As biotechnology pushes out the frontiers of science and the information explosion proliferates, how are farmers impacted?

This article is a reflection of the thoughts of an individual Midwest commercial family farmer who has had a number of responsibilities in state and federal government. No claim is made to speak for other farmers who range from small, part-time operators to large corporate entities which have professional staffs and many employees.

Consideration will be given to what farmers are like, the com-prehensive environment in which they operate, the macro changes in farmer decision making, how farmers look at change in general, how farmers look at changes in biotech in particular, how farmers assess a new product and some of the issues we will be facing in the future.

What Are Farmers Really Like?

They are well-educated people, aver-aging slightly more years of education than non-farmers, often with university degrees and frequently with masters and Ph.Ds. As a group they work for less per hour than non-farmers, consume less, and accumulate more than others. In short, they live poorer but die richer, and they do it because they want to for non-economic reasons.

Among those non-economic rea-sons are personal independence, love of and attachment to the soil, love of animals and nature, and a deep sense of stewardship. Most farmers put a high premium on religion. Daily working with the life and death realities of nature and isola-tion to think without interruption increases religious commitment, and the community discipline of rural people reinforces it.

Farmers are increasingly anxious economically as they have felt the agricultural depression. They are increasingly uncomfortable about seemingly endless environmental hazards, be they perceived or real. Radon, the ozone layer, and the unknowns of pesticides and biotech cause concern. News stories of women with breast cancer having higher levels of DDT in their systems intensify concerns, both in the specific and what they may indicate about all the pesticides in the future.

There is increasing fear of unreasonable regulation and even of entrapment where farmers may follow all the rules and be found negligent or where they may make the extra effort to be environmentally responsible and be found liable.

Farmers tend to trust their neighbors, their clergy, their farm organization, their university and extension people, as well as the business people they deal with; however, they are less comfortable with their government and the extremists who may influence government.

Increasingly, farmers are uncomfortable with agricultural leaders who take extreme anti-environmental positions, but they are also concerned with unrealistic positions taken by some animal rightists and environmental spokespeople. Per-haps farmers’ most rapidly escalating hunger is for fact and truth, and they are less sure where to get it.

The Environment In Which Farmers Operate

 

➤ The knowledge explosion has left farmers increasingly awed by the realization that what they know is a constantly reducing percent of the knowledge available. They feel a need for more knowledge and yearn for sources they believe are sound.

➤ Farmers are increasingly vulnerable. A county judge once told me he could put anyone in the county jail. There are so many laws, everyone is technically violating something, no matter how conscientious he or she is. This is com-pounded for the individual entrepreneurs who do not have professional staffs.

➤ Farmers are misunderstood. My first real shock at EPA was the reality that many fine, conscientious government employees were writing regulations for farmers while they didn’t understand agriculture. For example, early on, I was told by a fine, conscientious public servant who was writing regulations for farmers that most of the farmland in the U.S. was owned by large corporations. (Farmers know that over 90% is owned by families or individuals.)

     While it may appear unrealistic to expect 98% of the population to be preoccupied with understanding the roughly 2%who farm, the 2% who farm are the custodians of much of the sur-face of the earth, and unless reality is understood, everyone will lose.

➤The increasing sophistication of agricultural production technology in which biotech looms large raises increased questions of how, and if, individual farms can function effectively without vertical integration or new systems of get-ting technology to small and medium-sized farms.

Macro Changes in Decision Making

Before discussing the changes in American farmers’ decision making, the fact should be emphasized that one of our great resources is that American farmers can make decisions. In my work in Bulgaria, I find that one of the major impediments to progress is that the state has made business decisions for them for fifty years, thus people have great difficulty in making the decisions required in business.

Based on almost a half century of farming, I would suggest the following as major changes in decision making:

➤ The decision making process is more complex due to more information (some of which likely is inaccurate), increased and some-times inconsistent regulations, and a decision-making climate of potential and sometimes real media-hyped anxiety.

➤ More dependence is being placed on others to sort out the information avalanche — crop consultants, marketing consultants, management consultants, environmental consultants, feed consultants, accountants, lawyers, etc.

➤ Farmers are less confident in decisions they make. Increased insurance — liability, pollution, health, and workmen’s compensation — reflects this. There is also some increase in the “I’II do my best and let the chips fall” attitude.

➤ There is more anxiety in the process. Recently a county agricultural extension agent told me of a recent meeting on biotech in his area, and he said, “people are really afraid of it”. It appears to me that this fear typifies most current decision making because:

— Scientific data are too complex for non-trained people to understand.

— There is deep and vocal disagreement about the risk.

— Our culture hypes anxiety about the takedown.

— Farmers have been alarmed by past traumas such as DES, EDB, and Alar.

— The rate in which science is disproving previous positions cause insecurity.

— There is a substantial sense of regulatory harassment among farmers, and anything new and complex bodes of more harassment.

How Farmers Look At Change

Historically farmers have looked at change as exciting. This nation was settled by risk takers who viewed the frontier as an opportunity to change their lives for the better while they made the wilderness more productive.

Currently, there is still the same excitement for change. Farm shows, demonstrations, field days and farm tours excite farmers as they see new things and concepts. But change is viewed with increased anxiety, feelings of vulnerability and sometimes even futility. Perhaps the shift is reflective of a general perception that rural discipline is shifting from one based fundamentally on individual and community conscience to a discipline of government enforcement.

The changes promised by biotech also produce mixed feelings among farmers. The initial response is a combination of excitement and fear— excitement about the production potential and the hope of such things as genetic immunity reducing the losses from diseases and pests without the use of vaccines and pesti-cides — fear that undesirable or even dangerous dimensions may be introduced. Farmers remember that the introduction of rabbits to Australia was supposed to be highly beneficial, and many of us here in Indi-ana had a hassle with multi-flora rose which was to be a beneficial fence. But biotech carries a much higher fear level. Terms like “insecticidal protein” in corn create some anxiety as we are just now hearing more about the dangers of the pesticides used many years ago.

There is further fear that genetic alterations may introduce risk to those with rare but intense allergies.(Someone with the peanut allergy might now react to corn flakes.) There is also the fear that something created by biotech might not be contained once released. DDT, EDB and Alar could be removed from the system, but a science fiction type biological plague could escape and be uncontrollable. I don’t think this doomsday fear is very strong with farmers, but the 100% safe Delaney Amendment-type thinking has some appeal to everyone, and there is some feeling that the traditional “nothing risked, nothing gained” philosophy should be rendered obsolete by science.

Following the initial response we find economic opportunity and fear. The hope of farmers to produce a larger and better product at a lower cost is universal, but the unknowns create anxieties such as:

— Will biotech create huge surpluses and break markets?

— If the U.S. regulates biotech, will the rest of the world run with it and take out foreign and even domestic markets?

— Will the big corporations monopolize the new products?

— Will it force vertical integration of farms?

— Will it frighten consumers and destroy demand?

There is also the “political social fear”. This is simply the discomfort of being caught in a whipsaw between differing societal and political action groups where no one is quite sure whom to believe, and the producer is in the middle faced with the reality that he has to decide while others debate.

How Do Farmers Assess New Products?

While farmers differ in systems and priorities in decision making, most include the following questions when evaluating new product:

— Is the new product safe? What about immediate toxicity, long term health risk, immediate and long term environmental risk, and how reliable are the safety measures for its use.

— Will it increase profitability if I use it, and will l be left behind if I don’t?

— Will this product affect demand for what l produce positively or negatively?

— Does it fit in the systems of my farm?

— Is it moral? It is quite common to hear farmers say, “I don’t want to use that stuff because it is too ’hot’,” or they don’t want to use any chemicals they don’t have to because of residues and unknowns. I think these same concerns are even greater regarding biotech in general.

What Are Some Of The Future Issues Farmers Face?

➤  How will we get leaders to take the risk of leading? When I was still at EPA, I had a call from the president of a state farm group who said he was in big trouble because he had urged his farmers to be environmentally responsible and turn in their used oil for recycling rather than use it on the farm in a way that it might damage the environment. He said that about half followed his lead and they were now being held liable because the recycling plant had gone under and was a super fund site, while the other half who had ignored him were home free. Policy officials at EPA were sympathetic, but the enforcement people were adamant, taking the attitude that “the law is the law.” What gives particular concern is the number of knowledgeable people who, upon hearing of this problem, indicated that they were not surprised, and that it never pays to get out in front.

➤  How do we develop a realistic attitude toward risk? Risk, risk assessment, risk management and risk to benefit relationships have all consumed much of our thoughts. But logic does not grab human attention as much as fear. The body politic wants simple, brief explanations. Unfortunately, risk assessment at the citizen level too often is typified by the young mother who came to my wife during the Alar scare smoking a cigarette with her child in her arms and said, “Will apples hurt my baby?”

Progress and quality of life will be enhanced by our ability to focus on reality in relationship to the risk, and then communicate it to people in simple terms. Risk is a price of progress. It must be assessed and managed. Unperceived risks can do great damage, but non-risks perceived as risks retard progress. Whom the public will trust and how to communicate complex science to laypersons in simple terms are ongoing issues of increased urgency.

How to communicate realism about risk is particularly difficult in our democracy. The free enterprise system encourages competition; therefore, our people are bombarded with the “fear-fix syn-drome”. TV commercials create insecurity about everything from bad breath to being cheated so that they can sell security. News commentators and headline writers compete for viewers and readers in trying to make their story the most exciting. Exaggerating risk is more exciting than cool analysis, and the limits of ethics are pressed. Politicians get elected by identifying risks they can fix, and they get little media coverage if they understate the risk. Some environmental extremists get prominence and contributions from extreme positions. And some farm leaders enhance their support with extreme positions on the environment. Hard science and truth are often too complex, and, perhaps to the layperson, too dull to attract much public interest until the issues are too polarized for easily reasoned solutions. All of this increases fear, and most have a fix to sell that isn’t as convincing as the fear.

➤  Finally, it is clear that farmers are uncomfortable about how much they need to know, but can never know, and they, like all the others, are evaluating whom to trust. We have lived through what I hope is the extreme of the anti-hero era, but not without damage to our most revered institutions. Unfortunately, some scar tissue remains, and credibility levels will recover slowly.

I am a product of the land grant system and have profound and continuing respect for it. There is, however, a real need for our educational and research institutions not only to continue to look at their daily tactical need to survive during difficult times, but also to examine in depth their strategic positions and set their sights on the horizon.

Many farmers have, over the years, received much of their thought stimulation from their churches and the state university system. Some historically appreciated the theology of the church, but were somewhat turned off by the fundamentalist preoccupation with the evils of smoking, drinking and sexual promiscuity, while they were more inspired by the open-minded scientific approach of the university people. Recently on the plane to Bulgaria, I read in the airline magazine a pragmatic article on communicative diseases which stated that the best cure for AIDS is to control sexual promiscuity. I then saw on CNN that the Senate was considering requiring warning labels on all alcoholic beverages.

When this is added to the overwhelming evidence on smoking, I realized that those fundamentalists had been the most accurate in their positions, even though they were arrived at through a theological rather than scientific analysis. When this is compounded by the concern farmers have when they read the current labels and realize that the guidance given them in the past (which was the best science had to offer at the time) put them at risk by today’s standards, there is reason for real soul searching.

In a cultural situation where individuals are increasingly over-whelmed by information explosion, made anxious by fear in a culture that hypes fear, their increased anxiety and frustration may lead to looking to other than hard science sources for guidance.

This may seem unlikely, but when I was in India, l was amazed to see educated Indians defending the tradition of sending cows to old cows’ homes, their carcasses to remain uneaten in a society abounding with protein-deficient children.

Frustrated and insecure people often reach out in unexpected ways.

 

* This article is written by Will Erwin who has been on the leading edge in agriculture both as a farmer and as a policy maker. Will is a life-long farmer in Marshall County Indiana.

            He was Assistant Secretary of Agriculture in Washington with responsibilities for the Farmers Home Administration, the Rural Electrification Administration, and the Rural Development Service. He served on various boards and task forces for Presidents: Eisenhower, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Reagan, and was the agricultural consultant to the administration during the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency. Will also received an Honorary Doctorate Degree from Purdue University.

 This article originated from a speech given to a biotechnology conference.