A Crisis of Faith and Farming in Rural America
role of food, agriculture and rural development should be a shared effort to ensure sustainable development and eradicate poverty and hunger. Three-quarters of the poor live in rural areas and derive their livelihoods from agriculture or from rural activities that depend on agriculture. Much urban poverty is a consequence of rural deprivation and rural economic decline, which lead to “distress” migration to urban areas. The strengthening of agriculture and rural development is fundamental to achieving overall economic growth and poverty reduction for most undeveloped areas. The decline in financial resources for agricultural and rural development must be reversed. The success or failure of farming has a catastrophic impact on all of America, particularly since farming claims to be America’s largest industry and the country’s largest employer. There may be fewer than 1 million actual farms, but the farming industry employs perhaps 21 million people, including those who manufacture farm machinery, farm chemicals, and other farm inputs and those who process farm products into finished products for the grocer’s shelves. In fifty years, the number of individual farms in the US has dropped by two-thirds, and the decrease in farm numbers is likely to continue as the number of acres per farm continues to increase. Only about 14% of our farms had sales greater than $100,000, but this 14% owned half of the total farmland. While the number of farms has plummeted, the acreage farmed has dropped only 16 percent in the past thirty years. Much of the loss of farmland has been caused by urban growth absorbing farmland near cities. Price support, income support, and acreage controls are the major farm programs aimed at bringing production into balance with market needs, without bankrupting farmers. Today, there are fewer than 1 million farmers who make their full living from farming. The operative question is how will the rural church respond to these crisis situations?
In my personal experiences in life, I have learned that a crisis is either a cause for despair or an opportunity for change. Alongside sound government policy and responsible corporate involvement, there is a need for an informed local voice to speak for and to share with those in crisis. This is unquestionably the church! This is part of the mission of the Church. The faith community must seek not just to study the rural scene, or stagnant in the problems before it, but be part of it, to share the crisis and, in doing so, to help to discover the wisdom, creativity and redemptive power of God in the midst of the crisis. This is difficult because my research indicates that many of the members of the church are directly impacted by the crisis. However, from the point of view of both sharing in and being informed about the farming crises, the people (believers) of God must be able to uniformly speak prophetically and wisely to government, corporate America, its church, its people, and its community about the power of God to turn [next page]