Our corporate and political cultures have become so shameless and brazen they will happily exploit the farmer to sell trucks and win votes while destroying the very idea of the farmer and the family farm. One of the most popular Super Bowl Ads was a poignant testament to the family farmer by GM, the makers of Ram trucks and a foundation of a corporate and economic system that has driven the family farm literally into the ground. Even the people oohing and aaahing over this manipulative and emotional advertising didn’t seem to realize that the very ideas evoked to sell big and expensive trucks have been destroyed across rural American.

Economists decided long ago – and politicians agreed- that the family farm is no longer efficient in the global economy. For some years now, I have been photographing struggling family and diary farms and listening to farmers tell me how their children can’t find work in their own hometowns, how they are overwhelmed by regulations – often pushed by unknowing legislators, strident animal rights activists, and how they are forbidden to price their own products, unable to compete with giant corporate farms that important cheap labor,  kill cows after two or three years when their lactating decreases, manipulate prices and do not permit their cows to set food outdoors in their entire lives. As family farms perish, so are the value systems they embodied, the ones GM is using to sell gas-guzzling trucks.  It is a monstrous hypocrisy to evoke family farms to fatten corporate coffers but typical of the Orwellian image manipulations of the Corporate Nation. We are so busy being entertained we no longer know what we are really watching. By most estimates, there will be few, if any, family farms left in American in a decade or so, almost all of them sacrificed to the rapacious growth agri-business and corporate farming.

I don’t think you’ll see that in a Super Bowl Ad.

Homesteading and organic farms get much more media attention that traditional family farms – they are hipper, cleaner and much more romantic – but farmers understand the entire economic and political regulatory system are now so stacked against them that it is possible to compete, something young organic farmers are beginning to see for themselves as they grow older and try and figure out labor costs and pricing competition. Our farmers down the road are perishing while food chains fly produce in from South America at twice their prices.

Across rural America, jobs and entire communities have been sacrificed to box stores and the global economy, rural children forced into bad jobs in coastal and urban areas. This evokes China much more than the United States.  I watched this Super Bowl and I also wanted to cry, but not because the ad was nostalgic. Because it was an obituary, not a tribute.