The Garlic Bread Farmer

A kid, a dream, and the the USDA's "meritocracy" BS.

Early in the school year, I tagged along on my daughter’s second grade field trip to a nearby prairie and fossil park. The prairie experience itself was pretty great, but my favorite part was the bus ride.

The kids had to partner off and pick a bus buddy before loading up. I was happy when my daughter picked her partner: an inquisitive little guy I’d met on a previous field trip. My daughter has Cerebral Palsy and I’ve always feared she’d have a hard time making friends. This has not been the case. This little guy is one of my favorite of her friends. He seems to understand everything she says even when others struggle.

I squeezed into a bus seat with the both of them, pleased with my 5ft stature for one of the first times in my life. On the way to the prairie we passed what we always do in Iowa: fields and fields of corn. Matilda’s friend started to tell me about a new video game he’s been playing: Farm Simulator. In this hyper-realistic farming game, he fills semi load after semi load of corn. He excitedly tells me about all of the huge machinery he gets to buy in this game. This kid is AMPED about machinery.

He tells me that’s what he wants to be when he grows up: a farmer. I ask if he lives on a farm and he doesn’t. He lives in town and his parents work at a nearby grocery store. I ask him what his favorite thing to eat is. He thinks for a long time and says… “garlic bread!”

Me too, kid.

---

---

“Did you know you could be a garlic bread farmer?” I ask him. His eyes widen. “WHAT!?” Yes, I tell him. We go on to talk about how wheat is grown and how garlic is harvested. He had no idea that bread was made from wheat, but loves this idea.

It was a fun moment. But when I look back on it now, it makes me sad, too.

I didn’t have the heart to tell the kid that if his family doesn’t own farmland, it’s going to be pretty dang difficult to acquire. Land prices are astronomical. Equipment costs are out of reach. And the infrastructure that supports small and beginning farms is practically non-existent.

You can work hard—harder than anyone in the state—but if you’ve got no land, no capital, no agency, then merit gets you squat. There’s no bootstrapping your way into agriculture if you’ve got no boots, and no land to step onto even if you did.

And yet, in February, Brooke Rollins, self-proclaimed “MAHA Mom” and Secretary of Agriculture released a memo proudly rescinding all of the USDA’s Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA) programs—programs specifically meant to begin leveling the field for people like this kid and mine. They’re calling it a return to “unity, equality, meritocracy, and color-blind policies.”

I call bullshit, Ms. Rollins. Meritocracy assumes we all got handed boots, but most of us are barefoot in a field we’ll never be allowed to own. And you know that.

Not only is land hard to acquire—it’s nearly impossible to influence its use, even though what happens on that land shapes our communities, our local economies, and the health of our own bodies. We breathe what’s sprayed, drink what runs off, and eat what the system decides is worth growing. But we’re told we should be grateful for the abundance.

Photo by Anna Evans on Unsplash

This gets missed when we talk about our “proud agricultural state”: the farms are getting bigger, but there are fewer of them. And certainly fewer farmers. Two-thirds of Iowa farmers are over 65 years of age—retirement age. The land is increasingly owned by nonfarmers who like fixed cash-rent contracts and are highly unlikely to sell their ground to someone outside the family. Just 4% of Iowa farmland comes available for sale to a non-family member, and it often gets scooped up quickly by established row croppers.

And sadly, what Iowa grows isn’t garlic bread. It’s not tomatoes. It’s not strawberries or spinach or broccoli. It’s not wheat for small-scale breadmaking. And we aren’t investing in the infrastructure to grow and process those foods here. We’re not making it possible for kids to become garlic bread farmers. What we are doing is reinforcing the broken system that already exists.

We have the land. We have the climate. We have the know-how.

What we need now is the will to build something new.

Because everyone should be able to grow garlic bread.
Or at least dream about it.

---

If you care about land access in Iowa, follow the Iowa Food System Coalition and their new podcast: At the Iowa Farm Table. We’re working to ensure that kids can dream about garlic bread, farmers have strong markets, and that food-insecure Iowans have access to fresh, nutrient-dense food.