If this quote from the French Canadian (Québec) poet Claude Péloquin still offends you, just imagine how it was received in 1970 when the words were engraved on Jordi Bonet’s mural at the Grand Théâtre de Québec while the cement was still wet, no less. At the time, a large number of citizens, thoroughly incensed, demanded that this outrageous “graffiti” be removed. In vain: for the “poem” is still unmistakable as it appears on the mural of Québec city’s most illustrious building devoted to the Arts!

This disturbing quotation, which says exactly what it means, came back to me as I was reading a bunch of American studies and reports that stated the dramatic drop in the number of “mid-range” farms in the U.S. Such farms refer to family-owned agricultural businesses with annual sales varying between $100,000 and $250,000 and where much of the work is done by the owners.

In one of these reports, researchers from the University of Wisconsin emphasized that these mid-size farms are in something of a squeeze: they are either too large for a niche market or too small to compete with Smithfield-type corporate farms. The result: the financial situation of so-called mid-range farms is in perilous decline. Researchers make plain that if the trend continues, twenty years from now, farms just like these, farms that provide incredible social and economic benefits to their surrounding communities, will be a thing of the past.

In fact, this decline is clearly illustrated by statistics. In 1982, for example, in Iowa, there were three young producers for each old-timer. And today, the opposite holds true. The American agricultural industry is ageing and not ageing well.

There are, however, those who cannot and will not stand still and let this alarming phenomenon continue. Willard Cochrane is indeed one of these people. He is the most respected of all American agriculture economists, a wise old man, a professor emeritus, who was once adviser to President Kennedy. A few years ago he proposed an ambitious reform of agricultural policy – an extraordinary plea – to keep family farms from vanishing from the face of this earth.

What exactly had this celebrated man suggested? Two things, among others: to call upon the Ministry of Justice to intervene and bring down the monopoly of huge corporate farms and, especially, to provide each family farm with a yearly proportioned subsidy varying between US$15,000 and US$25,000, in an effort to help them better compete with industrial and corporate agriculture. What a great idea?

Other researchers went even further: they believed that the time had come to establish collective agreements to balance out supply and demand. Basically an American version of supply management!

In Europe, where the decrease in the number of farmers is as dramatic as in the States, a similar version of the above was suggested to suppress the agricultural haemorrhage: proportioned subsidies aimed at small farms, supply management for certain sectors deemed more sensitive and fortification of the cooperative sector.

The cooperative sector? Yes, because for the European community, cooperatives are part of the solution: producers are encouraged to hold assets as a collective and to better direct the value chain. Danish farmers have learned and apply this practice with pig farming; from the seed to the plate. No ifs, ands or buts about it!

We have an interesting paradox here, we have all these tools in the shed – supply management systems, input and processing cooperatives, government moneys paid out year after year – yet we often ignore them and persist in looking elsewhere for answers, magical thinking for miracle solutions.

There are times when I just don’t get it…