As we sat chatting in the beautifully appointed dining room, a fresh gust of wind shook the trees outside. We all cast a half-questioning, half-anxious look at the clouds tempting rain outside. Although we had heard reports of heavy rain the night before elsewhere in Iowa, the half inch already received here was perfect for the growing corn and soybeans. Would it rain more? How much more? Without a thought to the unspoken interruption, we turned back to our conversation. I was explaining the concept of community supported agriculture (CSA) and how it works in the Upper Valley to a farming couple. I was surprised to find myself introducing the idea of a CSA—a business model in which a family or individual purchases a share in a vegetable farm for a season and in turn receives a fraction of the harvest taken each week—to lifetime professional farmers living on some of the most fertile farm ground in America.

With the end of winter term, I packed up my dorm room and headed West—well, “west” at least for this Easterner—to central Illinois. As an intern with a farm management company, I’ve spent the last two months learning about the mass-production agriculture I had only previously studied in the classroom.

Saying that farming in Illinois and Iowa is absolutely dominated by corn and soybeans (beans for short) would be an understatement—corn and beans ARE farming. The typical full-time farmer works anywhere from 1,000 – 2,500 acres, that acreage generally split in a two-year rotation between the two crops. While most farmers own at least some of their own land, a considerable portion of their operation is often land leased from an absentee landowner. The most typical lease arrangement is a crop share. The farmer provides the labor, equipment, and fuel while the landowner provides the land, pays the property taxes, and maintains the physical improvements like drainage lines and terraces. The two split input costs like seed, fertilizer, and herbicide and at the end of the season each receives 50% of the harvested crop or some other negotiated percentage. In a cash-rent arrangement a farmer pays a flat fee to the landowner, pays for all the inputs, and takes all the harvest. Under a custom arrangement a landowner pays a farmer to farm the land and the landowner owns all of the production at the end of the season. With farmland in central Illinois pushing $5,000/acre, a combine (used to harvest corn and beans) retailing at $250,000, and farmers using in excess of 10,000 gallons of diesel fuel a year, there is some serious money in farm business.

When I arrived in Illinois, my conception of agriculture had me expecting to see corporate farms driving independent farmers out of business, environmental values ranking a distant second to production goals, and government subsidies drawing strong support in farming communities. I had some learning to do.

A polite half-smile and gentle shaking of the head is the usual response I receive when I tell farmers an impression exists out East that they’re being forced out of farming by massive agricultural corporations. Big business is certainly involved in equipment, biotech, agrichemicals, and food processing, but I have yet to hear of a single faceless corporation that owns an enormous swath of land and farms it with a fleet of tractors purchased at wholesale prices. Incorporated operations are frequently incorporated by the families who run them—brothers working together, father and son pairs, husband and wife couples. Farming, like every other industry, has become increasingly efficient with advances in technology. A farmer today can feasibly work a thousand acres or more—an impossibility even twenty years ago. The “disappearance” of the family farm is nothing new – improvement in food production that enables urban migration has been the story of civilization for thousands of years.

The consolidation of agricultural businesses into giants like Monsanto and Dupont does reduce competition and selection in the markets for seed, fertilizer, pesticide and other inputs. While farmers may not have total control over their input choices, the chemical companies do not have total control over the farmers either. My impression that large corporations forced farmers into new products was largely incorrect—the farmers with whom I’ve spoken make changes only after carefully evaluating the research and weighing the costs and benefits. But farmers are still subject to market forces largely outside their control. As John F. Kennedy so insightfully said, “farmers are the only businessmen who buy at retail, sell at wholesale, and pay the freight both ways.”

Soil erosion. Groundwater pollution. Habitat reduction. The environmental perils of agriculture hold a prominent position in numerous environmental studies courses and I expected to see some old fashioned pillaging of the earth when I arrived in the Corn Belt. My secret tabloid desires went unfulfilled. Farmland is, quite simply, an investment, and an expensive one at that. Landowners and farmers are savvy businessfolk, and poorly maintained soils, erosion, and runoff cost both the environment and the wallet. Everyone I’ve met is in this industry for the long-term, and it’s no coincidence that he who ignores environmental concerns soon runs the nutrients out of the soil and himself out of the farming business. While agriculture needs to be regulated by agencies like USDA and EPA, I’ve found that environmentalists and farmers share much more in common than the elite environmental watchdog groups in Washington had me believing.

At the global level, a growing block of developing nations concerned with world agricultural markets is pushing the subject of farm subsidies to the forefront of international discourse. Any changes to the current system stand to have dramatic affects on corn and bean farmers in the Midwest. I thought I would find farmers in Illinois and Iowa banding together and leaning heavily on their elected officials to protect their subsidy programs. Once again my assumptions were wrong.

Government programs spread a wide spectrum of directives. Direct commodity subsidies pay farmers to produce (or not produce) a specific crop like corn or soy, while cost sharing and conservation programs promote certain environmental practices. For example, one cost-share program helps landowners diffuse the installation costs of windbreaks; another program pays landowners to remove wetlands from production and replant those wetlands with native prairie grasses. Many of the farmers I questioned expressed an elemental objection to accepting government ‘handouts,’ but as businesspeople they cannot ignore sound financial opportunities. In many cases, however, enrollment in subsidy programs requires headache-inducing paperwork, which more than one frustrated individual has described as “jumping through hoops.”

What have I heard farmers propose the US government do with subsidies? “Get rid of them.” It would be difficult going for a few years, one farm manager told me, but in the end it would be easier, fairer, and probably better for the farmer. Other farmers with whom I’ve spoken seem to agree. New Zealand’s agricultural industry stumbled briefly when government subsidies were terminated, but it has since recovered and is now as strong as ever.

There is a tangible separation between the agricultural policy coming from Washington and the thoughts of farmers in the Midwest: US agricultural policy would be quite different were it written by the farmers I’ve come to know. As Dwight Eisenhower once said, “farming looks mighty easy when your pencil is your plow and you’re a thousand miles from a cornfield.” We would do well to keep this quote in mind around the discussion table back in New Hampshire.

Jonah Kolb is a rising senior and environmental studies major at Dartmouth College. He is currently interning with Moore & Warner Farm Management in Clinton, IL.