I grew up over there and built in between, so . . it's just to carry on, like I said, the name and stuff.

Fitch is a simple looking man shaded by an old cap. We speak out in front of his market. He has a plain expressionless face and speaks in clipped sentences. His farm he wants to pass on is about thirty five acres. He farms vegetables 'all the way from asparagus to zucchini, squash, pickles, corn, beans, pretty much everything.' In addition to the vegetable farm, he used to grain farm until he couldn't make money at it anymore. He farms full time now but concedes, 'I couldn't do it unless my wife is teaching, so I can get the insurance and stuff.'

Farmers' need for outside money is an effect of the tightening market.

'One of the changes in agriculture the last ten to fifteen years," Tim Abraham states, 'is that most farmers, either through their wives or through their own means, have an outside income because of economic conditions in farming.' Abraham has a separate business and his wife works for Oberlin as a secretary.

Woodrum, when asked if his son will carry on the farm remarks, 'Yeah, and his sons. Whether it will be in Lorain County or whether it will be in Iowa or whether it will be in another state, I don't know.' Woodrum believes the farm will have to move 'unless land preservation or something takes effect.' Abraham shares that sense, 'It'll be, you just move west. It'll be Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas."

There is, Pickering comments, 'just an expectation [further out West] that the farm goes from one to another to another to another, Lorain County doesn't have that kind of system right now.' Pickering reflects further, 'There's been a lot of farms that have disappeared. Farm I bought, where I'm living at - Ive only bought a piece of it - that guy's ninety seven years old and his kids all got into other things... And there wasn't really money enough to go back and farm that property. And all around, there are farms that are now rented by other people that used to be full farms.'

There are, Pickering remarks, 'very few young farmers. Most of them are older farmers just kind of finishing up their time farming.'

Enduring Desire

Tim Abraham can be curt. His speech is slow and clear and sometimes irritated. He has worked hard to stay a farmer. He has ad justed to the circumstances: large farm, more work, lower prices, narrower returns. And he seems understandably frustrated by these circumstances. He can seem exasperated - an exasperation that is perhaps more an anger fueled by his contradictory resentment and acceptance of how things are. We talk at his kitchen table. He has short spiky hair, a square jaw, and a small face. And he can seem agitated and distant all at once. He tells me about his operation.

'I farm about twenty four hundred acres. I produce corn, soybeans, wheat, and it's for commercial use, none of it's directly for human consumption, it has to be processed first.' He has been farming since 1973. Back then his farm was around four hundred acres. Now his farm is about twenty four hundred acres. 'The small family farm,' Abraham tells me, 'is no longer what it was thirty years ago. I mean that's just, thirty years ago you could make a good living on three hundred acres of ground. Today it's just economically unfeasible to do that.'

A little ways into the interview the barking of his dogs outside announce the presence on another pickup. Jack Hostadler, a retired seventy six year old farmer who Abraham rents land from, join us at the kitchen table. Hostadler, I was informed when his pickup was sighted, stops over at the Abrahams several times week since he's retired and doesn't have much else to do. Abraham is slightly annoyed by him but warm. Hostadler is in many respects representative of farmers of the past. He started farming in the thirties when he finished high school. He had a hundred acre livestock farm, mostly dairy. He quit when reached the point where he would have to drastically change his operation to stay in farming. He was 'just got overcome by the cost of farming.' Hostadler states simply he was at the point where, ' if you didn't get bigger you better quit.' I ask both men why people have continued to try to farm.

'It's the love of the land,' Tim Abraham states. 'I mean, you're sort of raised on this so you own something for, or it's been in your family for two or three generations. And it's hard to give it up. There's an old saying: 'Once you have farming in your blood, you can take the boy off the farm, but you can't take the farm out of the boy.' In many cases though, they [farmers] can't financially see their way through or not willing to work as hard as many farmers are today.' He speaks plainly. 'The family farms cease to exist.'

The question of why men and women continue to farm is hard to penetrate. The question has many silent answers which farmers have difficulty tracing out. Almost all of them have inherited the ancient occupation of farming from their parents, just as their parents inherited it from their parents. Some picked up farming because they grew up around it. In either case, after years spent farming they are enmeshed in the structure of farming itself, not separate from it, and this makes lifting the meaning out of it hard.

Woodrum, in what would be an almost impossible act now, found his own way into farming. 'My father was a sheriff,' he begins. 'My father worked on farms for other people. He never owned a farm,' he smiles. 'I started when I was fourteen, bought my first equipment, rented my first farm. My father wouldn't even sign a note for me. He said no kid of his would ever be a farmer.' Woodrum persisted, his struggle to farm began.

His love of farming wells in what seems like a kind of sadness in his eyes. He tells me farming is a great life. I ask him what makes farming great. 'Working for yourself Working outside. I'm my own man. Giving birth to animals. Planting seeds. Seeing crops. Working the ground.' Woodrum articulates his love of farming through these fragmentary details.

'Well to us,' Woodrum says, 'we don't do this for money, we have to make money in order to own it and to hold it - to us it's a way of life.' He pauses and tries several times to begin his thought, 'what I'm saying is: I guess you have to love the earth - which is God given - and to us, our family comes first, and this is a way of life. The rest comes second., That's the reason we don't like to see it destroyed. I think it has to be preserved in some way and I don't know.'

Woodrum's not knowing is probably due to the complexity of the circumstances that he labors within. Circumstances, the market and people Woodrum must sell his produce to, know little about him or his dedicated exertions. Woodrum is farmer who possesses a depth of spiritual feeling about his work. He thrives off laboring close to the earth, in the flies, in the heat, through long days of physical labor. He knows how to maintain every part of his world, from fixing tractors, to tending crops, to taking care of livestock, to carpentry. He is exposed to the weather. He works in the weather and he depends on the weather. And he suffers when the rain does not come. He has an earnestness, a deep earnest presence in his eyes, which comes only of a lifetime spent working the earth. Loving the earth. Loving the acts of farming. Loving farming despite the frustrations and growing constrictions.

The theme of controlling your own destiny is a recurrent one among farmers attempting to explain the draw of farming. 'The idea that you control what you are doing,' Pickering explains, 'You don't have somebody over your shoulder all the time, which is, you know, still the idea. You have something to accomplish everyday.' He explains further, 'I always say, since I'm a school teacher, I say I like farming, because after teaching school all day and having the kids give me a hard time, [1] go out, and [.] at least the plants don't talk back to me. They may not always grow the way I want them to but they don't give me a hard time.'

This hunger to be master of one's own task is a common thread.

'I think he's not a big people person,' Debby Galloway, the wife of dairy farmer, suggests, 'so he likes to, you know, work at his pace and nobody tells him what to do and he does things his way and he doesn't have to answer to anyone else. I think he likes being his own boss. And he really enjoys the animals. He has a passion for animals. I always tell him he has to have a passion or be insane and I'm not sure which one he is.'

The emerging sense I have is that farming is craft. A well loved craft. A kind of work that has been molded by generations of tradition. But Woodrum is right, it is not simply work, it is a way of life. This became more clear when I pressed Abraham further to explain why farmers continue, despite a growing collection of obstacles, to farm.

'Some of them that's all they know, particularly the older farmers and some of the younger farmers too. They never went off to college, never got any type of degree, they didn't get a vocation, so basically, [.] it's either that or go work at McDonalds.'

'But,' Abraham maintains, 'a lot of it's still a love of the land. It is, better way to put it, there are some rewards in it, because you are your own boss, you call your own shots, and there is that excitement there to do that.' His voice quiets and becomes slow.

'The way it was explained to us by a speaker at Kansas City one year [is]: most farmers will continue to farm until their banker tells them they can't.' He stops. His sentences come haltingly. 'So that's why they do it. That's all they know. And in many cases, they farm until the bank says no more.'

'But,' Abraham offers a kind of mature hope, 'you can still make money in farming providing you're willing to get bigger and do more - for the same price. It'd be nice, we can't all be lawyers and doctors, I mean somebody has to grow the food and fiber of this country. I just now recently came back from Europe and I can tell you this much: farmers over there are much more respected as a professional person than they are in the United States. Far more. And they are paid far more money. And that is all subsidized over there, to be a farmer. But this country has never seen starvation, Europe has, and that's probably the biggest difference.'

Abraham is biting when it comes to discussing present prospects and farming life. He is unsentimental about farmers quitting. 'It is a free country and you can quit if you wish and go do something else. I guess that's the statement I make to other farmers who say, 'We shouldn't have to put up with this stuff.' Well, you really don't have to put up with it if you want to change your lifestyle. Don't forget, the horse smith and the blacksmith had to change their operation too. So, will you have to change yours? Maybe to some extent, yes. So. . . you can only speculate as to what will be around here in 2020. But I guarantee you that you will see more houses. That is a reality that has not changed and will not change, under the current conditions.'

Hostadler has an even more thorough acceptance of the failure of farming in Lorain County. 'Farmers,' he says plainly, 'the few that are still like fifty five years old and maybe got a family that wants to farm, but it's doubtful whether they should continue. And some of them are trying to I s'pose, that I know of, and some of them that should quit. I'm not an authority over it. I can't, - You can't go by what I say, because I gave it up.'

'Unless you have become bigger,' Abraham declares, 'more efficient, done more work, for the same amount of net return,, you're basically no longer in business. Bottom line. That's why there's fewer and fewer farmers. Particularly the older ones, because the amount of capital that it takes to farm these large farms, it's hundreds of thousands of dollars, and you can't expect somebody th at's fifty five years old to put himself in debt a half million dollars to continue farming for seven or eight years. It doesn't happen.'

'It shouldn't,' Hostadler cackles, 'unless some banker is off in his rocker to loan him that money. But I see that happen. It must have happened in different places.' 'Sure it does,' Abraham agrees quietly.

The desire to farm endures despite financial pressure. The faith in the farming life endures. 'It's got to be in your blood,' Woodrum chuckles, 'I tell our pastor we work closer with God than what he does, because I really believe we do.' As he says this, he and I stand looking at each other, somewhat smaller in his large barn, caught in a long silence. 'But,' Woodrum breaks the moment, 'things change.' The eyes flicker. He stops. Silence. 'It's been good to us. It's been awful good to us.'

Standing there with him, and later driving away, I can't help thinking about how farming is shaping. The sheer constancy of it, of rising every morning to a series of tasks, large and small, physically demanding, and doing so day after day, with no finish line in sight. No great reward. No large sum of money. No retirement package. Only a consuming present moment. A present that demands absolute attention, to the land, to the livestock, to the tasks at hand, to the weather.

'Sweet corn,' Pickering notes, 'we pick it all by hand. We go out there every morning for two hours and pull off enough that day. And we'll do that hopefully around the fourth of July all the way through the end of November. We will keep picking sweet corn. You break it up over three months. You can get a lot done two hours a day over three months.' In like manner, farmers must advance many tasks that require attention day after day.

The endurance required and the demands of continually unfolding tasks could not help but be shaping. And that shaping, the shaping of farming, can lead to the depth of spiritual feeling that Woodrum moves through, but it can also be imprisoning as Abraham suggests. The shape of farming can trap people as easily as it can nourish them. And for each earnest intent Woodrum, there are others who have been destroyed and broken by farming, by being bound to eek their living from the land. Farming in and of itself is demanding and hard work and the growing external pressures make it even more taxing on individuals. Farmers like Abraham would hold, perhaps, healthy levels of disdain for non-farmers who would use their sweat as ink to paint romantic pictures of farming with words.

An Expanding Industry

One type of farming that is real healthy financially and doing well in Lorain County is the nursery or green house horticultural growers. Tom Demaline is President of Willoway Nurserys.

His father started the nursery business in 1954 with ten acres while he continued to work as a landscaper. The nursery now is seven hundred and fifty acres and employs about three hundred and fifty people. 'It's really grown from ten acres to this in the last twenty five years,' Demaline explains. 'We're the largest in Ohio, probably one of the largest in the Midwest. Probably in the top seventy five in the country in size. But there's still room, in a nursery business you can be a small niche grower, grow specific items for specific markets and still make a living. You can make a living on ten acres, no problem.'

Demaline is a sturdy, fit middle aged man. He has a moustache, wears large square glasses and a cap. We talk in his office. I ask if he thinks his type of farming is a way of life.

'Yeah I think so. Agriculture is something that you - whether you're growing sweet corn or trees or soybeans - I guess you have to love it to do it. . . Return on investment, aggravation you go through to make a dollar, there's probably easier ways to make a living than this.' Demaline has had to keep up with changes in the industry, among them the shift from growing things in the ground to growing them in containers. This switch has allowed Demaline to increase density per acre which has left the operation unbothered by encroaching urban sprawl.

'This section of the industry,' Demaline explains, 'is expanding at a faster rate than, well, most other agriculture is in a downturn. The environmental horticulture is increasing in size.' Demaline observes, 'a lot of people do go out and work in their yard, plant in their yard. They like the outdoor aspect of things. People appreciate nice landscapes. Especially when they build a two or three hundred thousand dollar house, they're probably going to put some kind of plants in front of it. If they're building on a corn field, they need shade trees to put around their houses.'

Yet Demaline feels he probably doesn't get the price for his product which its labor merits. 'I guess it's similar to the food deal, nobody realizes the amount of time it takes to grow a plant or the effort it takes to get it, it's just there, it's like a tomato or an ear of corn or a cow, it's just there.' He observes further, 'Most people don't see the whole - they take so much for granted when it comes to agriculture in this country, whether it's the woody side or the food side. Just a sort of give-me, I guess, how the public looks at it.'

Dave Kenyon, a plant manager for Green Circle Growers out in Kipton, believes that green house growing is not the future of farming in Lorain County because it's not really farming. He runs what is more or less 'a productionary for plants. But,' he adds, 'because we grow something, it's a farm, you know what I mean? But it's a lot different. We have wholesale markets we can get to. And food is totally different. When I think of farming, I think of food. Perishable items. We are a perishable item. But it's a flower, it's not necessary. And people buy them. But we're not competing with [..] California and Florida, the produce market.'

'The local farmers,' Kenyon notes, 'are leaving. I would say, cows, the milking, is a thing of the past. There's not many left, they've lost another three in this county very recently.'

The Absence of Neighbors

'It's gotten younger,' Pickering's answers. How, I asked, has the community changed.? 'Well', he continues, 'a portion has gotten older [the farmers] and [is] no longer active in the economy of the area and then the other portion has gotten younger and very active, but they're from a different mold. They're not people who's grandparents were farmers... They are people who's grandparents were city folk too. There's a spreading distance from farm people to city people.' A spreading distance indeed, of shared experience, of understanding, and of respect. And the spreading distance, the growing gap or void, is felt in number of ways. One way is that people don't understand the effort that goes into producing their food. As Pickering says, 'they go into a grocery store and it's there.' There is little thought to the farmer who struggled, at the mercy of the weather, fighting against insects, laboring long hours, growing that piece of food. People have become completely uprooted from the labor that produces the very food they eat. And this means that people do not respect the work, the amount of life, that is invested in farming. Community support for agriculture becomes more and more unlikely as the chasm between farmers and city people becomes expands impossibly.

A universal complaint of farmers in Lorain County is the difficulty of coexisting with urban neighbors. Something as simple as moving a piece of farm machinery, like a tractor, a few miles down the road to another piece of property becomes torturous.

'The people who move in here actually don't like farmers,' Woodrum sighs. 'They don't like our equipment on the road. They don't like the smell of our livestock... I can't understand why they move out here and don't like us. We were here, they know what they were moving into, they're moving into our environment, but . . . they just, I don't think when they move out here that they really know what they're moving into. There's going to be flies. There is going to be equipment on the road. We do move. Our biggest headache out here, we run, our furthest farm out here is twenty miles one way and most of them are in a seven mile radius, and we move a lot of wide equipment on the road. And people move out to the country, to live in the country, but yet don't have five minutes extra to spend the drive to go back to town to work ... Moving our equipment is one of our biggest headaches on the road. And I'm talking back roads. When we moved here in 1961 we'd maybe have four cars a day go by here. Now I've been talking to you five minutes and there's been four cars go by already, and this is it. It's by far nowhere near the same.'

Farmers end up fighting their more urban neighbors just to accomplish routine farm tasks. Just to take care of their produce.

'These people in Cuyahoga County that was one of their arguments' Pickering relates. 'They raise blue berries. When you keep the birds out of the blue berries, you cover them with a net. What'll happen is a few birds will get caught under the net. The guy says, "That's great, a bird in there squawking away keeps the rest of the birds away." People were going, pulling their cars over, getting out, cutting the net open, letting the birds out. So destroy their net letting the birds out. And now more birds come, see. And they were kinda gettin tired of fighting the whole thing. And they were in Berea, just outside of Berea, in Olmstead Falls, and so they finally said the heck with it, we'll go somewhere else and do it. And so they got out of the business and went somewhere else.'

The intolerance of incoming neighbors is more significantly a sign of the changing dynamics of the community. 'The thing about agriculture is this,' Pickering asserts, 'the more people get away from it, especially let's say this area, the more people move in, who votes for everything? The people living here. They don't understand anything about farming. When an issue come up to help or preserve a farm issue, they won't know what it's about... if we don't tell the public what farming's about anymore - because they're far away from it - when they go to vote for legislators and things like that, they'll forget what a farm is. And then those are the people that are going to make decisions on what farmers do. And you begin to lose that connection. Because I know [..] in my generation, even the generation before me, my parents, every one of those people living those days had a connection to a farm. It was their aunt or uncle or grand folks lived on a farm. It was before cities were there. We're getting so far away that people will lose their understanding.'

Pickering senses a danger to people losing track of 'where everything comes from.' He suggests, 'An analogy might be mathematics: in old the old days you memorized multiplication tables, addition, subtraction, you knew how to take a square root. . . I learned at one point, I don't remember any more, how to take a square root by hand. Most people don't [remember now]. A calculator does it for you. Imagine if somebody lost the rules to making calculators. All of sudden we wouldn't know how to do it.' Local farming may be the last best hope community members have for understanding how food is produced.

Another consequence of the fading of farming is that people no longer know when things occur, when certain produce actually is in season. In Pickering's word, 'They expect it all the time.' People have, 'lost seasons and lost quality too, because in the old days there was no question of quality. It always tasted good because it was always locally grown. Because when you pick something a week before you sell it, you have to pick it unripe... If you're going to ship it a thousand miles you gotta pick it before it's soft and ripe, so you ship it green, so by the time it gets there it doesn't have the flavor it should.' Premature harvest and shipping, which makes produce tougher and less tasty, is a consequence of the increasingly global food system.

Jack Hunt, an organic homestead farmer in Oberlin, makes a related point about the direction agriculture is going: 'We'll become dependent on distant agriculture. We'll become more vulnerable to glitches in the global economy. You know when you've got a global structure, when you get a flat tire in that structure, the whole structure stops moving... That's the real danger from the practical point of view .... If you depend on a distant source for anything ... if something in chain breaks down ... you' ve got serious problems.'

Another consequence of people becoming more removed from their surroundings is the loss of a sense of connection between members of a community. Individuals have increasing abstract ties to one another. Gone is the feeling of shared destiny. The feeling of being in it together. 'One thing I notice,' Pickering says, 'is people are very independent, they don't think they need anyone else.' Woodrum goes further yet. 'We don't have a real community any more. [In the past] It was a community that we all neighbored. We knew our neighbors. We relied on our neighbors. You helped your neighbor, your neighbor helped you.'

I asked what he thought was different about people now. 'Not caring. Not caring for your neighbor. Years ago, years ago - and we have people that live in the community that's been brought up here and [that we've] known all our lives and we care deeply for them and we watch out for them but we also have a lot of people that's moved in here from the cities and out of town, that came out here cause they wanted to be by themselves but yet don't want to be part of the community. It used to be before, hey, if somebody was sick and had a crop, hey, everybody dropped and went and helped harvest. You did stuff for your neighbors. Today there's so few of us farmers left that we've all got more to do than we can do and just have to rely on some other source other than a neighbor.' The interdependence of a farming community cannot hold against the pressures of an abstract urban community where people living close together are rather isolated from one another.

Fitch observes the lessons passed down to his children from farming, 'they learn how hard you work, that you have respect for other people because you have respect... they know how hard it is, and if somebody [..] damages something, they realize [..] what it is to, how hard you did work for something.'

The possibility is real that farmers' notions of interwoven community and respect for individuals will, at some point soon, seem quaint souvenirs of the past. Will a person who does not know or respect the farmer who grew the very food he eats care for others who provide the services that help him live? Where will people begin to value the work of others? Where will a sense of connection or community grow from? How will we value people?

'The longer the channel of distribution [for food] the more it's going to be corrupted,' Hunt states. 'It will be corrupted... just because it's cheaper food doesn't make it efficient, it just means somebody's starving in the [distribution] chain. I mean if I've just got to have coffee, then I've just got to have those slaves in El Salvador to make it for me. You know, to grow it for me, if I want it cheap. If I want coffee at a good cheap price, then I've got to have the slaves to do it, and I do have the slaves. And I'm not proud of it: And that's just the way our world works. Now farmers don't have any more control of the prices of their corn or beans than I do over the price of coffee in El Salvador.'

'I think most agricultural experts will even tell you,' Pickering states frankly, '[that if you] tomorrow decided you wanted to become a farmer, you wouldn't be able to do it, most likely.' This, told simply, is probably why farming in Lorain County will die. There are almost no young farmers beginning to farm. Likewise, fewer and fewer farms are passed down to the younger generation. Lorain communities do little to support farmers. And each year more valuable farmland is divided into housing lots or malls. Twenty acres of farmland is lost in Lorain County every day according to one recent statistic.

A report, on vegetable and fruit growers in Lorain County, put together by Jay Pickering, states two seemingly obvious but important observations. The first, is that Pickering found among growers 'a general feeling of being alone in their endeavors.' And the second is his conclusion that: 'Growers will not fight very hard to continue farming if farming is not profitable and especially if they are already working somewhere else.'

The decline of farming in Lorain County because of the narrowing economic prospects, the increasing isolation of farmers, and the lack of young farmers, has led some people to seek tools to preserve it. The tools, as of this writing, amount to three distinct but not mutually exclusive approaches: zoning for farmland, enacting legislation for farmland preservation, and or building community supported agriculture.

Zoning for farmland in Lorain County, or passing ordinances so an area can be used only for farming, is an unlikely proposition. Pressure from developers will keep raising property values and fueling the drive to build houses. This pressure, coupled with the firm conviction of Farmers that they should have the freedom to do what they want with their land, will likely prevent communities from reaching any agreement on zoning.

Relatedly, farmland preservation, or the purchase of development rights from farmers, is a difficult concept to reach consensus on. Some farmers feel that selling their development rights is like taking a low interest loan. The money they would receive helps for awhile, but when they run into trouble again, they have nowhere to go. The land is dead. It cannot be sold off. And there is no young farmer to buy it, so it becomes fallow. No farmer, this line of thought goes, will be very willing to cripple himself in this way, and cripple the land before they pass it on to their kids. Purchased development rights might be workable for a retiring farmer, but the question remains about who would follow him and eventually take over the farm. Anyone choosing to farm the land would be locked into farming and would probably have little money to retire or subsist off of. Given these scenarios, it is unlikely a farmer could receive enough money in exchange for his development rights to make such a deal tempting.

'In our area there's more and more urban pressures,' Abraham notes. 'As time goes by there'll be more and more houses. And that's bottom line... you must understand from an agricultural standpoint that ground is only worth a thousand, or twelve hundred dollars an acre, but for development it can be worth as much ten to fifteen thousand an acre. So any retired farmer who wants to sell his farm, unless he's willing to sacrifice personally, in the form of dollars, to see it stay in farming [will sell to developers]. It will more than likely, if those utilities [sewer, gas, water] are available, be sold off for development. That's bottom line. And that's what's happened in Lorain County. That's why you have such a push on now for farmland preservation ... purchasing of development rights.'

I ask if he thinks purchasing development right is realistic. 'If the people are willing to pass levies to preserve farm ground. Yeah you can do it, if they're willing to pay, five or six mils, yeah... You won't preserve every bit of it, but yeah you can preserve it if you're willing to pay for it, like anything else.' Abraham believes that 'if you pay them enough money the list will grow [just] so long. There's many farmers that say yeah, you pay my development rights and I'll sit here and farm it. Sure they will. But you've got to have a lot of money in order for that to happen. Take a farmer [who] owns six hundred acres of ground. And for agricultural purposes, just rough figuring, it's a thousand an acre, well for development purposes it could be as much as ten thousand an acre. Who's going to pay this gentleman five point four million dollars to keep it in farming?'

'Who pays for it? That's the question. Is the average home owner, in Lorain County, willing to pay six hundred to a thousand dollars a year, in the form of taxes, to have farmland preservation in Lorain County? If the answer is yes; if they vote that through, then the answer is yes; [then] you can have farmland preservation. But if you put it on the ballot, I would say that most of them are not willing to pay that much money. There will be some. But majority rules in this country. If they vote it down, it won't happen.'

Even if the county government can raise a significant amount of money to pay retiring farmers, or farmers who will eventually retire on the farm, the question remains about what happens to the farm in the next generation. The purchase of development rights seems like only an imperfect stopgap measure. The generational tradition of farming becomes difficult when farmers do not have the freedom to pass their land down without conditions attached. A young person would not want to be attached to a piece of land where they could work at only one occupation when that occupation may not be viable over time.

The third option, community supported agriculture, requires the least rankling with ordinances and tax levies, but it requires the most direct involvement from the community. The 'Oberlin Sustainable Agriculture Project,' or OSAP, is one attempt at such an endeavor. Ken Sloane, President of OSAP explains the concept of community supported agriculture that OSAP represents:

'It's a concept in farming where people band together in a group and buy shares up front, pay money to a farmer up front, buy shares, in exchange for' produce at harvest. They help assume some of the risk. It's popular in northern Europe and in Japan. It's becoming more popular in this country. It's a way of helping small farmers. And the C.S.A that we've started is very successful. I think we get about fourteen thousand dollars from that C.S.A. We got fourteen thousand dollars in shares. Now [during the harvest season] people will pick up produce at the market in exchange for the shares.'

The eight acre OSAP farm produces a wide range of vegetables and fruits. It is worked by one full time grower, presently Gerry Gross, and many volunteers, usually Oberlin College students. The farm, according to Sloane, will hopefully turn enough profit to pay Gross. OSAP, in addition to money raised from produce sales, is supported by grants and donations. The purpose of the project is to educate people. Sloane explains his vision for OSAP:

'I originally wanted to see it be a community based thing, a working farm for the community. It hasn't evolved into that. One of the big problems in Oberlin is a lot of our population disappears in the summer. Not just the students, but the people associated with the college, a lot of them go away. I wanted to see it be a C.S.A. farm where people shared in the toil. . . [but] it's very much a working farm with the help of students. And as we move to the [newly acquired property of the] Clark farm I think that's going to become even more - you know we envision... maybe a live in coop for people, for students to work on the farm. That's a vision for the future, one of the visions that we have.'

'We want it to be an example of what small agriculture can do in Lorain County,' Sloane asserts. He adds further, 'We want to be big enough and successful enough that people will come and say, "You know I have a small farm that I'd like to turn into a family operated farm, what can you do to help me do that?" We would like to be able to help people return to small farming.' Yet Sloane is unsure how the example of OSAP will be communicated to local farmers or potential local farmers. 'We have yet to define that,' he concedes. Sloane is also rather uncertain about whether anyone could survive monetarily off such a farm and whether young people would choose to spend a lifetime on such a farm. 'That's a question that remains to be seen,' he says simply. But these are questions that need answers if a community supported farm is to survive outside of a college setting.

Who will set up community supported farms in Lorain County? Who will work and sustain them? The idea that more of these little farms will spring up across Lorain county and flourish is a rather idealistic notion. The global market is moving the industry with an almost heavy inevitability, in the other direction, towards huge megafarms and corporate control of the industry. Yet still, as Hunt exclaims, 'there's nothing to suggest ... that that kind of concentration or power over food is, a good thing.' He protests further, 'But we protect it, our courts protect it, our churches, our bishops, our priests, don't say a Goddamn thing about it. They don't talk about it. They don't talk about the inherent injustice it reeks on little farmers all around the world, because they don't have to see the injustice. . .'

Conclusions

'I listened to a guy speak,' Pickering recalls, 'what he said was: "We used to be the eastern part of the corn belt. Now we're the western part of the East Coast."' The present reality for farmers and everyone else in Lorain County is that expanding urban development in northern and eastern Lorain County has had and will continue to have an increasingly constricting effect on farms. Farmers are not able to purchase new land to farm and they need to get more out of the land than ever before, and they must do so with less help. A farmer these days can really only depend on his or her immediate family for help with the labor; children, and often times, a parent. And almost always there is a member of the family working outside of the farm, as a school teacher or in some other occupation, to provide medical coverage and insurance and some kind of financial protection in the event of a crop failure. There is little room for a farmer to make an error because food is so plentiful, so cheap, and so available to the community. There is, in effect, no safety net for a fanner who fails to have a significant crop.

In an age of increasingly corporate farming, where grocery stores are more familiar to people than farms, where people are more likely to hide in their homes than help their neighbors, there is, in the lifestyles of individuals who might once have formed communities, a congealing mode of detachment. And oddly enough, in a more fluid economy of detachment, people will probably have less control over their own lives. Individuals will not be self sufficient and they will be more dependent on things that come from far away. Control of the prices and the quality of products people consume will also probably eventually be determined somewhere far away.

In Lorain County, vegetable farmers and other small niche farmers will probably be able to carve out an existence with persistence and the help of another job. But every farmer that is still farming in Lorain County will likely, at some point in the near future, face increasing pressure to sell their land. Particularly the commercial farmers who face an ever more competitive market. The majority of farmers will be bought out or crowded out by new homes and urban people that do not understand or respect farm life.

Farming in Lorain County may teach us an important lesson in loss. Specifically about something we didn't realize was important until it was gone. Some people may ask why there wasn't enough community support to turn things in another direction.3

3 1 would like to thank Brad Masi for his guidance and generous support through the process of gathering the oral histories and the writing of this chapter.