206 animal, vegetable, miracle
hardware store, no beer joints (the county was dry), and fewer residents
than an average Caribbean cruise ship. After I went away to school, I re-
mained in more or less constant marvel over the fact that my so-called
small liberal arts college, with an enrollment of about 2,000, was 25 per-
cent larger than my hometown.
And yet, even in a community as rural as that, we still had our self-
identified bourgeoisie, categorically distinguished from our rustics. We of
the latter tribe could be identified by our shoes (sometimes muddy, if we
had to cover rough country to get to the school bus), our clothes (less fre-
quently updated), or just the bare fact of a Rural Free Delivery mailing
address. I spent my childhood in awe of the storybook addresses of some
of my classmates, like “14 Locust Street.” In retrospect I’m unsure of how
fact-based the distinction really was: most of us “farm” kids were well-
scrubbed and occasionally even stylish. Nevertheless, the line of apart-
heid was unimpeachably drawn. Little socializing across this line was
allowed except during special events forced on us by adults, such as the
French Club Dinner, and mixed- caste dating was unthinkable except to
the tragic romantics.
Sustaining the Unsustainable
Doesn’t the Federal Farm Bill help out all these poor farmers?
No. It used to, but ever since its inception just after the Depression, the
Federal Farm Bill has slowly been altered by agribusiness lobbyists. It is now
largely corporate welfare. The formula for subsidies is based on crop type and
volume: from 1995 to 2003, three- quarters of all disbursements went to the
top-grossing 10 percent of growers. In 1999, over 70 percent of subsidies went
for just two commodity crops: corn and soybeans. These supports promote
industrial- scale production, not small diversified farms, and in fact create an en-
vironment of competition in which subsidized commodity producers get help
crowding the little guys out of business. It is this, rather than any improved effi -
ciency or productiveness, that has allowed corporations to take over farming in
the United States, leaving fewer than a third of our farms still run by families.
But those family- owned farms are the ones more likely to use sustainable
techniques, protect the surrounding environment, maintain green spaces, use
crop rotations and management for pest and weed controls, and apply fewer