Next year, Mr. Warner believes, there will be even fewer farmers here, in part because of fuel costs.
And he wonders what will become of his legacy and his land.
His son Travis, 18, wants to know more people besides his dad and the salesman at the John Deere dealership. The nearest pretty girl is 20 miles away.
He wonders if there isn’t something better than stumbling out to the fields with sleep still in your eyes and working past midnight. The summer air here is as stifling as corduroy drapes. Travis hasn’t spoken about this to his father, but his father suspects it just the same.
Travis is a state wrestling and hog breeding champion. He is going off to college soon and doesn’t know if he’ll ever come back. His brother, Dustin, left for good. “I like to work with people, I guess,” Travis says. “Be around people. And we come out here every day. It’s Dad and myself; that’s not working with people.”
The kid is lonely. The kid wants to get married. Who can begrudge him that? And Warner's wife, Travis's mother, she hardly ever gets to see her husband, who's in the fields so much. Almost no vacations, either. She's lonely and isolated too. What kind of life is that? “The best kind of life there is," the farmer says.
No political party seems to care much about the working man’s life, Mr. Warner feels. Stick a Republican and a Democrat in a sack, shake it up, pour it out, and the same rapacious thing crawls out. Creatures from a smoke-filled room.
Mr. Warner, a Pentecostal Christian, believes in miracles. He believes in speaking in tongues. He believes that abortion is taking a life and that gay marriage is an abomination. So he voted Republican.
What crumbs do the Democrats offer him? Two men in tuxedos on the steps of City Hall with a marriage license in hand? Handouts for those who won’t work? Mr. Warner says he could be peeled away from the conservatives if the liberals would talk to him about his values:
“God. Family. Work,” he counts them on his fingertips and adds them up. “Heritage.”
If the liberals would talk to him about God, family, work and heritage. Well, fat chance of that happening. But it's pretty to think so.
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I just want to say that Bubba and Silicon Valley Steve's comments make a great deal of sense to me, though I also agree with Rod Dreher's sentiments about the sadness of losing a way of life.
Not even our home planet or solar system will be here forever, though. Or our universe. All life is mortal, and I suppose that includes civilizations, cultures, and classes of people.>
FYI, per the Environmental working group's database (www.ewg.com), Smith County, KS, has recieved $91 million in subsidies over the last ten years. Works out to about $2000 per year per man, woman, and child. Not an enormous amount, but not chump change. Makes it a little harder to sympathize...>
The basic problem in Kansas is that commercial agriculture has become de-humanizing. Working hard is one thing, spend every waking moment in the fields is quite another. A modern commercial farmer needs to harvest a thousand, or 5000 acres to make his equipment payments, and to buy fuel, synthetic fetilizers, weed killers, bug killers, and genetically modified seed.
And of course, that means that the farms are huge and other people are far away. The village as an institution has already died in this country, replaced by pre-fab migrant labor housing. The towns are on their way out, because the pressure to increase the size of the farm is always there.
And when the old man dies, what will become of the land? Most likely leased out to ADM, or ConAgra to be farmed by hirelings. Very few individuals have the kind of cash or credit it would take to buy enough land to get started.
I do have a suggestion to reverse the trend though. Bust the farm up into 40-100 acre parcels. Sell them cheap to people (there are plenty of them) who want to farm using organic/sustainable or even horse-powered methods. Instead of one family on that thousand-acre parcel, there'll be 10 or 20. The work will be on a human scale, and there will be a place for a people-person like Travis.>
danby:
And of course, that means that the farms are huge and other people are far away. The village as an institution has already died
This is absolutly true. I couldn't put my finger on it, but you hit the nail squarely. Who would want that terrible isolated life?>
watsy,
"I, also, think that the Democrats should support domestic partnerships and make homosexuals give up the "marriage title" for now."
Tell us, when will be the "corect" time to stand up for equality?
"It wouldn't cost them anything"
I disagree.
"and it would be a fair compromise"
FAIR? To WHOM?>
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