Not the Farmer in Any of Us

I really hated that "god made a farmer" Super Bowl commercial for Dodge trucks, but couldn't really put my finger on why, other than that it reminded me of every local asshole with an "I Farm, You Eat" bumper sticker. (Oh, yeah? I pay taxes to subsidize your "farming" ass.)

Turns out the thing has way bigger defects than glamorizing a way of life that doesn't exist any more.

Alexis Madrigal at the Atlantic:

The ad paints a portrait of the American agricultural workforce that is horribly skewed. In Dodge's world, almost every farmer is a white Caucasian. And that's about as realistic as a Thomas Kincade painting.

Stipulating that visual inspection is a rough measure for the complex genealogical histories of people, I decided to count the race and ethnicity of the people in Dodge's ad. Here's what I found: 15 white people, one black man, and two (maybe three?) Latinos. I couldn't help but wonder: Where are all the campesinos?

The ethnic mix Dodge chose to represent American farming is flat-out wrong. It's true that whites are the managers of 96 percent of the nation's farms, according to the USDA's 2007 Census of Agriculture. But the agricultural workforce is overwhelmingly Mexican with some workers from Central America thrown in. The Department of Labor's National Agriculture Worker Survey has found that over the last decade, around 70 percent of farmworkers in America were born in Mexico, most in a few states along the Pacific coast.

This should not be news. Everyone knows this is how farms are run.And yet when a company decided to pay homage to the people who grow our food, they left out the people who do much of the labor, particularly on the big farms that continue to power the food system.

To borrow Ta-Nehisi Coates' phrase, the way this ad whitewashed American farming leaves Mexican farmworkers and their children "excluded from the process of patriotism," even though many identify as American. Almost 75 percent of foreign-born cropworkers have been in the states for more than five years.Hell, more than half of the farmworkers surveyed by the Department of Labor have been in the U.S. for more than ten years. These are members of American communities and prospective citizens.

Then there's the reality of American "farming," which the Gurgling Cod explains could not be further from the myth:

The farmer in all of us, 99+% of the time, is not a farmer. Farming is hard work, and it pays poorly. The Robars took over the farm from a farmer who died on his own farm in a farming accident. "The farmer in all of us" is a nice, truck-selling way to refer to an inclination that Americans have to like the idea of farming. The valorization of farmers by non-farmers goes back at least to Thomas Jefferson.

He concludes:

I'd suggest, just as a conversation starter, that the average American's deep-seated fondness for the idea of farming, coupled with a preference for easier, safer, and more lucrative work, creates exactly the kind of environment where terribile industrial farming can flourish. As a nation, we are seduced by pictures like the ones in the Dodge commercial, and meanwhile the heirs of Earl Butz are busy making anaerobic pigshit lagoons.

Not to mention the reactionary Birchism of the paean's author Paul Harvey, which is perfectly skewered in "So God made a banker."