Consolidation and tariffs spell an uncertain future for small farms, Paige Williams writes, with photographs by Bob Miller. Is an American way of life disappearing?
Tariffs imposed by President Donald Trump are worsening the problem by driving up the cost of fertilizer, and of steel and aluminum, which are essential to the manufacture of farming equipment. The tariffs have also provoked retaliation from major customers, including China, once a reliable buyer of U.
S. commodities. In February, a bipartisan group of former government officials joined representatives from the grain, pork, corn, dairy, biofuel, and soybean industries in beseeching Congress, in a public letter, to reverse Trump’s trade policies, citing “tremendous harm” and the possible “widespread collapse of American agriculture.” When farmers suffer, they wrote, “the entire rural economy is impacted—from schools, to churches, to main street businesses.” Farmers were struggling long before Trump. In the eighties, during a crisis triggered by skyrocketing interest rates and plummeting land values, Allen abandoned dairy, a 24/7 stressor, and focussed on row crops. For extra income, he fished in tournaments with his wife, Cindy, winning cash and boats. He led fishing expeditions at Kentucky Lake, until Asian carp, an invasive species, overtook much of the crappie and bass. He sublet a hundred acres. He fixed farm machinery, cut timber. He bought, trained, and sold quarter horses. He kept cattle—enjoyable, but all-consuming. When Allen was forty-one, a branch fell on him while he was cutting timber, cracking his hard hat and his spine. As he was being loaded into a medevac chopper, he told his daddy, “Check on my Charolais heifer, because she’s gonna have a calf—probably tonight.” In the I.C.U., Allen dreamed about being trapped beneath the floor of his barn. The dreams were so upsetting that he had to be restrained. He spent nearly a month in the hospital. In rehab, he asked, “When y’all gonna let me go home?” When you can dress yourself, he was told. The next morning, he had his clothes on. Allen soon returned to farming, with a back that constantly ached. Fifteen years ago, his granddaughter, Zoey, was born. Both her parents had addiction. Zoey was days old when her grandparents took her in. She was not yet three when Allen, whom she calls Pappaw, or Paps, put her on a pony named Tucker; Paps said she “rode the hair off that thing.” Later, she liked hopping on a horse and flying bareback through the fields, her long hair flopping between her shoulder blades. She won barrel races with an almost feral intuition. “You got to be born with that talent—God had to give it to you,” Paps once told Bob Miller, a Birmingham-based photographer and documentary filmmaker who’s been chronicling the family for years. Zoey’s profound connection to horses used to mystify her classmates. “I don’t understand them,” she says, “how they can sit in their room all day and play on their phones, or play video games, and not go outside.” Now a high-school freshman, Zoey prefers horses to school. Paps taught her how to break and train them—what to do when “starting a new horse,” what to do when thrown. “The No. 1 rule,” she says, is “after you get bucked off, you always get back on. You gotta show the horse who’s boss. If you don’t, they’re gonna try to get away with a lot of things.” Horses may give Zoey a path forward in life, regardless of what happens to the farm. She’d move to Texas if not for all the tornadoes. So, maybe Tennessee; maybe Wyoming.
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