I am privileged, indeed: I am a WA farmer
“Privileged” has become an insult, inferring unearned success, bias and racism.
I hear the term a lot as I am among a targeted 1% and my industry is identified as an environmental threat. But I’m not an oil baron, industrialist or multinational corporation. I am a farmer.
For my family, the work schedule is set not by the clock but by the seasons and weather. We have the honor of seeing new life spring into the world. We are generationally entrusted to care for the land. The average farm in the U.S. feeds 166 people per acre of production. We help provide the daily nutrition that makes urban life possible.
So how did farmers become the villains in the fight against injustice and climate change?
In part, it is a statistical problem. Historically, more than half of Americans lived on farms. Today just 1.3% of the U.S. population is employed in farming. Much of the U.S. population is largely ignorant of where their food comes from.
Correspondingly, lawmakers are less likely to come from farming backgrounds. Their mostly urban environments are a world away from the realities of those whose lives depend on working the land. This means new policies concerning agriculture are increasingly made by those blind to the experiences of farmers and ranchers and are often accompanied by political terms like “equity” and “fairness” that are perceived to bestow virtue on those who wield them, but in practice leave little room for facts or humility.
Along with the “privileged” label comes the inference (or outright accusation) of racism and exploitation. In 2022, there were just over 2 million farms and approximately 2.4 million farmworkers in the U.S. Most farmworkers are foreign-born — primarily from Mexico and Central America.
While activist groups like Farmworkers for Justice claim farmworker wages are tantamount to slavery, actual farmworkers are voting with their feet, staying long-term and establishing community roots. Throughout the West Coast, farmworkers command wages averaging $21 per hour for nonsupervisory, nonspecific labor (at least $2 an hour more than everywhere else in the country). As wages improve, more farmworkers are choosing to live near where they work. It provides stability, the chance to advance and can come with added benefits of insurance, educational continuity for their children and establishment within a social network.
Certainly, there are instances in which employers disregard labor protections and wage rules, but those occurrences are rare.
Finally, farmers and ranchers are painted with the same brush as large, corporate interests — like Cargill, Tyson and DelMonte. Reality is something else. According to the USDA’s Census of Agriculture, most farms are small — around 400 acres — family-owned businesses that have been operated by the same people for at least two generations. These farms contract with corporations to grow their products.
Farmers and ranchers are in the business of wholesale goods, but their income is not based on the cost of production; they are price takers, forced to sell their product at the going rate regardless of their income needs. When regulations change — new safety requirements, higher fuel taxes, new wage and hour mandates — agricultural businesses have difficulty adjusting because they already have a predetermined price for their goods that will not change, regardless of any changes to their expenses.
My family’s farmland was nothing but sagebrush and jack rabbits before it was transformed by the hard work and aspirations of my grandparents. It was not an unearned legacy. Every day, we help feed thousands of people who will never know our names.
Yes, farming is a privilege, but in the truest sense of the word.
Pam Lewison is a fourth-generation farmer in Eastern Washington and the director of the center for Agriculture at the Washington Policy Center.