News & Events - Archived News

Baranek, a third-generation Sacramento Valley farmer who runs a 525-acre wine grape vineyard with his wife, Catherine, describes a world in which family farms are being gobbled up by giant corporations, unfairly squeezed out of the market by poor-quality, government subsidized imports and increasingly beset by a Byzantine codex of regulatory nightmares.

"America demands that we farm clean and produce the highest quality food under the most strict standards in the world, and now we have our corporations buying crops from foreign countries using pesticides we banned 20 years ago," Baranek said.

The biggest disaster, Baranek said, is that the nation's family farmers have been cast into the uncertainty of a world market at a time when commodity prices are dropping and agricultural processors and retail chains are consolidating at a rapid clip. Farmers are increasingly faced with the decision to either sell their produce at prices below production costs or simply let their crops rot in the fields.

"I got sick and tired of all my neighbors crying at the coffee shop," Baranek said.

The Baraneks and a handful of Central Valley growers have formed The Coalition to Save the Family Farm to lobby elected officials and alert the public to the impending "agricultural depression" facing family farmers.

Small farms are difficult to define and some family farms are quite large, but the coalition is generally worried about growers who aren't vertically integrated -- farmers who don't own packing houses, trucking lines, storage facilities or wholesale distributorships.

In California, farms grossing below $250,000 a year account for 84 percent of the roughly 37,000 growers but generate only $2.3 billion of the state's $27 billion agricultural economy, according to the Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources at the University of California, Davis and the state Economic Development Department.

Between 1992 and 1997, more than 3,000 small farms were incorporated into larger organizations, sold to developers or simply shut down, the university reported.

"This is actually not a cycle that agriculture is going through. This is going to be a severe depression," Catherine Baranek said.

Many industry observers agree and say the factory-farming trend that's prevailed in America since the 1950s is killing small and family farms.

Farmers have become increasingly reliant on growing and business strategies that require more and more investments in transportation, marketing, fertilizers, pesticides and fossil fuels, said Jim Tischer, chief of the nonprofit group Community Alliance with Family Farmers in Davis.

"By and large, mainly because of vertical integration in agriculture, farmers at the lower end of the economic hierarchy have not shared in the boom in the U.S. economy since 1990," Tischer said.

"They've been left out on the back stoop," Tischer said.

Consolidation in other sectors of the economy have also been cutting into farmers' bottom line.

Nationwide, the 20 largest supermarket chains controlled 52 percent of all grocery store sales last year, according to Roberta Cook, a marketing economist at UC Davis.

That trend, combined with the steady decline of wholesale markets -- there are only 22 major markets nationally that control about 35 percent of the total fresh fruit and vegetable output-- means that farmers have fewer places to sell their crops and less leverage when negotiating prices, Cook said.

"In 1900, the farmer got 41 cents of the consumer's food dollar and in 2000, the farmer gets about 9 cents," Tischer said.

Added to California growers' worries is the alarming failure of several high volume processing plants and cooperatives in the state over the last few years, most of which are blamed on overproduction and foreign competition.

The state's anemic sugar beet industry is a perfect example how international trade agreements are driving domestic farmers into bankruptcy, said fifth generation Sacramento Valley farmer Topper Van Loben Sels.

California's sugar beet farmers, who once produced a year-round supply for nine refineries scattered from the Imperial Valley to the Oregon border, are looking for other crops to plant as two of the state's four remaining sugar processing plants plan to close this winter.

Overproduction nationwide has been driving prices down for much of the 1990s. Since 1995 prices have dropped about 30 percent to $22 per 100 pounds of refined sugar -- an 18-year low. A fourth of that decline has hit since December 1999.

But Van Loben Sels, who grows sugar beets, wine grapes, pears, tomatoes and feed grain, says the amount of sugar being imported from Mexico under the NAFTA agreement is roughly equal to the volume of sugar produced by California's failing refineries.

"We've lived through bad markets, bad weather and depressions but those are short term problems. The government is cutting long-term trade deals that are going to put our producers out of business," Van Loben Sels said.

"They're creating additional supply with no additional demand," he said.

Also, it costs money to protect the environment and comply with state and federal labor laws, farmers say.

"If the public is going to demand all this stuff, let them pay for it. All this environmental stuff is coming out of our pocket, not the consumer's," said John Baranek.

"It's just a matter of time and family farms are going to be history," he said.