Alfredisms: "Farms, farming and politics"
The Polk Progress was a Nebraska treasure that ceased publication in late 1989 after 82 years as a weekly newspaper. From 1955 until its last issue, the editor and publisher was the late Norris Alfred. In its last few months, the Progress had 900 subscribers in 45 states. Alfred was a remarkable Nebraskan with an uncanny eye for connecting the present with the future. Prairie Fire has collaborated with the Alfred family, the University of Nebraska School of Journalism and the Nebraska State Historical Society to locate and archive many of Norris's writings. We are capitalizing on our good fortune to present many of the Norris Alfred writings to our readership. We believe that his observations are as fresh and relevant to today's world as they were when originally written.
February 27, 1986 "Farms, farming and politics"
Converting Nebraska sandhill land to row-crop agriculture, probably, has been the most disastrous development of contemporary industrialized agriculture and its high-cost efficiency. We remember a character on local television news, with greedy-looking facial features, who had invested in sandhill ranch land with the intention of converting it to row-crop and then selling it as irrigated farmland at an inflated price. He justified his greed by claiming the reason he and his fellowmen (including the Chicago bankers backing him) were on this earth was to exploit it. He said it was a biblical injunction and God was on his side. Those sandhills were there expressly for his grasping purpose. And the subsidized gravy train of federal farm programs was helping him realize an ill-gotten fortune.
The Department of Agriculture has a hodge-podge of farm programs. For example, some were originally designed to help farmers save soil. There were other subsidized programs that encouraged wasting it. There are programs designed to save wetlands and other programs aimed at destroying them. Farmers can get financial help to bulldoze shelterbelts out of existence and put the land back into needless production. Concurrently, there are programs to help farmers plant shelterbelts. In the Department of Agriculture, the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. In between is an empty head.
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