I sometimes wonder what my great-grandfather thought when he caught sight of that first car coming down the road. Its likely he kept his thoughts to himself. He certainly kept his old black buggy. For some 30 years, until the day he died, it gathered dust in the dim recesses of the barn. Perhaps he wasnt ready to let go of the past. Perhaps he wanted to hedge his bets on an uncertain future. Or perhaps he just couldnt bring himself to throw out something that had once been useful.
Whatever Clyde Dragoo thought of the newest technology, he and his neighbors around Camargo traded one kind of horsepower for another. Automobiles allowed them to travel more readily to town for supplies. Tractors enabled them to plant and harvest their fields more efficiently. It would be hard to argue against these benefits.
But the world is changing at a more breathtaking pace and on a greater scale than in my great-grandfathers day. And the benefits of the trade-offs are no longer so clear.
What did become clear after putting this issue together is that our writers weighed the impact of change, technological and global, by telling us the stories of some of the people who are going through it. We see these people hanging on, hedging bets, moving on.
Alan Mammoser introduces us to his cousin Alvin, who works the ground in Effingham County that his great-grandfather first tilled in the 1870s. But now, Alan tells us, Alvin will be the last generation of his family to work that land. In an economy that supports fewer farmers on bigger farms, that ground will no longer support even one of Alvins sons. ?Even here,? Alan writes, ?in this region of close-knit families, on a landscape shaped by generations of hard work and faith, people are slowly relinquishing their hold. Through generations they have weathered change, but now the corporatized farm economy is leaving this way of life behind.?
Bill Lambrecht introduces us to Paul Gebhart of New City, who is facing down the latest challenge of the corporatized farm economy: genetic engineering of feed grains. Paul, who produces organic pork, worries about ?genetic trespass? from his neighbors Roundup Ready ® beans, a potential problem farmers just one generation back couldnt have dreamed of. ?Genetic contamination,? Lambrecht writes in his newly released book, Dinner at the New Gene Caf?, ?is a vexing new side issue of the technol-ogy that promises to make work for farmers easier and more profitable. What levels of unnatural DNA will be allowable if food is to remain organic or ?identity preserved? And who will be liable if organic growers get their food rejected? These are real and troubling issues that the government and the agriculture industry have only begun to consider. Paul has been thinking about them, and asking discomfiting questions.? Lambrecht, too, has been thinking about the multinational com-panies that profit from re-engineering the worlds food supply, and asking discomfiting questions.
But farmers arent the only Illinoisans who must weather changes in the global economic climate. Kevin McDermott introduces us to Larry Goetz, the owner and bartender of MVPs Sports Bar & Grill near the gates of the Bridgestone/Firestone factory in Decatur. Goetzs problem is that his primary customer base is about to become unemployed. ?In fact,? McDermott writes, ?much of Decaturs fate these days is determined in corporate board rooms on the other side of the globe.?
If these stories tell us something about those who might be left behind, they also hint at ways to move on. ?Illinois plainly needs a new soybean,? essayist James Krohe Jr. suggests in his exploration on the future of farming. And Illinois farmers, he notes, have turned more than once in the past to new crops, and to new techniques for producing them.
Family friends tell me Clydes son Earl, my grandfather, was the first farmer to plant soybeans in Douglas County. So, like Krohe, I believe in the capacity of Illinoisans to prevail in this uncertain future, too.
Illinois Issues, November 2001
