America had a long love affair with agriculture. While farmers constitute less than 2% of the population, they've maintained a substantial reservoir of good will. However, huge factory farms are siphoning off that asset. What were its sources and how is it threatened?

Farmers were revered by America's founders, especially Jefferson. Our economy was predominantly agrarian until 1900 and farmers helped America win World Wars I and II. Farms were idealized as wholesome, productive, and secure. The "general farm", a small to mid-sized enterprise which produced many varieties of crops and animals, reached its zenith about 1950.

Both my wife and I grew up in this setting and went to small country schools. Ours and the parents of our classmates were farmers or were at most one generation removed from the farm or ranch. We went to town for high school. Even there, everyone had close links to agriculture.

Midwest farms produced corn, wheat, oats, and several kinds of forage. All had gardens, many had bees and small orchards, at least a few apple trees. They raised both dairy and beef cows, hogs, and a flock of sheep. The wife kept chickens. This life was great Norman Rockwell calendar fodder. It's no wonder we miss it.

But miss it we must. The market forces worked their magic selecting for ever greater efficiency. But some of the magic is black.

Today the general farm, and its ranch counter part, is history. Small scale operators simply can't compete. It paid to expand and specialize.

From the consumers' standpoint, at least in the short run, this change is highly beneficial. Never has food been so plentiful, varied, or inexpensive. If one ignores or discounts trace amounts of synthetic chemical residue, the potential for excellent nutrition has never been equaled. For the risk averse, organically produced food is widely available, although usually at substantially higher prices.

There are, however, three other important ethical and ecological problems. Ethics first.

Beyond earthworms and bees, it's unseemly and disquieting to treat animals strictly as objects with mere commercial value. Surely cows, horses, sheep, and maybe even brood sows, have personalities. On our farm with only a dozen or so of each, many had names. They knew us and we them. (And people never ate anything that would come when called by its name.) We had expectations one for the other. Even when our sheep's ear tags reached four digits (blue tag # 1237), some ewes thought they were pets, Fida, Prom Queen, and Oreo for example, and we agreed.

On special days, Thanksgiving and Christmas, the animals would get special or extra rations. When it was especially cold, my grandmother would warm the chickens' mash. Such behavior may seem silly, it surely was inefficient, but it seemed right then and I defend it now.

In a feed lot processing 10,000 steers per year, a swine factory generating 100,000 hogs, or a plant producing 1,000,000 chickens, such special treatment is unknown, if not impossible. With margins razor thin, the computer dictates the rations, optimizing among numerous variables to maximize returns. In the relentless drive toward efficiency, we've traded off sensitivity and feelings of being connected.

A second problem involves drugs. When so many animals are so closely confined, there is great potential for devastating disease. Hence, the animals are constantly medicated. This selects for highly resistant strains of bacteria. The bacteria and some of the antibiotics reach the top of food chain where we consume them in our milk, eggs and meat.

Third, the ecological implications of this shift to factory farms are negative indeed. Our institutions evolved with small scale agriculture. In modest concentrations, manure is good, soil building stuff. But a system that cranks out oil tanker loads on a regular basis presents huge problems. Our institutions lag behind in dealing with this huge change.

Well organized, concentrated interests normally trump environmental sensitivity when the two conflict. While water flows uphill toward money, offal goes down hill toward poverty. Hence, factory farms locate amidst the poor. In Montana they gravitate to the Crow Indian Reservation and other impoverished areas.

It is no surprise that appropriate regulations have been so slow in coming. The political power of the wealthy and well organized is immense. And those running the factory farms exploit the residual reservoir of good will built up by farmers over the generations. Like our over pumped aquifers, this too is going dry.