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'Bigness’ evaluated
SOMETIMES IT MAKES you wonder how socalled “truths” got to be regarded that way. Many of these nuggets of “conventional wisdom” that especially amaze us deal with Bigness. In contemporary America, we hear from so many sides, if it’s Big enough — a business, a town, a government, a school — then it’ll be good.
Well, you can believe that if you want to, but we don’t. And some supporting evidence is on hand that in one category of particular interest to Rappahannock and rural Virginia in general — agriculture — we may be on the right track.
Last Spring, Sen. Gaylord Nelson’s Committee on Monopoly held hearings on Big Agriculture, examining the policies and actions of the U. S. Department of Agriculture and the food “industry” who would have everyone believe that bigger farms mean cheaper foods, that bigger supermarket chains mean better and cheaper food.
AN IMPRESSIVE lineup of experts in the field testified to the contrary — that instead of being an automatic “good,” policies which foster Big Agriculture might, instead, be ruining the nation. And not only the land and the people who live on the land, but towns and cities as well.
Prof. Philip Raup of the University of Minnesota’s Department of Agriculture and Applied Economics presented statistics refuting “the myth that a bigger farm means cheaper food.” A traditional, two-man family farm can produce food more efficiently and at less cost, he maintained.
Dr. Walter Goldschmidt told of studies in California that showed that family farms “produced a better community life” than gigantic, corporate farm operations. One especially interesting note: The small farm community supported almost twice the number of separate business establishments as the large-farm community. In addition, small farms provided the basis “for a much richer community life — schools were more plentiful, as were parks and civic groups, newspapers and churches,” &c.
CHANGES IN THE NATION’S tax structure to give small farmers the competitive edge they need were recommended, along with protective measures to help individual family farms resist take-overs by conglomerates or large non-agriculturallybased enterprises.
Ed Wimmer of the National Federation of Independent Businesses provided a final note at the hearings: “For every six farmers who leave the land, a small business turns out its lights.” Bigness as the answer to everything? No thank you,^ and it strikes us that Rappahannock County — regarded as “small” in all those statistical bulletins the bureaucrats are always cranking out — is living proof of the false premise of Bigness. □
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