This letter is an elegy to three farms going out of production.

I grew up in Western Pennsylvania, and watched the mills, and the towns connected to them, die. Rather, they were murdered, as the mills fled first South, then overseas, subsidized by American blindness. I was raised in an orphanage in Pittsburgh, also a working farm, where we fed the pigs, ducks and geese, moved the cattle to evening barns, and dug gifted potatoes by hand in the fields. Later, in a seminary also a working farm, I picked apples alongside migrant farmworkers, shucked corn and killed rats with pitchforks.

When I came West, I worked in the Gorge, and watched timber towns die, killed by environmental restrictions and lawsuits. City environmentalists knew all too well that delay in access to timber could kill a mill, and its town, which would never recover, even if the endless lawsuits were defeated. By the time the lawsuit was won, the mill was gone, the jobs were lost, the workers moved away. No one really cared about the Spotted Owl, which was found to flourish outside Old Growth anyway.

“The Precautionary Principle” ruled, and the perils of “external costs” were not applied to environmental activists, who could litigate and lose without costs. If their lawsuit killed a town, not their problem. This was economics of the ratchet: the environmentalists, granted standing to sue without costs, could not lose. They were ever so noble, at the costs of the lives, jobs, and communities of others. They could always get their food from Safeway, their electricity from a plug in the wall, their trees from Canada, their steel from Japan and Korea, their Nikes from China.

NIMBY became a national motto, and multiple use (formerly a guiding principle for federal land use) an evil phrase where now only “recreational” use was tolerated.

I see this now, as small businesses shut down, supposedly because of coronavirus, will never recover. Environmentalists don’t care, or maybe they understand all too well, that when the fisherman can’t make the monthly payments and loses his boat, when the mill shuts down, when the lumberman can’t pay the mortgage and loses his truck or his home, there is no job to go back to when the fisheries reopen, or timber again becomes available.

But meanwhile, unregulated, the predatory fishing boats of Japan, Korea and China plunder the seas and destroy fisheries. We blame the dams, when the problem in largely at sea. The farmer lives on a thin margin: when he can’t get water for one year, he can’t just come back the following year. As Aeschylus taught: “The affairs of men hang on a slender thread.” Water set aside for fish or Indians (who sell their “sacred” fish on the side in the Gorge), water taken for millions of illegal immigrant city populations in California, is denied to Klamath and Central Valley farmers.

Last year, my father-in-law died, age 94. We live on a 50-acre farm, where he moved in 1960 and raised his family. We raised our children here, where they fed the animals and brought in the hay. The farm house was built in 1905; we could have been a Century Farm, except we didn’t want any more regulations. The land is zoned Exclusive Farm Use (EFU), which means it can’t be subdivided. They obtained a temporary hardship permit in 1990, which allowed us to move onto the farm to help them with the cattle, hay, horses, pigs and crops. They lost a chance to subdivide when a required notice was never received. So now, with both dead, and six heirs, the farm has to be sold. Paradise lost.

A friend was a worm farmer outside Canby. He used his land, rented land from farmers and orchardists and created jobs for dozens. Then the state decided his workers were not independent contractors but employees, and forced him to pay, including penalties.

It put him out of business. Like much state regulation, the regulators seem not only not to care that their work eliminates farm jobs, but sometimes seem to glory in imposing prohibitive costs and penalties on farmers. State agencies join with “progressive” forces to attack farmers, using penalties and attorneys’ fees and costs to coerce farmers.

He moved back to the family orchards in Washington, but is engaged in shutting them down because of regulatory costs and Chinese competition. Again, issue after issue of the Capital Press shows state regulators, teamed with environmentalist and “farmworker” lawyers (free), taking a delight not in sustaining jobs, but in shutting farmers down.

In the past, we have watched blackmail. The farmworker has free representation. If he loses, he pays nothing. The farmer receives a demand letter: pay or we go to federal court. It will cost the farmer more to defend, even if he wins, but if he loses, he also is socked with attorneys’ fees and costs.

He and I both know Mexico well, lived in Mexico, are fluent in Spanish. He created jobs for Mexicans. The state killed those jobs, all in the name of “protecting.” One of today’s Wise Men, Victor Davis Hanson, a classic scholar and Hoover Institute Fellow who is also a farmer in California, has written well of the self-destruction of California, so very recently the envy of the world.

Just up the road, inside Canby’s Urban Growth Boundary, prime farmland is being turned into residential homes. Outside the Urban Growth Boundary, marginal farmland may not be used for residences. The perverse effect is the opposite of that supposedly intended by Oregon’s land use laws. ”Good intentions” have been mistaken for wise results, instead of judging by results. The false “scientists” of Laputa control the laws. The “virtuous” preen, and the working man is disinherited and despised.

The Great American impulse which settled the Plains, which built TVA, Hoover, Bonneville and Grand Coulee to “run the great factories and water the land,” that turned the desert into rich farmland, and gave electric light and hope to the Northwest, seems now turned on itself. All that good is now called evil. Even Woody Guthrie, like the patriotic Democrats of the 1950s, would be too American for them.

The American Founders did not anticipate that free American citizens would be so bound, Gulliver to the Lilliputian State Regulators from the cities, who do not or will not understand the sources of wealth in actual private industry and production. They think that money grows on Washington trees (with the Federal Reserve, perhaps that is true, although an illusion: such “money’ is theft, and avoids the moral nexus of taxation), or can be endlessly extracted by taxes and fees.

The Declaration of Independence spoke of how the King “has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.” They did not anticipate that “free” Americans can hardly take hammer in hand or fill a pothole (“wetland” — WOTUS) without first getting multiple permits from an evermore regulatory and punitive state.

As our farms disappear, as our mills disappeared, as our timber and mining disappeared and shipped overseas, as our dams are torn down, our coal/oil/gas industries shut down, as nuclear is neglected, we need to understand that we are watching not natural death, but murder. Perhaps a better word is suicide, as our children are taught that a free market capitalist economy is evil, and that the Founding values and example of no account.

Alan L Gallagher

Canby, Ore.