-Farm News photo by Darcy Dougherty Maulsby
Luis Portilla (left), a livestock farmer from Spain, and Javier Fatas (center), a dryland farmer from Spain, traveled to Jefferson in mid-December to share their perspective on recent farmer protests across the European Union. George Naylor (right), a Churdan-area farmer and board member of Family Farm Defenders (FFD), spoke during the event, which FFD helped organize.

JEFFERSON — The images were striking. Row after row of tractors adorned with flags and homemade, painted protest signs. Huge farm equipment blocking the streets of European cities from Paris, France, to Brussels, Belgium, in 2024. Farmers demanding better government policy.

“We use tractors to block roads and remind people we are present,” said Javier Fatas, 59, a dryland wheat, barley, alfalfa and vegetable grower from Spain who visited with Iowa farmers and community members in Jefferson in mid-December.

Fatas traveled to the Midwest in December with Luis Portillo, 33, a young dairyman and cheese maker who raises cattle and sheep in the northern part of Spain. Like many European farmers, Portillo and Fatas have been squeezed by powerful ag retailers, undercut by foreign imports and plagued by overburdensome environmental regulations.

“The farmers are not against regulations, but regulations must not bankrupt agriculture,” said Fatas, who added that regulations need to be tailored to specific regions.

Farmers like Fatas and Portillo are not only protesting one-size-fits-all regulations, but a subsidy system that they say favors the big corporate players.

-Submitted photo
Luis Portillo, 33, is a young dairyman and cheese maker from the northern part of Spain.

“Who’s winning? The big corporations,” Fatas said. “We still need to have family farms, not just big corporations.”

The war in Ukraine has only made matters worse, disrupting supply chains and increasing European farmers’ cost of production, Portillo and Fatas added. Both men are members of the Spanish Coordination of Farmers and Ranchers (COAG), a national coalition of 150,000-plus farmers and ranchers.

“We had more than 500 tractors in one of our protests,” said Portillo, who has slept in his tractor at night during some of the protests.

Farmers in Italy, Greece, the Czech Republic, Belgium and beyond have taken to the streets in the last few years (with some protests dating back to 2019) to show the public their anger about new, costly rules that are being imposed on farmers.

“They are fed up with mandates and regulations designed without their input,” said Dave Salmonsen, senior director of government affairs at the American Farm Bureau Federation.

-Submitted photo
Javier Fatas, 59, is a dryland wheat, barley, alfalfa and vegetable grower from Spain.

Farmers across Europe are urging European Union (EU) officials to deal with farmers’ concerns over prices and bureaucratic rules that limit their ability to produce food and prosper, he added.

“One thing seems certain — old lessons have to constantly be learned by those in power: working with your nation’s farmers, instead of imposing top-down regulations, remains the best way to maintain a necessary and productive agriculture,” Salmonsen said. “Leaders must listen to those closest to the issues.”

Erasing rural culture

Fatas and Portillo toured rural locations in Wisconsin, Iowa and beyond in early December to share their perspective of the protests, learn more about American agriculture and discuss common concerns. Members of Family Farm Defenders (FDD) hosted the Spanish farmers.

“This tour was a great opportunity for farmers from both the U.S. and Spain to share their experiences as people who care for the land and for their rural communities and to explore policies that can support farmers wherever they farm,” said Patti Naylor, FFD board president who farms near Churdan with her husband, George.

-Farm News photo by Darcy Dougherty Maulsby
Javier Fatas (left), a dryland farmer from Spain, and Luis Portilla, a livestock farmer from Spain, are members of the Spanish Coordination of Farmers and Ranchers (COAG). This nonprofit organization is focused on defending farmers’ interests and serves as a collective voice for Spanish farmers’ needs and concerns.

Family Farm Defenders is a grassroots movement that supports fair, resilient agricultural systems that create opportunities for family farmers to produce healthy local and regional foods. These goals are increasingly hard to achieve in the EU.

EU farmers’ dramatic actions with their tractor protests highlight the dire conditions they find themselves in, Patti Naylor said.

“It’s something you can relate to, since American farmers are feeling the squeeze of high costs of inputs and equipment paired with low commodity prices.”

For all their differences, the United States and EU share another common experience — a trend toward fewer farmers.

“Europe has been losing 800 farmers a day,” Portillo said. “Also, Europe has lost 5 million farms since 2020.”

The data confirm this. Europe lost approximately 800 farmers every single day from 2010 to 2020, according to the European Commission. The number of farms is also plunging. In 2020, there were 9.1 million farms in the EU — approximately 5.3 million fewer farms than in 2005, according to Eurostat, the statistical office of the EU. This drop (nearly 37%) plays into the significant decline in the farming population across Europe.

America isn’t immune from declining numbers of farms and farmers. After peaking at 6.8 million farms in 1935, the number of U.S. farms fell sharply until the early 1970s. Since 1982, the number of U.S. farms has continued to decline, according to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service (ERS). The most recent ERS survey showed that there were 1.89 million U.S. farms in 2023, down 7% from the 2.04 million found in the 2017 Census of Agriculture.

Losing the culture of agriculture

But does this really matter? Some economists and analysts point to the fact that America’s agricultural productivity continues to rise, even as the number of farmers and farms drops.

Technology advancement has allowed U.S. farmers to produce more crops and livestock while using less labor and land. From 1948 to 2019, the quantity of farm labor used in the production of U.S. agricultural commodities fell by three-fourths, and land use declined by a fourth, according to USDA’s Economic Research Service.

During the same time, U.S. agricultural production rose to about 2.7 times its 1948 level, thanks to high-tech machinery, modern livestock barns, advanced genetics and inputs from fertilizer to crop-protection products.

All this comes at a cost, however, said George Naylor, a FFD board member.

“I helped organize a tractorcade in 1977 in my county seat of Jefferson when the American Agriculture Movement promoted parity pricing that would have prevented the tragic farm crisis of the 1980s and assured the health of our rural communities. Forty-seven years later, farmers around the world are questioning the trajectory of the farm economy that is leading to an agriculture without family farmers.”

The ongoing loss of farms is transforming nations around the globe, from India to Mexico to the EU.

“Whole societies are changing, because they’re losing their farms,” George Naylor said. “Ag policy is moving more people to the city. When is this supposed to stop?”

Rural Iowa, which contains 23.2% of Iowa’s population, continues to shrink, even as many of the state’s metro areas keep growing. While the COVID-19 pandemic temporarily slowed this persistent rural population decline, rural Iowa has continued to lose people since 2012, according to the Rural Iowa at a Glance 2023 edition/Population Trends from Iowa State University Extension.

The Spanish farmers commented on this as they traveled through rural Iowa, George Naylor noted. “One of them said, ‘It looks sad.'”

It’s important to look at the big picture and analyze potential unintended consequences of ag policies, he added.

“It’s fitting to discuss these issues in Jefferson,” Naylor said. “President Thomas Jefferson noted that independent family farmers were the most precious assets of a representative republic.”