10 Analogs Of The Future

Introduction-2

Poor sort of farmer that lets anybody tell him how to farm his own land.

“Broke?” Howard asked.

“Yeah. Well, not at the moment. If my probeans come in like I hope they will, I’ll make expenses and a small profit, on paper. That’s a real help when it comes to borrowing. But you and I know it’s a downhill slide. Each year I wind up with less in my account.”

Howard understood all too well. Even when you deducted all expenses for things like new vehicles and equipment, you still found you had gone in the red. It was a fact of life; farmers sold wholesale and bought retail, and who could compete with the food factories?

“So you’re sellin’ out?”

“Haven’t made up my mind. I can still wait till next year, but not longer than that; by then NCI will have leased all the land it will want. And there won’t be any other market; once NCI leases most of the land here, their competition will look elsewhere. So if I don’t sell before then, I’ll be stuck.”

Since Howard hadn’t considered taking up their offer, he hadn’t thought about it before. But now that Jimmy mentioned it, he could see that this offer was only good for this year or next. It hadn’t been easy for Jimmy. It’d been a lone fight, except for Howard. His wife Lily had refused to accompany him to the country.

“Well. Reckon I’ll miss you.” Howard spoke slowly, watching him, but got no rise out of the other man. Jimmy just looked at him, haggard.

“And I’ll miss you—unless I take this leasing offer.”

Howard couldn’t conceal his distaste for the idea. “Not my kind o’ farmin’.”

“Mine, either.” Jimmy grimaced. “How long do you think you can hold out, as an old-time farmer?”

“What do you mean?” Howard asked carefully. He had given much thought to that lately.

Jimmy sighed. “I spent twenty-five years in business, mostly in the food industry, learning all about marginal businesses among other things, and trend analysis. I’ve tracked this trend back as far as 1960.”

Howard blinked at him, shaken.

“Yeah. It was a better, simpler life then. But modern problems were already visible, though the cloud, as they say, was no bigger than a man’s hand. In that year, the American public spent a mere 19 percent of its income on food. In 1970, it spent a mere 17 percent. At that rate it would have hit zero in 2045 or thereabouts. Think that’s bad? It’s worse than that.”

Jimmy got up and crossed to the fridge, pulling out two bottles of beer. “It’s worse than that. Because it dropped to 15 percent, not in 1980 as you might expect, but in 1978—and the trend followed that curve from there. It could actually hit zero by 2010!”

Howard stared at him, the open bottle forgotten in his hand. “That’s impossible! Who’d grow food if they couldn’t sell it? Who’d process it, pack it, transport it?”

“What’s the world’s largest market for food?”

“Th’ gov’ment. But—”

“Quite. How long has it been since you’ve sold wheat—corn—beans—millet—on the open market? Ten years?”

Howard was silent, but he made it more. It startled him, thinking back, to realize how long it had been since he could make a profit with commodity foods on the open market. Whole protein beans, now, he still could sell—but already there was agitation in the industry for the Department of Agriculture to raise its floors there, too; the market price was falling steeply. That was why John’d shown him that thing from NCI—and no doubt why Jimmy was looking it over.

“So you think the government will buy up all the food and give it away?”

“Already a third of the food we grow is sold to and given away by the government. Practically everybody qualifies for it. Some of it’s eaten by poor people overseas, but unfortunately every big city on earth these days has modern sewage treatment facilities.”

The modern way to treat sewage was to sterilize it, then feed it to algae, then do things with the algae: it made good but nowadays too expensive fertilizer; it could be used as the starting point for a thousand chemicals that used to be made from oil; or it could be made into food, or fed to yeast and the yeast made into food.

Butter and cheese and milk, fake flour, cornstarch, flaked potatoes, pea soup, fake meat from textured vegetable protein, fruit juices, vegetable soup stocks, pasta—why, the list was endless and getting longer every day.

“The world just doesn’t need farmers anymore,” Jimmy said sadly.

“And so now they’re turning farms into plastic mines,” Howard snorted.

Jimmy sighed. “My father was an engineer, and his father was a doctor. Beyond that, I forget. But far enough back, in southern China, my folks were peasants—which is to say, farmers. I guess my family never lost some of that thinking, because my folks used to say, only land has permanent value. And that everybody has to eat, so the people who grow the food support the entire society. Somehow or other, that sunk in. I’ve always wanted to be a farmer. Only now it’s too late. It’s the food factories that really feed the public. Farms nowadays are basically producers of luxury goods. The real money is in the parks and dude ranches. Even dude farms!”

Those where Howard’s own sentiments. But—”Folks’d never eat all that fake stuff if they could get real food,” he growled.

Jimmy shrugged unhappily and set his bottle down. “My grandkids prefer the fake stuff, especially meat. I don’t mind eating chicken myself—even killing my own, now you showed me how—but not rabbits. Or cows.”

Howard frowned, drank beer. It was a common attitude. All his life long he’d known peole who were too fine-haired to eat, say, rabbit or squirrel, at least not any they’d known personally. Stubbornly he said, “Yeah—but the fake stuff just don’t taste right.”

“Tasting right is a function of what you’re used to—what you ate when you were growing up. My grandkids are growing up on the fake stuff; it tastes right to them.”

That was a new thought; Howard was shocked by it. Why, there must be a whole generation growing up that maybe wouldn’t want real food if it could get it!

“My God,” he said softly, despairing. “How can the farmer make a livin’?”

Jimmy dropped his gaze to the floor and shook his head.

*****

Howard had crossed Jimmy Li’s fields and was half across his own before he raised his head. This was a field of protein beans, his major crop for the past six years; on the back side he had a field of the new genetically altered corn to sell to the government to cover expenses. This would be the last year for that; they were cutting the floor back down in staple foods, because the food factories could feed the population so much more cheaply that farmers no longer had any support from the taxpayers.

Now probeans were going the same way—first the price falls under competition from the food factories, then the gover’ment steps in and subsidizes the farmer till the taxpayers howls, then the farmer’s got to scramble.

Turn the whole world into a goddam amusement park next…

The beans looked good, the shoulder-high plants sturdy, the ripening beans at the tips where the harvester could get at them turning ripe straw-yellow. Across the field Howard found the old footpath among the trees along the creek. Walking silently from an old hunter’s habit, he came up behind a line of those aspen that in Missouri are called “red birch.”

Voices sounded from beyond it, speaking casually.

Through the trees he saw his son John and two of “the boys,” his grown grandsons Bill, John’s son, and Allen Wade, Susie’s boy. “In those days this field and the corn field were in pasture.” John jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Man could raise cattle in them days and make a livin’.”

“They don’t need stock raisers at all now, or so I read,” said Bill. “They can cut off and culture bits of the carniculture, so they will never have to kill another cow—when they go to full production.”

Howard had read that. It would kill the ten-thousandth of a market there had been for livestock.

Carniculture had beaten back textured vegetable protein. They cut a cow—or pig or chicken or rabbit or peacock—into, say, ten thousand pieces and put each piece into a suitable nutrient medium. Pretty soon the piece was as big as the animal it came from, pure firm meat, no bones, fat only if wanted. The nutrient medium was made from protein beans—only now they were making it cheaper in the food factories.

“There’s just no way a farmer can compete, I mean a regular dirt farmer, Dad,” said young Bill. “Factory farming, now, is no assurance either, because they can make plastics and things out of sewage and algae, too. But there’s a limit to the kind of capacity the factories have, and if they’re making food, they can’t make plastics.”

“There’s still a market for fruit,” said John quickly.

“Diminishing,” said Allen. “The major market was fruit juices and things like pies, and the food factories have moved in.”

Howard faded back and presently turned off on a little-used path hidden between bushes. Despite the blurring of his vision he bent under the trees along the creek and touched the earth. Deer tracks; big doe and a fawn. They got fat on probeans.

There was a footbridge here, a mere plank laid across from bank to bank. A two by six, what they called a five by fifteen nowadays. Howard hadn’t crossed it in a year or so and bent again to check the ends for rot. They were laid on rocks and besides, he’d used artificial wood—rayon fiber in rayon foam, with clay mixed in to discourage termites. It was sound; he crossed swiftly.

There was an old log not far from the board. It had been here since he was a young man, a meter thick in those days but sunk to half that now, soft and punky. He seated himself on it, put elbows on knees and chin on the backs of his hands. It was cool and dim in the cavern of the trees.

It wasn’t merely that they wanted to sell his land. God knows, that was nothing new. This leasing business was a blind, their way of getting him to accept the inevitable. Sell and retire! But “the boys” had not been raised on the farm as John had been, and he had been, and his father Morris had been. It was nothing new, that they should counsel selling it, even in a sneaky round-about way like this.

No, what caused this slamming about the breastbone had been what Jimmy Li had said. For years the boys’d been saying farming was playing out and he’d refused to listen. But Jimmy knew his stuff, and besides—once the trend was pointed out—

And now here in the cool shade cave his heart was burning faintly. He grinned dryly, looking out at the sun-blasted field outside. No doubt his old body was trying to give him a way out, but modern science had closed that door. His heart wouldn’t fail.

After a bit his breathing slowed and he stood up. But he stood with head hanging, arms dangling, like an old cow run too far.

Always, since the days of flint and clay sickles, there had been farmers. In time of “the breaking of Nations,” as the poet Hardy had said.

But—free food?

Who could compete with free food?

The shiny cities with all their vulgar artificialities had eaten him. His heart had tried to stop, horrified, at the prospect of the loss, not of a farm, but of a way of life.