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South Dakota Battles Corporate Farms
Adbusters, Spring 1999
They want to own everything from the sperm to the dinner table. That’s how soybean and hog farmer Charlie Johnson describes the corporate takeover of agriculture in his home state of South Dakota.
Farming groups such as Dakota Rural Action and the South Dakota Farmers Union decided to make sure that the family farm didn’t become a relic of the past in South Dakota. And they may have succeeded--in November an amendment to the state constitution banning corporate farms passed by 59%. “Amendment E” makes it illegal for corporations to buy agricultural land or sign new contracts with farmers. Existing corporate farms can continue to operate, but once a contract expires, it can’t be renewed.
From his farm in Madison, South Dakota, Johnson has watched corporations gobble up much of the state’s agriculture and livestock production. A farmer that signs a contract with a company agrees to provide only the land and the labour; the corporation brings its own seed, animals, equipment and fertilizers. “[Corporate farms] turn agriculture producers into serfs on their own land,” said Johnson, “It’s not capitalism or free enterprise going on in agriculture production today, it’s more like feudalism.
“We’re seeing a kind on awakening on this whole issue, not only in South Dakota but in other states,” says Johnson, “I think you’re going to see people in other states pursuing their own avenues and putting constitutional amendments on their own ballots.”
South Dakota’s neighboring state of Nebraska is the only other state to have a ban on corporate farms entrenched in its constitution. Other states have legal limits to corporate farming, but according to John Crabtree of Nebraska’s Center for Rural Affairs, many of these laws have been “gutted” over the years because of changes to the legislation. He warns that without strong legal limitations, corporate farming will end the long tradition of family farming in America.
“You can’t have rural communities without farming and corporate farming is simply not a replacement for that,” Crabtree says, “What corporate farming and the continued consolidation and industrialization of agriculture is going to do is destroy rural communities, economically, socially and environmentally.”