Consider the ‘origin story’ of our food supply

Thomas Jefferson's plantation, Monticello. (Photo by Beth Hoffman)

I recently spent a few days at Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's plantation from 1768 to 1826. Fortunately, a lot has changed since that time — most importantly, there is no longer sanctioned slavery in the U.S. But it is fascinating to me that, as they say, "the more things change, the more things stay the same."

In the early years of Monticello, Jefferson's plantation grew tobacco. Tobacco, if you don't know, is not only harmful to human health, it's also extremely hard on the soil, sucking up nutrients. Yields are hard to maintain and the crop requires an enormous amount of labor (hence the dependency on slaves).

But tobacco was a money-making crop, and Virginia was established by the Virginia Company, a corporate entity looking to make money. Colonies, after all, were not only places for settlers looking to escape religious persecution (as many of us were taught in elementary school) — they were primarily locations to extract resources and grow products for the corporate interests of empires. Tobacco grew well and could be sold throughout the empire.

But in addition to profiting from the sale of tobacco, companies also loaned money to farmers to buy more land and enslaved humans, locking them into deep cycles of debt.

In other words, in addition to raping the land (in the words of my father-in-law, describing his family's impact) and enslaving Africans, a system was created to siphon wealth upward and away from the people who ran the farms and did the work. Debt entangled the roots of the American colonies.

Jefferson was aware he was stuck in this system, and in fact, never got out of debt. According to the National Archives :

"[Jefferson] pictured the planter as the victim of a grasping mercantile community in England employing good prices and credit as a means of entrapment, after which the merchants' prices could be lowered and then, even if the planter's shipments were [according to Jefferson] "ever so great, and his demand of necessaries ever so economical, they never permitted him to clear off his debt. These debts had become hereditary from father to son for many generations, so that the planters were a species of property annexed to certain mercantile houses in London."

The British then stopped buying tobacco and other products from the newly independent colonies during and after the Revolutionary War. Not only was Virginia affected; New England states struggled to sell the whale oil that fueled their economy, and rice from the Carolinas (a crop brought to the U.S. by enslaved Africans) was also without a buyer.

To add insult to injury, peace negotiations at the end of the war demanded that, in exchange for their acknowledgment of the United States as a nation, all private American debts needed to be paid to the British. But planters and states alike could not pay back the debt, and the young nation was on the brink of economic collapse.

In 1784, Jefferson became a U.S. emissary to France, traveling abroad to try to convince the French to buy American products and to continue its support of the United States. The French and British were enemies, and the United States hoped to continue to capitalize on that dysfunctional relationship.

To make a long and fascinating story way too short, in the end, the only commodity Jefferson succeeded in negotiating a trade agreement for was whale oil. Tobacco was too heavily taxed and the French did not like American rice. But the Paris streets were badly lit, crime was rampant, and whale oil— particularly sperm whale oil from New England — burned well in lamps. Plus, buying from the Americans would mean the French could stop buying whale oil from the British, an argument that eventually persuaded the French to buy it.

Here's why I'm telling you this story.

Origin stories — be they about our families, our towns, or our nations — are important because we can see how habits, behaviors, and systems form. They can help explain how and why we do things today.

I see at least five important similarities between colonial agriculture and the system we have today.

In Jefferson's time, the merchants who lent money and bought the commodities made all the profits in farming.

A look at the U.S. "food dollar" (below) — a graphic created by the U.S. Department of Agriculture — shows how that is still the case today. Less than 15 cents of every dollar spent in the grocery store goes to farmers, and that is before taking into account the costs farmers face when growing the crops!

Multinational companies like Pepsi Co., Mondelez (Kraft), Cargill, and the others who process, market, and advertise the processed foods that make up what sits in our grocery stories make 85 cents of every dollar you spend. It is their profits that continue to rise during this time of inflation, while farmer incomes fall — much as the British financiers' did while American farmers struggled.

This year, grain prices have dropped significantly. Will you see that drop in the grocery store? Absolutely not. Profits for these corporations continue to grow, at the literal cost to farmers and consumers.

Today we produce many of the same products (tobacco and rice are two) grown in Jefferson's time and which depend heavily upon exports. Corn and soybeans are also crops widely overproduced, which drives down the price and creates an even more pressing need for negotiations with other countries to unload as much product as possible. Growing the cheapest possible products to "feed the world" has left many farmers unable to feed themselves nutritious food.

Much as Jefferson and other farms in Virginia grew tobacco, despite how harsh it was for the soil, in America today we continue to grow crops year after year on soil that is now badly depleted. Synthetic fertilizers have made it possible to take this to a catastrophic level as we can replace some of the nutrients needed for specific crops to grow. However, we still do not pay much attention to the health of the soil and the more complex nature of micronutrients in our dirt.

In Jefferson's time, enslaved humans did the work. Later, many of the freed slaves continued to supply the labor as they rarely had other options for income. Today, immigrant labor supplies the majority of farm labor, and many of our agricultural competitors like Brazil and Vietnam also employ the least expensive workers they can. Likewise, food processing plants are well known for employing those with few other opportunities.

In order to sell the cheapest food possible while keeping hefty margins at the top, the multitude of people who plant, harvest, process and transport our food make little. Wealth is siphoned upward, into CEOs' and shareholders' pockets.

In most cases, markets still control farmers and they have little say in what their products are worth. Just as a colonial farmer was at the whims of the British Empire, farmers today are at the mercy of the corporations who contract with them or buy their products. Rarely is the cost of doing business factored into what a farmer receives for her beef or apples or milk — the price is set and farmers can take it or leave it.

The more things change, the more things stay the same.

This column was originally published by Beth Hoffman's blog, In the Dirt. It is republished here through the Iowa Writers' Collaborative

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