Jus' drinkin' coffee someplace else

June 16, 2006

Life on a bike is often reduced to enjoying the effort and scenery... and wondering where you can next eat a sticky bun. My progress across America could be measured in sticky buns.

That was how I met Edgar and Bob, in a filling-station cafe. When I asked Bob, the larger, what they'd be doing if they weren't drinking coffee right there where they were, he said: "Oh, jus' drinkin' coffee someplace else, I guess."

They were both the same age, Edgar and Bob, had been friends as boys, had graduated from high school together and grown-up together. Bob farmed 500 acres - still does, though he calls it 'small in these parts' - and Edgar around 200 - 'because I'm supposed to be retired now; trouble is, moment I stop, folks can't stand it and they find me something to do.'

He didn't take the hint to tell me his age and it took a while to overcome a natural suspicion of strangers asking questions. But he recollected with warmth the evenings he and his family used to listen to the last great days of American radio and listed his favourite shows.

'You see a farmer round here with a big car or a new combine and you see someone with oil on his land'

'But we couldn't listen all evening because the batteries'd go flat.' I asked what there was for young people to do nowadays and he said most of them had moved away to the cities. When I said that I meant those of school age, he said: 'Watch television, mainly.'

On the face of it, this is little different in principle from spending your evenings listening to the radio, but he was quick to enlarge.

'I had brothers and sisters and we used to spend our evenings playing cards and talking and, yes, listening to the radio. But television's changed all that. It ain't the same.'

With young people moving away, uninterested in farming, land that didn't stay in the family got bought by neighbours. Or if the landowner was lucky, it would be bought by a big farming corporation or, still better, by a shooting group. Or best of all, although it rarely happened, by someone who wanted to build, be it houses or some sort of fun park. That's what every farmer dreamed of.

'This isn't the best land. Over in Missouri, that'd be more valuable. Here, the soil is too shallow, the underlying rock is too high, and so the water runs away. We need rain pretty much every week to farm, if we get it. This year we've had a drought and that's been a problem to a lotta people.'

The fields across much of Kansas look empty, a result of so much being left to grass. Without grass, the soil would dry and loosen and blow away, which it did in the 1930s and the era of The Grapes of Wrath. The desolation drove thousands off the land and dust blew as far as the great cities of the north. Locally, street lights came on during the day as blowing soil blocked out the sun. That was the era when people spoke of the Dust Bowl, a consequence of repeated over-exploitation of the land and a prolonged drought. People fled because they could no longer live in the blowing dust, because the farms could no longer pay them to stay there, and because Kansas was as much in the depths of the Depression as anywhere else but had less money to recover from it.

Eighty thousand people left Kansas between 1930 and 1940.One of many farmers who found nobody could buy the food they had grown told a government inquiry: 'The camp fires of the homeless are seen along every railroad track. I saw men, women and children walking over the hard roads. Most were tenant farmers who had lost all in the late slump of wheat and cotton. The farmers are being pauperised by the poverty of industrial populations and the industrial populations are being pauperised by the poverty of farmers. Neither has the money to buy the product of the other.'

The appearance of the Kansas countryside never recovered from those years but much of the apparent emptiness is misleading because the fields in fact grow wheat. This is America's huge wheat bin and vast farms grow just the one crop. But for the summer visitor the land is misleading because summer is often too hot and dry and so a lot of the wheat is sown in autumn and cropped before the worst of winter.

Some of the apparent emptiness of fields also comes from the CRP - crop rotation programme - which is so far as I can work out is the predecessor of land set-aside in Europe. Only so much land is allowed to be productive and the European Union pays farmers to leave the rest neat and tidy but above all fallow. Satellites check that it has happened and that farmers don't exaggerate by a square centimetre the land for which they are claiming money.

In Europe, I told Bob and Edgar, the expectation was that the farm paid the profit but government subsidies paid the wages. The same seems to happen in the USA.

'The government decided it wants a cheap-food policy and that means subsidies,' Bob said. As everywhere, you can't have cheaper food without paying lower prices and if you pay lower prices, people stop farming, food gets scarce and prices go up. Nobody's found a way round it.

'They've got an arrangement now that farms produce a set amount. They can produce more than that if they like but they don't get subsidies on the rest.'

But those Kansan fields have something that European fields don't, and that's nodding-donkey oil pumps, usually one to a field. The farmer receives a fee for access to the land, an indemnity against any damage, and a three-sixteenths royalty on the value of the oil extracted. The pumps drag up water as well as oil but even in a drought, it's too salty to use on the land. Instead, it's pumped along with the oil to small tanks - usually three of them on the edge of the field - and there the water separates before being pumped back to the rock. The oil is then carried away by road or pipeline for the oil company to process.

'You see a farmer round here with a big car or a new combine and you see someone with oil on his land,' Bill laughed. 'Ain't always like that but generally that's the case.'

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