The Guardian 2 November, 2005
Culture and Life
by Rob Gowland
The family farmer
In the early 1960s, my wife and I went driving around parts of South Australia. A quick run through
the Barossa and then we were off up to the Murray as it wriggles its way across South Australia
between Renmark and Morgan where it turns sharply to the left and heads down towards Lake
Alexandrina and the sea.
I don't know what the banks of the Murray between Renmark and Morgan are like now, but half a
century ago they were startlingly high. We stood on this high riverbank and looked down on a
pelican flying upstream below us. A magic moment.
When the river turned south, we headed north-west to Peterburgh and the Flinders Ranges by
whatever back roads we could find (the more deserted the roads, the better I liked it).
While mooching around in the area between the Flinders and the approaches to Lake Frome, a dry
salt lake after the manner of Lake Eyre, we were struck by the extraordinary preponderance of
ruins.
Inhabited homesteads were few and far between, but ruined ones were commonplace. Built of local
stone, they all looked of an age. None were large, more a farm house than a
homestead.
They were built, I gather, in the late 19th Century, when good seasons produced plentiful tall grass
and the impression that this was rich farming land. The number of these derelict, deserted
farmhouses bore mute testimony to the dashed hopes of the settlers who built them.
For the seasons changed, as they always do, and the tall grass vanished and the settlers had to
walk off their properties, abandoning the stone houses they had built with such care and
hope.
In a good season, even the Simpson Desert will bloom. To expect Australia's fragile, ancient soil
and variable but for most of the continent generally poor rainfall to sustain intensive agriculture,
however, is to ask too much.
The present drought, the worst on record, is bringing the experience of those South Australian
settlers to increasing numbers of people in areas not generally considered "desert fringe". Once
again, but over a much larger area, farmers are walking off their land because they cannot afford to
stay there.
For the farmers, it is a tragedy, but a tragedy that is peculiar to capitalism, for only capitalism treats
farming not as an essential service but as merely a form of commodity production.
Only under capitalism does each individual farmer have to go deeply into debt to meet the heavy
capital cost of the complex machinery needed for modern farming. A farm in Australia may not be
labour-intensive — it may not have many staff these days, although that's usually because the
farmer cannot afford any — but a modern farm is invariably capital-intensive.
Modern farms are, of necessity, highly mechanised, and the machinery is hideously expensive.
Every thing on a farm — from feed to fertiliser, stock to slaughter-house charges, tractors to trucks,
quads to fencing — costs a small fortune.
And the farmer must borrow from the banks to acquire these essential items and pay interest on
the debt whether they get a saleable crop or not.
When farmers facing economic ruin round on the government and demand debt relief, they may
get some concessions to ease their plight, depending on the extent of their campaign and the
strength of their revolt.
But for capitalism as a system, the ruin of individual farmers merely opens the way for business to
move into whatever section of the rural economy those farmers occupied.
Agribusiness is the capitalist solution: throw family farms off the land and replace them with
corporate-owned agricultural enterprises or reduce the former family farmers to tenants of the
same agribusinesses.
Like all businesses, however, agribusiness is primarily concerned not with the land — and certainly
not with care of the land — but with making a profit. In these conditions, the long-term good will
always lose out to immediate gains.
A corporation does not have a vision of leaving the farm to its sons and daughters to carry on a
family presence and tradition. Environmental protection, too, takes second place to maintaining
shareholders' dividends.
When the Australian people achieve socialism, agribusinesses will provide a useful basis for state
farms. In the meantime, however, the family farmer — exploited by banks, wholesalers and retail
distributors, expected to battle drought and rapacious agribusinesses alike — is a natural ally of the
exploited worker.
Workers, and especially unions, should take a strong and sympathetic interest in the problems of
the family farmer today.