Flowers on the Moon
by D. A. Houdek
As the train curves on the approach to the old airlock there’s a good view of the barrier mountains rising at the edge of Mare Nubium. Beyond is the crater that old maps call Alphonsus. Now it’s called Mariah Valley, though most maps add a notation naming it the The Valley of Mariah’s Flower.
Try to imagine it as Mariah saw it from the train whispering across Mare Nubium. But remember, even Mare Nubium isn’t quite the same as the one she saw. The shadows are softer. There’s a hazy look to the sky, dulling the stars, lightening the darkness. And the train made no sound except to the tourists and commuters within. Luna, herself, remained wrapped in the eternal shroud of silence and lifelessness that had always cloaked her…
***
Out the window of that train, Mariah watched the stark landscape pass by. The gray of the lunar rocks was burningly bright while casting sharp-edged shadows of deepest black. No motion disturbed the still-life tranquillity of the scene. The passage of the train through the broad valley raised no dust, sent no rush of wind to stir the powdery soil. Neither distant mountains nor nearby rocks heard even a hint of the train’s passage.
Luna ignores us, Mariah thought. When we’ve gone by it will be as though we were never here. That’s how some would rather it remained forever. The train rushed toward the towering wall of a mountain. Some long ago meteor had struck the moon throwing up these high, sharp peaks. The might of that falling rock was nothing next to the slow, but persistent, might of man.
Lights came on in the car as the mountain swallowed the train. Regular commuters didn’t look up from their papers and PIDs. The tourists oohed and aahed in predictable quantities while some vainly attempted pictures. Mariah sat quietly, her bag clutched on her lap like a precious treasure, looking at everything but only reacting within. Beyond the train, the glassy tunnel wall rippled barely a hand’s breadth away.
As the train slowed, a faint shiver passed through the cars. This caused no reaction in the tourists, but all the local commuters now looked up. It was nothing more than a small quake, possibly caused by the same forces within the moon that produced the gas venting that made Alphonsus so appealing for the project. A regular occurrence, but never a thing to take lightly when beneath a mountain, especially a mountain having stresses put on it unlike any in its history.
The airlock sent a different sort of shudder through the train. Mariah craned to see behind her, catching a glimpse of blackness eclipsing the tunnel end. Air filled the tunnel until the pressure matched the interior of the cars. The cars crackled and groaned as the pressure changed. Then, slowly, the train started forward again.
Mariah breathed heavily, straining to see forward, as the train continued through the mountain. Her view was blocked so she couldn’t see The Valley until her car emerged from the mountain.
First she gasped, then unexpected tears flooded her eyes. Who ever imagined, who had ever thought, there would be a blue sky on the moon? The train now traveled, much more slowly than before, through a pressurized tube elevated above the surface. Beyond, the landscape looked much like the previous plain, save for the bluish haze hanging low over it. Looking to the ring of mountains surrounding Alphonsus Crater, the sky showed distinctly blue. Vaporous wisps of atmosphere curled up the mountain slopes. If she looked directly up, through the clear roof of the car, the sky that appeared blue at an angle was darker, almost black, with stars still showing through. Mariah quit looking up.
Closer to the train were still the gray rocks and soil of Luna. The sun still shone hotly down upon them, but the shadows were softer, the light diffused into the darkness. Below the tracks the land fell away until they passed over a small stream. Miracle enough for some, to see water flowing freely over the surface of the moon. If they’d achieved pressure enough for that… Mariah wanted more.
The tourists muttered amongst themselves. They’d paid dearly to see this and were disappointed. How could they not be? The Valley looked bleaker than the most barren of terrestrial spots. How could they know they gazed upon a wonder beyond compare? This world, Earth’s moon, had never known a breeze to stir the soil. There had been no drifts, no dunes. Water had never left the its imprint in branching, twining channels etched in the surface. Erosion had been a thing that took eons with the solar wind and gravity slow forces of its action. Never had this world known the blurring of light by atmosphere, or the insulating tempering of heat and cold. To the Terrans it looked dead, deader than the alien harshness they’d just left behind.
Lower the land went, and perceptibly thicker became the atmosphere beyond the train’s tube. Eagerly, hopefully, Mariah stared down at the land moving by. There it was; a hint of green amongst the gray. Several varieties of lichens had been introduced to the surface, and recently some moss. None yet, however, could survive the immense extremes of Luna’s long days and nights. No plants yet existed independently on the surface of the moon. Still, it was wondrous progress.
“I don’t see the big deal,” she overheard one tourist say. No, he couldn’t. The photoelectric conduits strung from mountain peak to mountain peak couldn’t be seen from here. Nor could the artificial ionosphere they generated be seen. Using the sun’s abundant energy the conduits ionized the upper layer of gases, the heavy inert gasses, radon and xenon, the ones less easily lost to Luna’s low escape velocity. Below came the layers that held the lighter molecules, the oxygen, nitrogen, and CO2 that human lungs and Terrestrial life so cherished.
“Smog,” the same voice said with disdain looking at the hazy layer through which they passed. “Mankind goes all the way to the moon to bring air pollution.”
Ozone, Mariah thought, thinking lovingly of the gas that made a dangerous nuisance of itself at breathing level on earth but provided such a lovely radiation shield higher up. Already The Valley had ridden out solar storms of intensities that sent the residents of other lunar cities running to radiation shelters. Of course the people of Alphonsus had been inside the bubble, but the atmosphere cushion outside had kept the rad levels down to tolerable margins.
The train slowed again and Mariah tore her attention from the view to look at the town at the base of Alphonsus’ central peak—another oddity of this crater. The only surface city on Luna had a tiny permanent population, the others commuted in from the nearby cities. Coming to a stop, the train’s magnetic field slowly dissipated settling the cars down onto the wide rail. Despite the admonitions of the speakers to remain seated, everyone in the car but Mariah stood, gathered their belongings, and crowded toward the exits. The doors sighed, equalizing the minor variation in pressure. Hissing open, they let the flood of people out onto the platform.
Mariah waited until they’d all gone before she took her bag and stepped out. She wanted to have the full effect of the town without a swarming crowd around her.
Onto the simulated wood platform she stepped. Before her stood lampposts and park benches. Small trees grew up from the pavement surrounded by a riot of flowers. Yes, there they were, the flowers growing on the surface of the moon – growing in a container beneath a bubble. She looked away from them, hugging her bag closely to her. To the right of the platform was a general store made to look like an old barn. This absorbed roughly half of the tourists, most of the remainder being sucked in by the refreshment stand to the left. The commuters vanished into other buildings, some to work the tourist concessions, others among the scientists and engineers of The Valley atmosphere project. Only Mariah remained on the platform.
Moving to the right, she came to the end of the platform and the pseudo-wrought iron fence marking the boundary. Clasping it with one hand she leaned as far over the fence as she could, trying to touch the bubble. She could see it, despite attempts to make its surface non-reflective and invisible, and that ruined the illusion of being in the open. What destroyed it totally, for her, was the feeling of being enclosed. She could feel the boundaries of the bubble as thoroughly as she could feel the presence of the walls and tunnels of the sub-lunar city where she’d spent her life. Beyond the bubble stretched The Valley. Suited people were scattered in the near distance, working at various tasks about which she could only guess. Part of the regular work here was the hunt for lichens and spores that may have spread and taken root on their own. While some had been found, none had survived the long lunar day/night cycle. Life was tenacious, but never before had it been presented with a challenge such as this.
But nothing was as tenacious as the will of man. It made Mariah proud as she gazed out over The Valley to be part of a race that could dream such a thing as this, then make it real.
“Mariah!”
She spun to see Grandfather coming across the platform toward her. Dancing over the platform, she leapt, letting Grandfather catch her in his arms. It annoyed her to see several tourists aiming their cameras at her low-gee performance. Then she ignored them, concentrating wholly on the old man before her. When had she become taller than he? His skin was wrinkled and leathery with a tan unlike any ever managed by a person on the moon. In one hand he held a cane. A cane? Had he been injured? She remembered that when she was young he’d almost died in a tunnel collapse near the beginning of the project.
Seeing her expression, her Grandfather held up the polished wood for her to see better. “No, I don’t need it, my dear. Not much anyway. It’s funny how at ninety even one-sixth gee can feel like a burden to old bones. But I have it mostly because it’s from the first surface tree we tried.”
“You had a tree growing outside?” She hadn’t heard that before.
“Only briefly. It was started in the labs then taken out and planted in native soil. Poor thing didn’t last out a month, but it did start extending roots into the lunar soil, at least a little bit.” He smiled somewhat sadly. “It’s a start, still a long way to go.” He twirled the wooden cane. “And its genetic stock lives on, even if it does not.” Mariah fingers played over her bag as she thought of its precious, hopeful, contents.
Mariah looked back across the platform to the barren, smoggy valley on a world that wanted no part of it. This was Grandfather’s life’s work. He’d started on The Valley atmosphere project as a young man, when Mariah’s father was a baby. It had taken nearly a decade to fill in the gaps in the mountains, making an enclosed bowl of the valley. More time had gone into experiments on the best way to get Luna to hold an atmosphere for any length of time. So low was the escape velocity that in the intense heat of the long lunar days the molecules fled into space too rapidly to replenish. Layers had to be built, with heavier, less active, molecules on top serving as the cap to hold in other, vital gasses.
Once the crater that was this valley held atmosphere they’d move on to the next crater, sealing its ring of mountains, putting on the cap, filling it with gasses, many of which were gotten from the rocks and soil of Luna itself. Then the two areas would be joined and on they would go to the next, and the next, until they’d covered the entire surface of the moon with an atmosphere. Theory, plans, and prayers looked to the day when the atmosphere-holding cap – a permanent, planetary inversion layer – could be raised above the confining mountains and humans could walk on the surface of the moon without pressure suits or breathing gear. Before that time they planned to have plantlife bred that could tolerate the extreme length of the day/night cycle and the corresponding temperature variations.
It would be more than Grandfather’s lifetime away. More than Mariah’s too. It would be forever if some had their way. The moon’s pristine surface was being contaminated by the atmosphere project, some said. Various groups had threatened and tried to stop the project every decade or so over the years. Some foamed at the mouth over the nuclear reactors that broke the lunar rock down into its component elements. Others fumed at the Kozyrev Vent that enhanced Alphonsus’ natural gas venting. Grandfather mostly ignored them until time took care of the problem, but Mariah feared this time it was different.
“They’re threatening to shut down the project,” she said quietly. “The Earthsiders are making noise about it too, said they can see The Valley with the naked eye. They call it a ‘smudge on the moon’ and want it stopped. Polluting their God-given right to view an untarnished moon. Same with the enviro-dolts, here and on Earth. Say it’s not natural.”
“‘Naked eye’ my naked ass,” Grandfather huffed. “They’re not seeing this without a scope.” He sighed. “Same litany as always. Nothing we do on this world can ever be ‘natural.’ Not now, not ever. And nothing we can do on Earth can be unnatural… not if we’re native to that planet and not descended from Martian microbes or something.”
“Some complain this atmosphere will require constant maintenance, constant work by man to hold it in place.”
“Stupid argument.” Grandfather dismissed it. “How long would the people of Southern California last without constant maintenance of their artificial environment?”
“They’re serious this time,” Mariah insisted. “They tried to blow the dome at Mare Australe. It was hushed, but I know what almost happened.”
Grandfather lost his smile. “I hope they were shown to the exit — without suits.”
“Only one was caught. A kid, not more than twelve or thirteen.”
“Fronting for the others,” Grandfather sighed deeply and stared up at the bubble. Mariah followed his look. It consisted of several layers of plasticized kevlarium with self-sealing gel between. Small meteors had already struck it without breaching all the layers. Even any bomb short of a nuke that vaporized the whole valley was unlikely to do irreparable damage. Shrapnel that penetrated would leave holes immediately sealed by the gel. Pressure valving and designed-in compensators would take care of most of a contained blast or shock wave. The bubble itself had some flexibility. Local damage to structures and people wouldn’t destroy the entire community. Coupled with the exterior air pressure — substantially higher than Luna-normal vacuum — the bubble had little cause for concern. The Valley, itself, however had more weak points than could be counted, chief among them the train tunnel airlock.
Mariah could see the worries play across Grandfather’s face. “It’s not just the lunatics we have to deal with, but the legislators too. We have a centuries’ long project that can be shut down on the whim of some short-lived, short-sighted political twerp. One foolish generation can destroy the labor and accomplishment of a dozen generations preceding them, and deny that accomplishment to all the generations that follow.” He sighed. “What we need is something dramatic to show them, something that will so inspire their pathetic souls that they won’t dare destroy it.”
Mariah squeezed her bag and smiled.
Grandfather’s house was one of the old ones, dug into the base of the central peak. It had been part of the traditional lunar tunnel complex until the bubble was built over it. Then the face had been opened up. Grandfather had built a log cabin facade over the entry out of lunar concrete giving the house the same impression as the rest of the town; a Disneyesque version of a Terrestrial American frontier town.
Entering the front room of the “cabin,” however, Mariah noticed that Grandfather hadn’t abandoned his airlock. It stood open, but with controls set to monitor and seal if the pressure dropped. The front room was also done to resemble a pioneer cabin, but further in the old tunnel house was as blandly neoteric as the rest of the lunar cities, Mariah’s home included. On one side, however, the wall was exposed lunar rock. She put her hand on it, disappointed to find it covered with a transparent sealant. The opposite wall contained a mural showing The Valley beneath a bright blue sky. Puffy white clouds piled up against the mountains at one side, raining down on slopes covered with trees. In the foreground the floor of the crater was a carpet of flowers.
Mariah stared at it, at the flowers, thinking that Grandfather would not see this dream in his lifetime, and if things went the way they were heading now, she wouldn’t see it in hers. The tears that had filled her eyes on her first sight of The Valley had been tears of achy joy and pride, those filling it now were ones of frustration and dread that the dream would be snatched away.
Grandfather stood behind her, squeezing her shoulders. “I know how you feel.” His voice echoed the emotion she felt. “I’d feared there would be no one of my family to carry on after me. Your father hated this place so that I feared he’d infected you with it too. It was my fault, of course. The Valley was my life and my family. My children got pushed aside for it.”
“But it was important. He should have understood.”
Grandfather patted her shoulder and turned away. “You’re showing me now why he didn’t want you to come here. I think he knew it would take you too. I’d give my life for this place… have given my life. He didn’t want to lose you to that fanaticism.”
“Too late,” she whispered.
Mariah began working in the labs the next day. A series of chambers recreated the environment in The Valley as it now was, and, through a progression of projections, to how it would be over time. They worked in each to produce plantlife that would survive. Working from terrestrial stock was unavoidable. They had the advantage, however, of plants with generations of adaptation to low gee, but adapting to pressure, temperature, and sunlight extremes remained to be conquered. Their efforts were still in an infant stage, Mariah saw at a glance, this being her specialty. Until recently all efforts and funding had been directed into the atmosphere project alone, not the future that could bloom from it.
Other areas worked on building the atmosphere in a suitable mixture, and evaluating the impact on the changes here to the surrounding moonscape such as tracking faults and fissures in the nearby mountains.
Mariah willingly played on her grandfather’s name to get into every area. Being only a post-grad intern, she wasn’t expected to produce any useful work. Capitalizing on that she moved freely through all aspects of the project, making sure she was an accustomed sight everywhere. It took a bit more time to get Grandfather to take her outside the bubble, however.
The suits excited her. All her life she’d known the bulky, clumsy pressure suits that encased her in a shell, cut off from the world that was her home. This suit, made especially for The Valley, was different. It was semi-porous, made of a snug elastic material. Mirco tubing and conductors laced through the suit provided heating or cooling as needed. The air pack contained standard pressurized canisters coupled with an air pump to pull in the thin outside air. This supplemental system greatly expanded the range of the air supply. The helmet had even been redesigned, being a more rigid version of the town’s bubble.
Mariah felt her skin tingle as they stepped out of the bubble lock into the open valley. It was not excitement but the pressure change, something she’d never felt in quite this way in standard suits. Minuscule portions of her skin were actually in contact with the exterior of the moon. The idea thrilled her.
With the elastic suit Mariah could run, jump, and dance as she’d never been able before. She didn’t even mind the cameras of the tourists trained on her. Cavorting like a child, Mariah knew no Earthsider naked beneath their atmosphere could feel as free as she did now. Light enough to fly, she wished for wings. This was her world, her Luna, as she’d never known it before. Gentler, more moderate, this Luna reached out to welcome her while the other Luna spread tendrils of death from every shadow of its harsh emptiness.
“How long can a human survive exposed on the surface?” she asked Grandfather, then shut off the radio link.
Smiling indulgently, Grandfather boosted the volume on his external speaker. “You couldn’t. The air at the peak of Mount Everest is thick as soup compared to this.” Thin though the air was, it still transmitted his voice back to her as sound waves. After enjoying the novelty, she settled down and let Grandfather show her around key points of the project.
The water stream came out a pipe hidden in a rock at one end and was reclaimed at the other end of its run where they measured the rate of evaporation. Along its path it flowed over land that had never before known water. Mariah delighted in the sound it made as it ran, tumbling over rocks and then over a mini-waterfall. Crews along the edges tended the precious lichens and moss. In a still pool they introduced algae, hoping it would survive the dark phase.
Grandfather took her up the side of one of the mountains to a battery station. Electricity generated by sunlight in abundance during the day was stored in the batteries for use in the long night. As they climbed Mariah felt the prickling of her skin increase. If they climbed to the peak they’d be in near vacuum, beyond the capacity of the suits to sustain them.
Returning to the enclosed town made Mariah claustrophobic. Raised in enclosed spaces, suddenly anything other than an open sky suffocated her.
As part of her training she volunteered to take measurements of atmospheric densities in various locations. This let her keep the suit, returning each day to walk on the surface of the moon. Giving all the appearance of wide-eyed innocence and eagerness to learn, she kept her real purpose to herself. From her luggage she took the end result of a project she’d worked on from its beginnings as a junior high science project all through her post-graduate studies in genetics and botany. The years and the work came down to a few seeds… preciously few.
After using the atmosphere density information to find the optimum location, with the added criteria of being as far as possible from the normal activities of the other techs and scientists, Mariah took the seeds outside. Despite the flexibility of the elastic suit she couldn’t feel the fine seeds through the gloves. Watching them trickle into the ground she’d prepared, Mariah thought of the hope and promise in these tiny objects. Covering them carefully, she watered them. It was the first day of the lunar light phase.
Day after day the unrelenting sun beat down on the fragile vessels of new life. Each day Mariah brought water. When the temperature climbed too high she brought ice to cool the soil so the — hopefully — sprouting seeds wouldn’t be baked to death before they had a chance to live. She violated Grandfather’s rules about plants being able to survive without human intervention. Terrestrial farmers carefully nurtured and tended their crops and always had. Insisting on things growing naturally in such a wholly unnatural environment was nonsense, she decided. She knew he had his reasons, and they were sound, but quicker results were needed. The impatient members of the human race weren’t going to wait generations more to see a payoff from their investment.
On the tenth day Mariah was greeted by the sight of tender green shoots poking up through the gray lunar soil. Wishing she could touch them, stroke them, encourage them, she watched the struggling young plants with her gloved hands folded. That day she stayed out to the very limits of her air supply.
After five days of darkness the plants began to yellow. Anticipating that, Mariah turned on the grow-lights she’d brought. Shielding them from view, she rigged them with batteries. She added a heater the next day.
By the time the sun returned the plants were nearly ten centimeters high. They grew rapidly in the sunlight. Ice in the soil wasn’t enough to cool them anymore. Mariah kept the full sun on them, she’d bred them to take extremes, but put a battery operated cooling unit nearby. Edges of the young plants crinkled in the unrelenting sunlight. When one died, Mariah added a panel to block the sun part of the time.
By the end of the next dark phase two more were dead, and of the remaining three only one seemed to really thrive. If she could get seeds from that one, the next generation she bred would be stronger and more tolerant yet.
Mariah ceased to be impressed by the idea of being on the surface of the moon beneath a colored sky without a true pressure suit. She found herself looking instead at the moonscape around her, wishing she could touch the soil with her bare hand, and could touch the brave little plants she enticed to grow there. It would never be, not unless the news from the cities changed. When the air fees rose they blamed The Valley project. Water, ice, minerals… any cost or shortage was blamed on the project.
They had to see. They had to be made to see that it would work, could work, if only they didn’t abandon the baby before it had a chance to live. If only her little plants survived to show them how far the project had come, to show them just what the face of Luna could look like if they were only patient.
Mariah sat by her plants on the second day of the next light period. It was the most pleasant time in The Valley. The temperature was balmy, but not hot. Looking up at the thin, dark sky, it seemed to Mariah that there was a hint of something in the air. Grandfather had been working these past several weeks on the production of clouds — ground fog, more realistically. A lot of water had been pumped in from the nearby distribution center to supplement The Valley’s own Lunar ice supply. There were grumblings about rationing and shortages in the cities. Propaganda nonsense, Mariah knew, but the allegedly intelligent citizens of the moon believed it. Wild claims that Grandfather was strangling the moon by bleeding all its resources out into space were rampant.
If only they could see this. One of the three remaining plants was dead. The second didn’t look as if it would survive much longer, but the third… oh, the third! The bud at its top had just began to open. Red petals peeked out of the green, colors unknown before on Luna now grew in native soil not beneath a dome or bubble, but beneath Luna’s own sky.
Mariah sat by the plant for a long time, looking at it, thinking about the future of her home world. Even with its light gravity, the moon would one day have air one could breath without masks or helmets. Water would flow openly on the surface beside forests and fields…
This is what Mariah thought as she looked at one struggling blossom on one spindly plant. Or so it is believed. Looking back now we can only imagine her thoughts and motivations. We can reconstruct pieces of her actions. The rest is no more than a guess, but still a guess that has become legend.
What is indisputable is that she was on the surface when the attack came. The sound of the tunnel airlock being blown out would have carried to her across the lunar surface through the thin atmosphere her Grandfather had labored a lifetime to create. She would have seen the cloud of dust from the explosion, then the ground would have trembled beneath her feet as the shock wave rolled across Alphonsus Crater toward the bubble town.
She would have felt the rush of air out of The Valley.
In her suit, though inadequate for vacuum, she could have made it to the bubble airlock. She had breathable air enough. She never tried.
It is certain that Mariah finally did get to touch the naked surface of the moon. She was found with her cheek pressed to the ground. She’d taken off one of the suit’s gloves, too. In her tightly clenched hand was the soil of Luna. Her body lay over the top of her helmet, pressing it down to the ground, keeping the air within it from escaping. Under the helmet, its bloom intact, lived the first flower on the moon.
THE END
Her journey into novel writing started the summer before eighth grade when her father gave her an old typewriter. At all times of the day and night you would find her on the back porch penning her first work, which she would continue to write for the next 22 years. In 2007 – after marriage, filling her chronic entrepreneurial needs, and having five children – Bernadette began to write seriously with the goal of being published. That year she wrote 12 books. In 2009 she was contracted for her first trilogy and the published author was born. In 2011 she (being the entrepreneur that she is) opened her own publishing house, 5 Prince Publishing, and has released contemporary titles and will begin the process, eventually, of taking on other authors in other genres. Also in 2011 she became co-owner of Seven Songs Press and will release a novella as part of an anthology with other very talented authors in November 2011.
Coming in the next few weeks… Stars That Sing the Requiem, a collection of five of my science fiction short stories, each featuring a woman who reaches for the stars.
Just two days ago, on Sunday, we had what was probably our last boating day of the season. Next time we go up to the boat it will just be to get it over to the boat launch, maneuver it onto the trailer, and bring her to storage to rest for yet another long winter. But Boat Day on Sunday was glorious, with the temperature in the mid-80s, no wind, deliciously, pleasantly warm and summery. The spiders agreed.
In the midst of the remembrances and reflections on the tenth anniversary of 9-11, I will remember and honor the brave people of Flight 93. That flight, aimed for our nation’s capital, was crashed into a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
And where is that band who so vauntingly swore,
Naturally it was right after the big foot-and-a-half snowstorm that I first saw the lone baby deer struggling through the snow toward the house. It’s rare to see a deer alone here. Usually they’re in groups of four to a dozen, except for the occasional lone buck. But this baby was alone. And little; barely half-grown.
doesn’t seem to have new copies but does list the book available from several other booksellers. Or you can order the book directly from the Burr Oak online giftshop at: 
On Farms and Factory Farming
We just drove through Iowa. Where most people may have seen lovely farm landscape, I’m a farmer and I saw nothing but a toxic nightmare with ruined soil.
The only crops were corn and soybeans–both of which I avoid in food–with the few cattle in no-pasture feedlots. We couldn’t see the pigs or chickens; no doubt locked in buildings. It’s not the way to farm. It’s not the way to raise healthy food. It’s not the way to treat animals. What’s the solution?
The government should fix it!
Bah. The government created the factory farm problem by setting the stage to destroy the family farms.When I talk here about what took place, I’m talking from first-hand experience and what happened to the farms, people, and area I knew.
The beginning of the end of family farms was in the 1970s. The most devastating thing to happen to family farms was the government’s inheritance tax. Children could no longer inherit the family farm because they could not afford to do so. Inflation, exorbitant interest rates, and rising land prices (remember the Jimmy Carter era) made it impossible for the family farm to be passed down in the family. The bulk of family farms went fallow or were sold. Either way, they went out of business.
Our area, what had been an area of beautiful dairy farms, within a very sort span of time ceased to have any dairy farms at all. A few of my generation tried to take over farms, or to buy farms. Farming was in their blood and, despite the risks and endless hard work, they wanted to farm. Farming is a matter of pride. Farmers are truly independent… or they used to be.
Farmers know they feed the nation, and the world. By the late 1970s those who still farmed faced tremendous difficulty. At its best, farming is endless hard work. There are no holidays or weekends off. There are no cute little forty hour work weeks and no vacations. No one pays benefits or gives you medical insurance or a pension plan. If you want to increase your income you have to work harder to produce more. A true family farm requires a family. One person cannot do it alone. Children are required to work, and from a very young age. Get silly notions about child labor out of your head when I say that. It’s good for children to not only work, but to feel they are an actual valued contributor to the family income and business. A farm is a good place to raise children.
So, with the changes in the world and the farm financial situation, the women of the farms–who used to be full partners in the farm business–had to go out to find jobs to support the family when the farm could not. This was also a major factor in the cataclysmic decline in 4-H programs as mothers were no longer available to take such an active role in raising their children and supporting their programs and activities. But, that’s an aside. The men also started to work at jobs outside the farm. Imagine putting in a full dawn to dusk day on the farm, then going in to work a nightshift at a job in town? Is it any wonder the appeal of running a family farm started to fade and fade rapidly?
Another huge factor in the destruction of the family farm came also from our benevolent, far-sighted government. This was the requirement to have milk come from “Grade A” dairy farms. This did-in a lot of dairy farms. Yes, we want clean food. Grade A dairy barns are so clean you could eat off the floor. Great. The piping keeps the milk untouched and sanitary. Lovely. All good, right? A Grade A conversion was very, very expensive. Almost certainly not having the money on-hand to pay outright for such a conversion, farmers had to borrow a large sum at high interest rates to pay for the conversion, or go out of business.
Those dairy farmers who were older, or unable, or unwilling, simply went out of business. Where before this a dairy farmer in our area may have milked about 30 cows, to make the Grade A barns pay-off, to pay for the conversion and still make enough profit to live on, the dairy farms around us who stayed in business now went to 70 to 100 cows being milked, or more. This increases income, but also increases the work load. If dairy prices fall, as they inevitably did, then the outside job must be maintained to make the payments on the loans. It was a vicious, stressful cycle.
Farming had now lost any of the classic sense of “idyllic”.
Independence also took a hit when the government threw in more curves with FHA loans to farmers. A farmer applying for a loan to buy a farm, or upgrade to Grade A dairy would be told how many cows he had to be milking in order to get the loan. The numbers got absurd. Starting a farm became virtually impossible. Farmers where forced into a hopeless spiral where they simply could not milk enough cows to pay for the loans to buy the cows they had to buy to get the loans to have cows in the first place.
The other insanities our brilliant government threw in included attempts to get people to raise less corn… by paying them based on how much corn they grew. Naturally, people planted as much corn as possible because of this.
The dairy buyout was another horrific thing the government did, and in a way gave full government sanction to the abuse and torture of farm animals. A dairy farmer–a good dairy farmer, as most family farmers were–cares for his livestock and treats them as kindly as possible. A happy, contented cow produces more and better milk. This isn’t a new concept (though when considering the conditions on factory farms it is a lost concept). The government dairy buyout would buy and slaughter entire herds of dairy cows to decrease milk production. As awful as the idea of the unnecessary slaughter of fine, productive dairy cows is, the way it was done caused a number of farmers I knew to back out because they wouldn’t allow the abuse of their cows. The cows bought out were to be branded–hot iron branded–on their faces. Many farmers could not stand the though of this torture being done to their beloved cows and backed out. That is what our government was doing. That is how our government said it was okay to treat animals.
I don’t know how to unwind this food/factory farm mess, or even if it’s possible, but the government sure isn’t the way. The government wants people to accept cheap fodder as the norm (then blame the human victims for the obesity and heart disease caused by the horrific food). I get grass-fed, organic, free-range, etc. for us to eat and pay the substantial price for it, but–honestly–you can’t feed 6.5 billion people that way. So what’s the answer?
As we were driving through Iowa, I commented that I wondered if people farming now even knew how to properly farm the land, or if that knowledge was being lost. A farm can exist and produce on the same land for thousands of years, all without requiring outside fertilizers or creating any pollution. Not so the current farms with their endless fields of engineered, modified corn. Corn is hard on the soil. Yet crop rotation doesn’t happen. Artificial fertilizers do. Artificial fertilizers may produce tall, green corn stalks and high yields, but do they have the basic minerals and nutrients the human body, or the intermediary livestock fed the corn, requires to be healthy? No. Then the factory chicken farms, pig farms, and cattle feedlots produce waste that creates a serious pollution problem. This “pollution” on a proper multi-crop, family-type farm is called “fertilizer”. No waste. No pollution. A proper cycle that produces high-quality, nourishing foods.
There’s more to this rant about farming, about how the food you buy in the stores is not as “healthy” as it may seem. That will come later.