If You Ask Me / By Martha Knight

Drive through the area and count the working farms. You don’t use many fingers.

You see where farms used to be. Farmhouses are still there, but the majority are not occupied by farmers. On other former farms the old houses are gone and now there are more contemporary homes.

Then there are the acres that have been swallowed by the Pennsylvania Game Commission, and sequestered for use by wildlife.

Where agricultural use exists, much of it is different. Most dairy farming has ceased. Beef cattle graze where dairy cattle used to—or there are goats, or alpacas or sheep. Exotic animals roam and reproduce and are privately hunted on another former dairy farm, well fenced in. Some choice farm land is used for “tree farming,” with hardwoods adding their growth rings at their leisurely pace.

We could lament those changes. We could wish for the lifestyle country families used to have. Barefoot freedom all summer, raising a calf or pigs or rabbits to show at the fair. Helping with the farm work, and with raising the garden crops. Wading or swimming in the creek, roaming in the woods, having weenie roasts and picnics with neighbor kids. Ball games where we made up the rules as we went along.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could recreate those times! But if we pursue those thoughts very long, and let realism filter in, we realize it is nostalgia we are feeling. We have pangs of longing for those times, the past itself, our younger selves—the way we were, intertwined with the way things were.

The rearview mirror of life has a rosy, impressionistic tint. The mind’s eye, turned to our own reflection, does not detect how much we have changed in our tastes and habits.

The land itself has changed. Just as the great stands of hemlock, covering hills and valleys when people of European extraction began to settle here, succumbed to timbering, clear cutting, chemical wood harvesting and tanneries, then dairying and other farming, lifestyles and buying habits have evolved.

My father was a “method farmer” who read farm magazines and took animal husbandry courses by mail, toured Midwestern farms and some closer to home, and embraced such innovations as birdsfoot trefoil cultivation, no-till and “manure tea.”

He loathed unions, but Dad helped organize, and for years was president of, the Metropolitan Milk Marketing Agency. He was active in the GLF when it was a cooperative, and in other farm organizations. He was hostile to some government policies, though.

The Brannan Plan? Dad scoffed at the reasoning. A government agency setting the price of milk? That would repeal the law of supply and demand, he said. Meanwhile, government supports of commodity prices, and especially those of the grains dairy farmers must buy in order to produce milk, were a terrible idea.

The Brannan Plan called for a “farm income model” to be used in the calculations of levels of price support to be provided to farmers, or at least some farmers. Dad didn’t buy that idea at all.

“It isn’t as if a man has a God-given right to be a farmer, or to produce a certain kind of crop, whether or not there’s a good market for it,” Dad insisted. Produce the amount of milk the market could absorb, and price and market it appropriately, and keep the government out of it, he urged.

High butterfat milk was no longer the most marketable kind, so don’t index milk prices to butterfat. And don’t think you can revive the market for butter by passing laws against selling pre-tinted margarine in farm states. If consumers want “oleo,” they’ll buy it even if they have to break that little capsule in the plastic bag and spread the dye through the margarine by kneading it laboriously. The product costs loads less, tastes okay and works in baking.

“It would make as much sense for the government to let buggy whip makers keep on in that craft because that’s what their families have done for generations. There’s no market for buggy whips, and the government can’t change that. So rather than buy up all those surplus buggy whips, the government should encourage those people to make something people will buy. Or they could work in a factory that makes something else.”

We don’t have GLF anymore, or Abbott’s Dairies, or many dairy farms, or many businesses catering to them. Gardening is favored as a pleasant hobby, but the vogue for “buying local,” to get “healthier” and fresher food, is taking root here. I don’t think we are seeing a genuine revival of agriculture as a major economic engine here, though.

A recent presentation by Susan Carlson asked, rhetorically, “Can Our Main Street Be Saved?” It seemed tightly focused on slightly more than two blocks of Main Street, and I would suggest that there is more to Main Street than that, and some of it presents an inviting aspect to visitors and even potential residents or business owners.

Sue says, “Some changes are not all bad. But some are devastating to small businesses. When our major industries sold out and deserted the town that made them, taking with them all the higher paying jobs, all the talent that was relocated and all the dollars that disappeared with them, the town couldn’t recover because no equal or better replacement came after them…”

She posits that when a generation of “entrenched merchants” died or retired, with them vanished the knowledge of how to succeed in such businesses.

If Leo Meacham and his store magically reappeared on Maple Commons right now, local shopping tastes would not. Nostalgic as we may be for the glass block and Foamglas production heyday, and a locally owned Pierce Glass, the market for those products is global, and production capacity is owned by a few global companies, which weigh the viability of each facility considering factors that do not include affection for any community, whether or not it was the “initial” location. The equation changes with world market conditions, as well as with ownership of facilities.

If only it were simpler, and as rosy as nostalgia. But it isn’t.

Peace.