Kansas farms are disappearing.

Thirty-five years ago, there were 87,000. Today, there are 62,000.

Fewer farms mean fewer farmers. So more than two-thirds of the state’s counties lost population between 1980 and 2000.

Four counties – Jewell, Graham, Rawlins, Osborne – suffered 20-year population losses topping 25 percent.

“It’s not good,” said George Pyle, a native Kansan and author of the book “Raising Less Corn, More Hell: The Case for the Independent Farm and Against Industrial Food.”

“Communities all across the state that once supported – and were supported by – farmers are drying up and blowing away,” he said.

More and more, Pyle said, family farms are giving way to bigger family farms or giant corporations that need fewer people to work more land, raise more cattle, feed more hogs.

“We’re told all the time that this is inevitable, that it’s a consequence of the free and open market,” he said. “But the market is neither free nor open – it’s built on subsidies that make no sense at all, that force the big to get bigger and the small to get out.”

Pyle, 48, knows Kansas. After growing up in Hutchinson, he spent 23 years writing for the daily newspapers in Garden City, Ottawa, Olathe, Chanute and Salina.

Now an editorial writer at the Salt Lake Tribune, he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for editorial writing in 1998.

The market, he argued, is controlled by a handful of corporations that have finagled a trade: Cheap food in exchange for the federal government looking the other way on enforcement of the nation’s environmental, work place safety and anti-trust laws.

“We’re helping the bear,” Pyle said, referring to the joke about the man who skipped church to go hunting. Later treed by a hungry bear, the man quickly prayed: “Lord, I know you can’t help me because I wasn’t in church today, but, please, whatever you do, don’t help the bear.”

“Our government and the ag lobbies have bought into the notion that if something is bigger, faster, more efficient – it has to be better,” Pyle said. “Well, that’s what (Russian dictator) Uncle Joe Stalin thought. He was wrong, too.”

“Raising Less Corn, More Hell” arrived in bookstores last week. Already, it has struck a chord with Dan Nagangast, a Lawrence organic farmer and executive director of the Kansas Rural Center.

“What this book does is take all the different issues that affect agriculture – world trade, commodity production, the environment, the fate of the family farmer – and ties them all together,” Nagangast said. “I know that sounds simple, but I can’t think of anybody else who’s done it.”

Prologue: Searching for Roots (.doc)

Aging farmers

At Kansas Farm Bureau headquarters in Manhattan, spokesman Mike Matson said the association does not dispute the demographic changes brought on by bigger-is-better agriculture.

“The average age of the Kansas Farm Bureau member is 58 to 59 years old,” Matson said. “Play that forward a generation, and you’ll see that the numbers of people producing raw commodities are clearly on a downward trend.

“And look at what’s happening to the land – it’s no longer a given that the son or daughter will come back to take over the farm,” Matson said. “As a result, we’re seeing fourth-generation farms divvied up and sold in ways the original landowners never would have imagined.”

Rather than fighting the changes, Matson said, Farm Bureau is looking for ways to help its members adjust and survive.

“The train is on the track,” he said. “I don’t think anyone is going to say if we stood in front of it, we’d stop it.”

That’s true, Pyle said, but only because farmers are small pawns in a big game.

“If things are going to change, the public is going to have to understand that farmers are too few in number to be politically powerful. The power in agriculture lies in the corporations that have made it the way it is,” Pyle said. “They’re not going to change.”

But grocery shoppers, he said, can make a difference.

“Instead of buying whatever’s cheap, they need to look a little harder and pay more for whatever’s organic or locally grown,” Pyle said, “whatever makes it possible for producers who aren’t in the industrial chain to make a living.”