Missouri Farm and Food Preservation Act is a bellwether for livestock agriculture
by Steve Fairchild

“The Midwest is the shock absorber for the rest of the country, acting just like the shocks on your car. All of the crazy ideas that come from the two coasts take a while to permeate into the heartland. It allows for some of the crazier ones to be diluted down,” said the deadpan actor and conservative economist Ben Stein.

Keep that quote in mind, regardless of where you stand on the health ordinances that have stymied modern livestock production in a number of Missouri counties. Watching the debate and testimony on the recently introduced Missouri Farm and Food Preservation Act—legislation that would supersede these health ordinances and require counties adhere to state-set regulations on livestock operations—has taken some cushion out of those shock absorbers from my perspective. In fact, it evokes the sentiment of Scott Fitzgerald’s Nick Carraway, who said, “Instead of being the warm center of the world, the Middle West now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe.”

As you have seen so far, this fuss that has tattered so many of our readers won’t pass quietly or without emotion. And it draws us to a fundamental question not just about how the countryside will look a few years from now, but the base economics of our regional agriculture.

One side claims that industrialized agriculture threatens to become a monolithic force. One side argues that the definition of family farms has been co-opted and used against the very multi-generational family farms that underpin our rural economy. Somehow, both sides argue that agricultural diversity is at stake.

Oddly enough, back when agriculture was more diverse in the Midwest, it was also more homogenous. Rural people lived largely the same way—drawing their sustenance from the land. By and large, to live in the country was to be a generalist. That’s no longer the case. This isn’t the result of planning or free markets run amok; it is the result of technology, enterprise and that predictable human habit of opting for convenience over labor. The changes brought by this social and economic evolution are slow and subtle, yet their effects vast and unyielding.

Society at large doesn’t mourn the fact that you can’t sell Daisy’s cream or eggs from the backyard flock at the grocery store. We can debate whether it is lamentable, but the agricultural generalist has become a specialist. Markets shifted. Agricultural survivors shifted with them.

If only agriculture friendly counties allow livestock production of any economic scale, we’ll soon find the cost of concentration. Consider the potential for counties with rural amenities—rivers, hills, trees—to regulate agriculture to its local death in favor of cultivating housing and tourism markets. Concomitant, of course, is the agricultural-based county next door whose service and retail industry slowly strangles as workers flee for better prospects. County sized rural slums? Perhaps that’s a bit dramatic, but not, I think, out of the realm of the possible.

Worse, and maybe more likely, the state won’t be balkanized by such regulatory fiat. Instead, we will discover that we have lost a keystone of our economy as livestock operations wither. That’s a prospect made more dramatic by the shifting fundamentals of the corn market. Mountains of dried distillers grain, the byproduct of a booming ethanol industry, need livestock to be of any worth.

Modern livestock production is an integral part of Midwestern agriculture. The decision at hand is whether to support it.

I like Stein’s quote but this road’s been too rough and tumultuous for everyone involved. The shocks are popped and the leaf springs flat. It’s time to make a call.

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