You can do a lot with baling twine. It binds the hay together, for certain. We’ve also used it for door latches, knife sheaths, belts, halters, hinges, jury-rigged tailgates, tie downs and cooler handles. The artful employment of baling twine is about more than the ingenuity of a small farmer. It’s about their psyche; the good and the bad sides: the ability to make do in a pinch and adapt (the good side), and the refusal to ask for help or slow the hell down to make a sensible repair (the bad).
Baling twine thinking is (perhaps literally) woven into the fiber of the small farmer. We have to make do and adapt all the time. Unlike the big commodity operations, we don’t get government subsidies. We work within our communities and regions, using metaphorical baling twine to weave a local food web: supplying our customers with food directly, without pumping our production into the commercial food supply. Because we don’t get subsidies, we are constantly competing with the industrial system and its artificially cheap prices. Thus, none of us small farmers simply grow food. We must engage deeply with our customers, cultivating the depth of relationship where they understand and are willing to pay for the true cost of food.
These days since the pandemic hit have contained a lot of physical and psychological baling twine for us at Sap Bush Hollow; from the ad hoc repairs, to the reconfiguration of our labor force, sales and marketing tactics, to adjusting income streams.
I follow a lot of fellow small farmers on social media, and I watch them do the same. Rather than hiding, they’ve come out into the open. They pulled the N-95s down off the tool shelf (they sit next to the baling twine for many of us), whipped up homemade disinfectant and hand sanitizer from the supplies in the vet cabinet, came up with alternative diddies to Happy Birthday for hand washing, and kept going. And we’re working together: marketing each others’ products, helping customers to find us, picking up delivery routes and helping the vulnerable stay out of crowded grocery stores.
And for the first time, folks are noticing us. We’re selling a lot of product. We’re getting new customers. All that sweat and baling twine is paying off.
Sort of. But not necessarily.
Because, while the sales of our products are flowing more readily, our ewes and sows and cows are already pregnant or birthing. The crop plans are already in place. The seeds are already started. Unlike a factory, that could cash in on increased demand with increased just-in-time production, we need 12-18 months to ramp up. And then, as many of us have learned, the trick to navigating a small farm successfully is balance. The land has a carrying capacity. Exceed it and disease erupts. The added stress increases farm injuries. Any potential gain on the books is easily doubled in losses. In other words, the same poverty earnings we’ve experienced for the last several decades are about what we can expect for the year-to-come. This is our time to shine for our community, but it is by no means a boom economy for us.
We’re making do, as any proud graduates of the Baling Twine School of Management would. We haven’t escaped the financial blows. And while sales right now are healthy, we can’t magically increase them to recuperate the losses that this pandemic has incurred.
Furthermore, we could definitely do better. We could use better product storage, more help with our technology, more infrastructure to adapt to our rapidly changing business demands. More hands.
And while the Baling Twine School of Management doesn’t condone slowing down and asking for help, the entrepreneur and business manager in me overrules. It screams out: swallow your pride and never leave money on the table. Take the opportunity to make sensible repairs and improvements.
So when the CARE act comes out, I pivot from the work of restructuring our business and communicating with customers and start making calls and filling out forms for aid.
The first thing I learn is that because the funds went through SBA, lenders who work with small farmers were at a disadvantage. Some weren’t approved to make the loans. Others didn’t have the infrastructure in place to work with SBA. So by the time they were able to take our applications, the funds were gone. And then, we learned that the EIDL advances weren’t even available to farms. The most recent good news for farmers was that the USDA will provide $16 billion to help with the food and agriculture system. A large chunk will go to purchasing and distribution to help get food into the hands of the people who need it most. But the direct payments to farmers and ranchers are made based on price losses: drops in commodity prices due to the dysfunction of our industrialized food and distribution system that could not adapt to this crisis. Essentially, the payments are determined based on participation in the commodity food system.
From what I can decipher, most small farms I know would be ineligible. Our prices haven’t changed. They haven’t changed because we set them based on the actual costs of our food. There’s no futures and options and commodity pricing in the world of direct marketing. The losses we small farmers face right now are more like the losses of the rest of America’s small businesses….those funds for which we were sidelined because of the letters “F-A-R-M” in our business names. They came in the form of labor costs, lost accounts receivables; closure of sales venues, and most significantly, the cost of changing gears: building online marketing platforms, and altering our food storage, processing and distribution systems.
Interestingly, the money targeted for industrial farms is money to prop up a broken system: money to somehow put things back the way they were. Conversely, the money that could go to small farmers would accelerate our rate of adaptation. It would help our cities and communities cope with change. And where the USDA money is capped at “$250,000 per individual or entity,” those sums would be laughable on a small farm. You could service 2,500 small farms with multiple lifetimes of baling twine with those figures. What the small folks need is a pittance in comparison. Sums in the range of $10,000 or $20,0000 could do astronomical work to tweak and improve and adapt.
I’m a graduate of the Baling Twine School. I was raised not to expect these kinds of handouts. I was raised to tie a half hitch or a square knot, slap on a little duct tape and just make things work.
And so I’ll do that. No problem. I love what I do, and I am joyful to be of service to my community. But the underlying message from our government still goads me. The underlying message is that “we’ll fix what matters.” And that doesn’t include the small farmer.
Maybe that will change. Maybe the next round of funding will catch up to us.
But I want to share something about small farmers. We aren’t sitting around waiting for it. And while the dollar figures are bandied about and the press releases are written and the new online forms are generated, and the industrial food system is plowing produce into the ground,
your small farmer still has produce.
And the grocery stores are running low on flour.
But there are small farmers with cooperatives who are grinding wheat.
And the grocery stores are running low on eggs.
And we small farmers have eggs.
And we’ve been warned the nation is perilously close to a meat shortage.
And we small farmers have meat.
And we have milk and cream and yogurt and cheese and butter and beans.
And while the world despairs at the isolation of social distancing, we small farmers are keeping you tied to your land, to your place, to its flavors, and to your family. Through our masks and our emails and phone calls and deliveries, we are offering kindness and human contact and community and sustenance.
Thus, while the nation flounders to try and turn itself back in time to restore the broken glory of two months ago, putting back in place “what matters,” we small farmers are running around behind the scenes, holding it all together with a shitload of baling twine. Welcome to the new baling twine economy.