IS THE MIDWEST FARM BELT HEADED FOR THE CORPORATE CROP CAVERN?

This may be one of those columns that when you have finished reading it, you wonder why you invested the time. It's not my purpose to stop you in mid-sentence, but following the tenets of truth-in-advertising, I should warn you this piece is about a problem that may never appear, and even if it does, it may not impact your life or the lives of your children.

Having said that, however, for those of you who have opted to stick with me to the bitter end, let me say this column doesn't have any zingy political views, no made-in-heaven solutions for the problems that ail us nor is there one scintilla of humor included. If you're still with me, let's cut to the subject and quit horsing around.

For the past couple of weeks, I have experienced increasing angst over an economic study that crossed my desk from the Kansas City office of the Federal Reserve. The gist of this economic forecast is that, with all of its multiple, seemingly unresolvable problems, the future of agriculture in Missouri and throughout the Farm Belt may be in the industrialization of the industry, which is another word for corporate farming, distribution and retailing of crops grown and raised under contract on the farms in our state.

All of us are familiar with some of the debilitating circumstances the farmers of Missouri face today: high production that leads to commodity surpluses, impacted by international competition, U.S-declared embargoes, inflation and environmental safeguards, to name just a few of the head-shaking conundrums confronting the people we know who have devoted their entire lives and fortunes to feeding and clothing the rest of us. There are those who declare the farmer is pampered, which must be a new term for anyone whose annual income depends on the constantly changing moods of Mother Nature, a sometime cruel parent who invokes a wide variety of weather ranging from floods to drought on her children below. If most of us had to watch helplessly as the weather destroyed not only our investment but our hard work and our hopes for the future, I doubt we would use the pampered word.

Federal Reserve economists are reasonably certain that farm products in the future will be chosen, financed, marketed and controlled not by individual farmers but by corporate entities that have already made their appearance in agriculture and are steadily increasing their control over more and more crops and products grown on farms throughout the country. We already know what has happened to the individual producers of poultry and pork they are disappearing daily from the agricultural landscape and soon can be viewed only in certain regions of the state where huge corporations have not yet put down roots. Fed economists predict the same fate will soon make the same impact on one of the state's principal crops: corn. They have ample evidence for their conclusion.

If chickens, turkeys, hogs and then corn disappear into the corporate crop cavern, then how far behind will be wheat, beef, soybeans, cotton and all the other components that make up Missouri's basic industry?

What may have even greater impact than these so-called supply chains on the state's economic landscape is the transformation of hundreds of small towns that today are supported in large measure by the farms and farmers surrounding them. The small town and city grocers, apparel merchants, service industries, processing plants, commodity buyers and sellers, machinery suppliers, feed and seed dealers, petroleum distributors, will all feel the impact of this transformation and that impact will be financially inflicting to all citizens whose suppliers are either diminished or disappear altogether.

I'm certainly not wise enough to determine if the Federal Reserve forecast is accurate, but I'm smart enough to know they're smarter than I am, and so it might be wise if state officials, regional development organizations and most certainly local chambers of commerce and other community groups took note of these forecasts and became informed about their hardly optimistic findings. It's also possible that the economists are dead wrong, or they have become illogically pessimistic about the future of farming in Missouri and America.

I hope they're out in left field. The thought that's been bothering me lately: What if they're not?

~Jack Stapleton of Kennett is the editor of Missouri News and Editorial Service.