The Iowa Hawkeyes say "America Needs Farmers." But does it?

Ed. Note #1: For those of you who are reading the blog for the first time, welcome. As an introduction to the basic ground rules of the site, you may want to read the initial welcome post here. I do hope you'll stick around (and comment! This whole blogging thing is much more fun for me that way).

Ed. Note #2: One may argue that if I'm going to restart this endeavor after nearly five months away, especially at this particular juncture, I'm doing my readers a disservice by not using the first post back to talk about what is almost certainly the most significant social movement in this country in some time, namely, Occupy Wall Street (or, if you prefer, #OccupyWallStreet). To which I say: you're probably right, and trust me, plenty will be written on that topic here. But just as one doesn't reintroduce a starving man to food by serving him a five-course meal, one doesn't start off an out-of-practice blogger with a topic on which he could probably write 50,000 words.

Ed. Note #3: If I'm going to keep this blog going (and I really, really do want to), I need help from you, dear reader. I'm simply not creative or insightful enough to feel confident in selecting a topic and writing (well) about it day after day after day. So I'm asking all of you to e-mail me if you have topics you'd like to see discussed here (don't be afraid to use the comments, either). My e-mail address is in the sidebar.

Now, then . . .

For those of you who are unaware (though, if you're my Facebook friend, you almost certainly are aware), I am a huge Northwestern Wildcats football fan. This may explain my persistent bad mood over the last several weeks, but in any case, on your average fall Saturday, I can be found in front of a television, cheering on a bunch of guys wearing purple and hoping that Dan Persa's Achilles tendon decides it doesn't hate him, and me, anymore. This past Saturday's opponent: the Hawkeyes of the University of Iowa.

If you don't follow the Big Ten Conference that closely, you may not know that Northwestern/Iowa has, in the last few years, become a rather intriguing rivalry (though don't say that to an Iowa fan, as he/she will promptly inform you that his/her Hawks have no rivalry with a school as inconsequential as Northwestern). This has a lot to do with the fact that, prior to last Saturday's 41-31 loss, my Wildcats had beaten Iowa in five out of the teams' six previous meetings, including three straight times at Iowa, despite Iowa usually being, on paper, the better team. Various theories have been put forward for why, to be stereotypical, a bunch of rich Chardonnay-sipping pencilnecks have recently had the number of a bunch of strapping corn-fed young lads, from the usual revenge hypotheses (Northwestern coach Pat Fitzgerald is avenging a broken leg he suffered as a player in Northwestern's 1995 game against Iowa that kept him out of the Rose Bowl) to the truly bizarre (something about evil magic and baked potatoes, and if you're a college sports fan and you don't read SBNation's absolutely spectacular Iowa Hawkeyes blog Black Heart Gold Pants, shame on you).

(I'm going somewhere with this, I promise.)

Given that the Iowa game has become something of an "event" for Northwestern fans, and an event we expect, for no good reason, to win at that, I was more than a little pissed off after the loss on Saturday, but I still have to admit that I have a great deal of (occasionally grudging) respect for most of the Iowa fans I've come across, who are loyal, knowledgeable, and respectful. (Offer does not apply to the Hawk fans who left the parking lot nearest my dorm in Evanston a disgusting mess after the 2007 game, or some of the people I saw talking about the game on Twitter on Saturday.) Prior to the Northwestern game, those fans pulled off two excellent card stunts, which looked something like this:

(Image courtesy Black Heart Gold Pants/SBNation, and I'll be damned if I can find a decent photo of the actual stunts themselves on the Internet.)

Look closely at that second image. In addition to the obligatory "Go Hawks!" and the famous Tigerhawk logo, the cards spell out the words "America Needs Farmers" and the circled letters "ANF." The slogan and the symbol were the brainchild of Iowa football coaching legend Hayden Fry, who used them to draw attention to the plight of the American farmer in the mid-1980s. (The "ANF" logo made its most famous appearance on helmet stickers worn by Iowa players during the 1986 Rose Bowl.)

It should be obvious that a great number of Hawkeyes fans are sympathetic to farmers, not least because many of them are farmers themselves. The University of Iowa uses its conspicuous presence in the public eye to draw attention to a group of people whose praises, it feels, are inadequately sung, and in doing so, it inspires pride in its fanbase. From a public relations standpoint, this is a killer move that makes entirely too much sense.

But does that slogan "America Needs Farmers" make any at all? It's a question I couldn't stop myself from asking on Saturday, or this evening, when, while buying dinner, I saw that my all-time favorite chain restaurant is running a promotion for the benefit of Farm Aid.

Of the more than 150 million working Americans in 2008, 618,000, or about 0.4%, were employed in crop production, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects those figures to fall to 587,000 and 0.35%, respectively, in the next seven years--and yet the United States still, according to the WTO, exported nearly $100 billion of food in 2009, far more than any other country. The United States is obviously wealthy enough that it could easily buy all its food from overseas, and given the utter clusterfuck of subsidies and protectionism that is this country's agricultural policy, how much more expensive it would be for the consumer to do so in a true open market is, in my view, an open question. (This does not even touch upon the idea that Americans buying more foreign food may help spur development in the world's poorer countries, as it is clear that current American trade policy is not much concerned with things like that.)

This is not intended to be an indictment of the American farmer--far from it; farmers do difficult, arduous work that I would have absolutely no idea how (and probably no ability) to accomplish, and I have nothing but respect for them. Nor am I suggesting that it is not sensible for America to have farmers, as the great majority of the land east of Denver and west of Chicago--roughly one-third of this country's area--is unsuitable for most purposes but ideal for farming all kinds of crops, and with such an abundance of fertile land and relatively few people, agriculture is probably the most efficient use of that land and those people. But I am suggesting that the glory days of the American farmer--the halcyon days when America Needed Farmers--have long been over, and may have been over even when Hayden Fry was slapping yellow "ANF" stickers on his players' helmets. (This is even truer when one considers that the idealized "family farm" so many Americans think of is largely a myth.)

America is now, most emphatically, an urban country. Our love affair with agrarianism was entirely appropriate as little as a century ago, when agriculture was our economy's single largest sector. It is, at best, archaic now.

(I'm pretty sure I devoted more words to Northwestern football than to the actual substance of the thing I wanted to talk about. I fear this may be a common occurrence going forward.)