For Americans who have been looking to Congress to reform the food system, these past few weeks have been, well, the best of times and the worst of times. A new politics has sprouted up around the farm bill, traditionally a parochial piece of legislation thrashed out in private between the various agricultural interests (wheat growers versus corn growers; meatpackers versus ranchers) without a whole lot of input or attention from mere eaters.
Not this year. The eaters have spoken, much to the consternation of farm-state legislators who have fought hard - and at least so far with success - to preserve the status quo.
Americans have begun to ask why the farm bill is subsidizing high-fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated oils at a time when rates of diabetes and obesity among children are soaring, or why the farm bill is underwriting factory farming (with subsidized grain) when feedlot wastes are polluting the countryside and, all too often, the meat supply. For the first time, the public health community has raised its voice in support of overturning farm policies that subsidize precisely the wrong kind of calories (added fat and added sugar), helping to make Twinkies cheaper than carrots and Coca-Cola competitive with water. Also for the first time, the international development community has weighed in on the debate, arguing that subsidized American exports are hobbling cotton farmers in Nigeria and corn farmers in Mexico.
On Capitol Hill, hearings on the farm bill have been packed, and newspapers like The San Francisco Chronicle are covering the legislation as closely as The Des Moines Register, bringing an unprecedented level of attention to what has long been one of the most obscure and least sexy pieces of legislation in Congress. Sensing the winds of reform at his back, Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa, chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, told a reporter in July: “This is not just a farm bill. It’s a food bill, and Americans who eat want a stake in it.”
Right now, that stake is looking more like a toothpick. Americans who eat have little to celebrate in the bill that Mr. Harkin is expected to bring to the floor this week. Like the House bill passed in July, the Senate product is very much a farm bill in the tradition- al let-them-eat-high-fructose-corn-syrup mold.
For starters, the Old Guard on both agriculture committees has managed to preserve the entire hoary contraption of direct payments, countercyclical payments and loan deficiency payments that subsidize the five big commodity crops - corn, wheat, rice, soybeans and cotton - to the tune of $42 billion over five years.
The Old Guard has also managed to add a $5 billion “permanent disaster” program (excuse me, but isn’t a permanent disaster a contradiction in terms?) to help farmers in the High Plains struggling to grow crops in a drought-prone region that, as the chronic need for disaster aid suggests, might not be the best place to grow crops.
When you consider that farm income is at record levels (thanks to the ethanol boom, itself fueled by another set of federal subsidies); that the World Trade Organization has ruled that several of these subsidies are illegal; that the federal government is broke and the president is threatening a veto, bringing forth a $288 billion farm bill that guarantees billions in payments to commodity farmers seems impressively defiant.
How could this have happened? For starters, farm bill critics did a far better job demonizing subsidies, and depicting commodity farmers as welfare queens, than they did proposing alternative - and politically appealing - forms of farm support. And then the farm lobby did what it has always done: bought off its critics with “programs.” For that reason “Americans who eat” can expect some nutritious crumbs from the farm bill, just enough to ensure that reform-minded legislators will hold their noses and support it.
It’s an old story: the “hunger lobby” gets its food stamps so long as the farm lobby can have its subsidies. Similar, if less lavish, terms are now being offered to the public health and environmental “interests” to get them on board. That’s why there’s more money in this farm bill for nutrition programs and, for the first time, about $2 billion to support “specialty crops” - farm-bill-speak for the kind of food people actually eat. (Since California grows most of the nation’s specialty crops, this was the price for the state delegation’s support. Cheap indeed!)
There’s also money for the environment: an additional $4 billion in the Senate bill to protect wetlands and grasslands and reward farmers for environmental stewardship, and billions in the House bill for environmental cleanup. There’s an important provision in both bills that will make it easier for schools to buy food from local farmers. And there’s money to promote farmers’ markets and otherwise support the local food movement.
But as important as these programs are, they are just programs - mere fleas on the elephant in the room. The name of that elephant is the commodity title, the all-important subsidy section of the bill. It dictates the rules of the entire food system. As long as the commodity title remains untouched, the way we eat will remain unchanged.
The explanation for this is straightforward. We would not need all these nutrition programs if the commodity title didn’t do such a good job making junk food and fast food so ubiquitous and cheap. Food stamps are crucial, surely, but they will be spent on processed rather than real food as long as the commodity title makes calories of fat and sugar the best deal in the supermarket. We would not need all these conservation programs if the commodity title, by paying farmers by the bushel, didn’t encourage them to maximize production with agrochemicals and plant their farms with just one crop fence row to fence row.
And the government would not need to pay feedlots to clean up the water or upgrade their manure pits if subsidized grain didn’t make rearing animals on feedlots more economical than keeping them on farms. Why does the farm bill pay feedlots to install waste treatment systems rather than simply pay ranchers to keep their animals on grass, where the soil would be only too happy to treat their waste at no cost?
However many worthwhile programs get tacked onto the farm bill to buy off its critics, they won’t bring meaningful reform to the American food system until the subsidies are addressed - until the underlying rules of the food game are rewritten. This is a conversation that the Old Guard on the agriculture committees simply does not want to have, at least not with us.
But its defiance on the subsidy question may actually be a sign of weakness, for one detects a note of defensiveness creeping into the rhetoric. “I know people on the outside can sit and complain about this,” Representative Collin Peterson of Minnesota, chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, told The San Francisco Chronicle last summer. “But frankly most of those people have no clue what they’re talking about. Most people in the city have no concept of what’s going on here.”
It seems more likely that, this time around, people in the city and all across the country know exactly what’s going on - they just don’t like it.
Mr. Peterson’s farm bill passed the House by the smallest margin in years, and might have been picked apart on the floor if Representative Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, hadn’t leapt to its defense.
(She claimed to be helping freshmen Democrats from rural districts.)
But Senate rules are different, and Mr. Harkin’s bill will be challenged on the floor and very possibly improved. One sensible amendment that Senator Byron Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota, and Senator Chuck Grassley, Republican of Iowa, are expected to introduce would put a $250,000 cap on the payments any one farmer can receive in a year. This would free roughly $1 billion for other purposes (like food stamps and conservation) and slow the consolidation of farms in the Midwest.
A more radical alternative proposed by Senator Richard Lugar, Republican of Indiana, and Senator Frank Lautenberg, Democrat of New Jersey, would scrap the current subsidy system and replace it with a form of free government revenue insurance for all American farmers and ranchers, including the ones who grow actual food. Commodity farmers would receive a payment only when their income dropped more than 15 percent as the result of bad weather or price collapse. The $20 billion saved under this plan, called the Fresh Act, would go to conservation and nutrition programs, as well as to deficit reduction.
What finally emerges from Congress depends on exactly who is paying closest attention next week on the Senate floor and then later in the conference committee. We know the American Farm Bureau will be on the case, defending the commodity title on behalf of those who benefit from it most: the biggest commodity farmers, the corporations who sell them chemicals and equipment and, most of all, the buyers of cheap agricultural commodities - companies like Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill, Coca-Cola and McDonald’s.
In the past that alliance could have passed a farm bill like this one without breaking a sweat. But the politics of food have changed, and probably for good. If the eaters and all the other “people on the outside” make themselves heard, we just might end up with something that looks less like a farm bill and more like the food bill a poorly fed America so badly needs.
Michael Pollan, a contributing writer at The Times Magazine and a professor of journalism at the University of California at Berkeley, is the author of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” and the forthcoming “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto.”
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
Cant stand Micaehl Pollan’s fuzzy environmentalism.
A few quotes form the New Yorker article on paul Watson should stem that:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/11/05/071105fa_fact_khatchadourian
OR http://tinyurl.com/2kdld4
Watson said, “It’s all human drama. That’s all anybody’s interested in, human drama. Nobody is questioning the whales that are dying out here.” Then he muttered, “Hominids, man, goddam hominids.”)
Watson believes that humanity’s impulse to organize its surroundings, no matter how benign-seeming or elevating, is inherently destructive. This impulse—dating as far back as the first hoe—has been considered beneficial, Watson argues, because people have assumed that altering the shape of nature does not have real consequences, or because they have measured those consequences only in relation to how they affect humanity, or because they believe that they have a God-given right to do what they wish with plants and animals. Watson considers religion to be the invention of an arrogant species that has spent too much of its existence attempting to remove itself from the animal kingdom.
In the seventies, Watson became interested in the writings of Henry Beston, an early-twentieth-century naturalist, who wrote, “The animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained.” Watson found similar ideas in the work of Henry Fairfield Osborn and William T. Hornaday, and in the Deep Ecology movement, associated with Arne Naess, a Norwegian philosopher and mountaineer, who, in the early seventies, noticed that some environmentalists had begun arguing that no species was of greater worth than another, and that ecosystems should be protected for their own sake, not simply to benefit mankind. A “deep” ecologist would clean up a pond because plants and animals deserve to be free of pollution; a “shallow” ecologist would preserve the pond so that his grandchildren could have a nice place to swim.
Watson has said that “cancer is a cure to nature’s problems,” that earthworms are more ecologically important than people, and that humanity resembles a virus on the verge of killing its host, the planet.
“People say, ‘You’re incredibly arrogant,’ ” Watson told me. “I say, when you’re dealing with a species that’s as arrogant as the human race you’ve got to be arrogant to believe that you can actually change it.” He regards civilization’s greatest artistic and cultural achievements—from architecture to music and film—as expressions of human vanity, “worthless to the earth.” He sometimes asks people to imagine the outrage that would occur if someone were to destroy, say, the Vatican or the “Mona Lisa,” and he compares that with the indifference that people exhibit toward the mass extinction of plants and animals. “In anthropocentric society, a harsh judgment is given to those that destroy or seek to destroy the creations of humanity,” he has written. “Monkey-wrench a bulldozer and they will call you a vandal. Spike a tree and they will call you a terrorist. Liberate a coyote from a trap and they will call you a thief. Yet if a human destroys the wonders of creation, the beauty of the natural world, then anthropocentric society calls such people loggers, miners, developers, engineers, and businessmen.”
To get a “food” bill your going to have to stop the propagandists that live from peddling twinkies and other crap as food from lying.
Good luck! You are also going to have to wean the companies that get paid for not growing things.
KELMER: Great posting!
It seems probable that films like SUPERSIZE THIS have opened some minds to the fact that they are (and/or become) what they eat. In a nation of growing obesity, drug addiction, alcoholism, Diabetes, depression… there’s not much to argue for insofar as the typical “fast food happy meal diet plan” goes.
This article is informative because it exposes the degree to which all the wrong things are being subsidized and the price being leveraged in terms of compromised public welfare (i.e. my above paragraph) as a result. Reminds me of the rabid investments in armaments and militarism rather than art, culture, education, health care and peace initiatives. When the priorities are off kilter, so, too are results.
We need everyone to be farmers and gardeners. Support CSA’s local produced agriculture.
That is the solution. Those are the answers. QUit waiting around for this do nothing Govt to save us. They won’t.
Go to your state and local govt’s.. your local community. Start a community gardening project. Teach folks how to grow food in their backyard.
Support local farmers in Community Supported agriculture.
Have Farmers markets.
Do co-ops.
Peace
http://www.communitysolution.org/
KELMER: Great posting! I second vote and raise Siouxrose’s to excellent posting…especially the bit about the arrogant human species being a virus and I would opine needs to be exterminated for the survival of the rest of the bio-sphere..
Personally, I am not a great fan of extremisms, fundamentalisms and cults, be they religious, moral, economic, political, nationalist, militarist, technophilic, technophobic, or in this case “Deep Ecology.”
It does seem to me that one can strike a reasonable balance between reverence towards and protection of the splendors of nature, and reverence towards and protection of each other in the human community. This Mr. Watson, who undoubtedly would consider me an “arrogant” humanist, seems to me a fanatical crank.
Sorry if that’s too fuzzy for your taste. I’m not that fond of hard edges, either.
Restaurants are using local grown ingredients and middle class people are paying premium prices to eat at these places but it’s worth it if you have ever tasted homegrown.
Subsidies need to go to community co-ops that organize getting the food to market. NOT AGRI-BUSINESS!
It’s yet another front of the class war. The people battle for their rights while the beast battles for its hegemony.
It’s very important that we frame the class war as the mother of all wars. When the people come to realize that it all boils down to the class war, we can quickly consolidate our energies and defeat the beast once and for all.
MARK ABRAM: To the enlightened it’s not an either/or proposition. The Biblical notion that “god gave man DOMINION over…” the creatures is what’s led to such rabid abuse and ecological destruction. In many Indigenous cultures individuals learned to live with the land in a mode that was symbiotic rather than exploitation-based. Now with so many billions, and a percentage raised on the false values emanating from ubiqutious advertising on the MSM, the capacity to accept more humble lifestyles, to experience the SACREDNESS of one’s daily bread, to go slower, to smell the roses, to appreciate relationships, etc is deadened. THAT is another tragedy but G. B Shaw (?) said “The tragedy of the 20th century is that nothing is any longer perceived as such.”
In other words, there are ways to live with nature and sustain societies, but when greed and militarism factor in, nation-states tend to take more than they need, rip off others, and invest in armies as a false measure of security intended to maintain the ill-begotten wealth.
What we need to do is get Vandana Shiva to help us-her activism against Monsanto and others is impressive but her ability to unite and motivate the citizen is second to none.
In addition, her expertise in the field of food and bio gentetically engineered food sources is expansive; not only does she have a way of leaving company executives speechless and/or blubbering, she’s right on with the social conscience awareness that so many of us seem to be lacking.
I’m going to play Adam Smith here and argue that it’s high time for the federal government to dump agricultural subsidies and leave food production to the market (I’m not talking about pesticide regs, etc). The farming population constitutes about 2% of the population, as opposed to the 1/4 to 1/3 that were there when FDR took office. Why should the family farmer, if any really family farmers are left out there, expect more government support than the family cashier or the family secretary? Besides, I have a feeling a lot of our food and tax dollars are going to Mr. and Mrs. Monsanto.
There’s also the quite troubling matter that Monsanto is a war profiteer, since it engineers deadly chemicals like Agent Orange. It mystifies me that a company with an ethos ready, willing and eager to profit from the destruction of 3rd world peoples, gets to decide what’s in MY cereal. Not a healthy paradigm.
I’m a farmer. Because I’ve grown corn and beans in the past, I get guaranteed gov’t money every year. If prices drop I get more gov’t money. Because local ethanol plants get gov’t subsidies, they can make money even with higher corn prices. All of this has led to record high land prices. Except for small farmers and beginning farmers, most of us are millionaires. The USA continues to do what it does best: feeding taxpayer money to the wealthy.
Greg R: “Except for small farmers and beginning farmers, most of us are millionaires. The USA continues to do what it does best: feeding taxpayer money to the wealthy.”
So Greg, how do you feel about the millionaire status - being on the receiving end and all? Are you trying to change things or do you like your new found money? What are you doing with all of that money - donating it to charity, for example? Are you environmentally conscious in what you do - do you use chemicals, irrigate - depleting our groundwater?
I’m sorry if my tone sounds accusing or judgmental. I’m an Iowa child who has strong ties to the land. Corporate farms are an obsenity to me. So are millionaire farmers, made so at the expense of so many who can ill afford the transfer of wealth.
Is there a part of you that feels just the least bit guilty?
Mark Abram: I’m sorry I did not have time to respond to your comments regarding nuclear power subsidies. There was a time when I would have agreed with you regarding government’s role but observation over the past 40 years has forced me to change my mind. If we couldn’t get anywhere on alternative energy under Clinton/Gore in times of relative peace and prosperity, it’s just not going to happen. We have to get rid of all gov’t energy/power company subsidies in the name of fiscal responsibility and make sure competition is maintained in the market place. There’s lots of stuff out there. In Japan, you can buy roofing shingles with built in solar cells.
FARM BILL: Same thing. Exclude corporate entities from subsidies. Limit to family farms. Then figure out a basic plan to make sure family farms don’t sink. (Pollan’s right. You have to offer a real alternative) Let them grown what they want but no one should be able to put poisons in the water supply, directly or indirectly.
Nancy Pelosi is between a rock and a hard place if she does not “help freshmen Democrats from rural districts” since freshmen helped get the Congress to Democratic leadership in the first place.
That aside, the real problem is that of government farm subsidies ever being allowed to go to any incorporated entities at all. It’s a similar problem for us citizens as occurs in much of the rest of federal policy. What is desired most by corporations is often at odds with what makes any sense for individuals.
I see nothing wrong with farm subsidies in a spendthrift system that blows upwards of $6 billion a month nation-building in Iraq.
We need a comprehensive alternate energy plan that weans America off petroleum…farmers could be at the vanguard of such a movement. Those who carp about bio-fuels are apparently happy to lick the polluting hand of Big Oil.
$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
“nation building”?!?!?!?????
You mean “nation destroying”, right?
militantliberal___ Very interesting that you say only 2% of the population are farmers now. That means we can throw all of them to the wolves and it will only be the life`s work of a measly six million people that would be in jeopardy, and like Greg R, they are all milliomaires anyway, so who cares? They are probably tired of working and would be better off moving to the concrete jungles anyway. As all they produce is junk food, it will not be missed and the city folk are sure to enjoy raising their own good food in their gardens. Of course, it will wreck the economy, with hundreds or thousands of agribusinesses not able to survive, but it will be worth it just to have only pure home-raised food for all. The city children will be able to throw away their ipods and iphones as they will be busy helping grow that good food for their families. Just think of all the money that will release to bury in the sand in Iraq and help out the military-industrial complex. Great article, Michael Pollen!!
I am calling my Congressman tomorrow morning– saying that famrers used to make up 1/3 to 1/4 of the nation and now make up 1-2% so give them a lot less because it is going to Monsanto and others who need not apply.
We need something for the small farmers market locally.
My Congressman ins on the farm committee- he is however totally in thepocke tof Cheney and Bush. We had watch the dog and pony show of Bush and Cheney coming down to our remote district as well as Laura for pete sake!!! so we know this guy will do nothing for local people. BUT I am still going to call him !!! Ho[pe Hope hope– never give up- call anyway!!! tell them you care .
The whole idea behind the agri-businesses (Read: Government control of populations by controlling the food supply) is to get all of the family farms off of the land, so if you want good food for everyone then you need to get the agri-businesses completely out of the food production.
iowairish and Kernel-Most farmers around here (So. MN) are used to the long-entrenched system of gov’t subsidies to farmers and basically like it and find ways to justify these programs. I have never felt guilty about taking the money because this is the farming framework in which I have to compete. My vocal progressive opinions have rancled some of the areas conservative farmers, but I’ve generally avoided farm-related criticisms. A couple of years ago I did have a letter published in the St Paul Pioneer Press criticising all aspects of farm bill policy with the exception of federally subsidized crop insurance. This is an excellent program (with very small taxpayer outlays) which supports farmers in times of weather-related crop losses.Yes, I have increased my charitable giving these past few years. I’ve given to CD, FSTV, Oxfam,and a great many more. I use chemicals judicially on my farm and do not irrigate. I am basically no-til, except for some occasional light “scratching.” The biggest problem I have seen with some area organic farmers is the use of extensive tillage to supress weeds. This leads to soil erosion. To my mind there is no greater farmer ’sin’ than to allow his soil to wash or blow away. The fact that gov’t farm programs have done such an excellent job in facilitating the growth of ever larger farms is the truly horrendous aspect of farm policy in this nation. Something on the order of the Lugar-Lautenberg proposal would likely be a huge step in the right direction. The Dorgan-Grassley proposal is a good small step, but allowing farmers to receive a quarter million /year in subsidies is still ridiculously high.
Greg R __ I appreciate your discussion as I also am a farmer and stockman for my entire life. It seems that there is still too much subsidy going to the largest farm organizations but there are many thousands of medium size operations that need the stability offered by farm programs. Compared to the enormous amounts going to oil, industry, and military, the farm subsidies are very small. We do need to irrigate (NE) as it is almost impossible to generate a living without it here. My point was that while it may be fun to trash farmers and their government programs, very few people are going to be interested in doing the considerable labor and vast expenditures required to operate a farm these days. I do believe people should realize once they are gone, it is almost impossible to replace them.
Caelidh - I agree! There is a great need to teach people how to grow their own as well as how to buy locally. Although I live in rural WV where it’s much easier to garden, I also have many friends who live in the city where they have gardens. In fact, my inspiration for my own garden was a good friend who lives in Parkersburg and has a rather small backyard. She grows an amazing amount of food including enough strawberries to take her through the year, lettuce, tomatoes, redbeets, turnips, and green beans.
I grow almost all my own vegetables for the entire year except for those that must be eaten fresh or some I just can’t seem to get right, like cauliflower. I’ve made my own pickles, relish, and salsa, along with the usual tomato sauce and other staples. This year, for the first time, I made sauerkraut from cabbage I grew. I have a fulltime job, and I still have time to grow a flower garden, paint, practice my guitar, play poker, teach a children’s art class, and even watch TV or just hang out and enjoy my friends sometimes, so it’s not impossible to grow and process food and have a life besides. Also, I’m 60 years old, and it keeps me healthy and strong to work outside so much.
There are many homes in suburbia where gardens will produce a bounty of food, even if it’s not enough to last the entire year. Every little bit helps.
This country is supposed to support capitalism, and the “conservatives” push free enterprise above all else including individual rights. But corporate welfare, including farm subsidies is not true free market capitalism. The only role government has in business according to the rightwing advocates seems to be to provide funds. They want no regulation, but they still want the money for business. But even poor people who receive government support have to submit to all kinds of regulations. If farms and other industries want government funding and subsidies, they should accept stringent government oversight including regulations about the quality of food produced, the environment, and conditions for livestock.
I saw Kurt Vonnegut on The Daily Show not long before he died. He said that human beings are a cancer on the earth, and the earth’s immune system is fighting back to eradicate us. If we are not careful, the earth will win the battle, but it will take a long time for the rest of life to recover.
We should not behave as if the only reason to maintain the balance of nature is for ourselves, but it’s also important for us to understand that we are part of the same energy system as the rest of the universe. If we realize that all living things - and all of nature - are in this together, the reason for keeping a pond clean isn’t restricted to an “us OR nature” rational, but an “us AND them” basis.
I am also a rural resident of Iowa. I live on approx. 8 acres with about 3 of that reserved for what I would call large scale gardening.
I moved here two years ago and since that time have had four neighboring farms sell 3 acres each of their farm land to corporate investors to build 2500 head hog finishing facilities (CAFO’s). These operations now surround me on all sides 3/4 of a mile from my home. 190acres of land immediately around my own property is owned by family and is rented to much larger “farmers” who do the basic 2 crop (corn/soybean) rotation.
The farm bill has been a disaster for all but the very large farmers and “Industral Agri-Terrorist” network. Any time someone in my state tries to speak out for some kind of moratorium on CAFOs or industrial scale corn/soybean operations we are reminded by legislators the Iowa is an “agriculture” state. What’s good for monoculture corn confined hog operations is good for all of us.
B___ - S___ Iowa is being destroyed by what passes for agriculture in this state. We have the worst water quality of all 50 states, our rural economies are devastated, and our land and money is being diverted from the people here to outside owners and banking interests at an alarming rate.
Unfortunately, many “farmers” here have bought into the corporate, university, banking and government cabal that has created the problem.
I applaud Michael Pollan’s book “Omnivore’s Dilemma” It gives readers a clear if somewhat simplistic view into the nature of the “Industrial Agri-Terrorist” interests that have ruined the farming communities. Thank goodness someone has. The farm bill subsidies are indeed misused and misguided and should be ended. While they line the pockets of large corporations, the best they do for any average “farmer” is to help him pay the bank for the large equipment he was convinced to buy to work the extra acreage he was convinced to buy to run the operation he was led to believe was the only way a farmer could stay on his land and make a living.
Most farmers I know have jobs outside of farming and possibly make enough farm income thanks to the subsidies to pay the bank loans and taxes on the land, while constantly in danger of falling behind if some weather challenge should cause a drop in production.
While higher corn prices due to the ridiculous ethanol boom have caused a short term bubble, there is little doubt when the reality sets in we will all be paying the banking sector for unwise loans made to take advantage of the newest boom.
This article hits the nail on the head and the proposals by Grassley to cap subsidies as well as the even better proposal from Lugar and Lautenberg are a good step forward, but for all of us, we really need a commitment to help smaller producers to grow FOOD instead of commodities.
Help us in Iowa help ourselves, read Omnivore’s Dilemma, boycot highly processed foods with corn byproducts, grow a garden to feed yourselves and support small local farmers by purchasing at CSAs, Farm Markets, Restaurants the support local foods and convince your supermarkets to reduce the processed food they carry and do more business with local farmers.
Kernel-current and past farm programs have helped to speed the process of ever larger farms. One example in my area is a man who made a great deal of money in maufacturing and in the course of one year has gone from a non-farmer to a very large operator buying and renting land by paying top dollar. If you’re a good marketer, the economies of scale and the near endless gov’t dollars make farming a good bet right now. Oh, and this guy doesn’t really even do much work. He just hires experienced farm hands.
I was extremely aggravated last week when I tried to buy chow mein/chop suey vegetables that were NOT from China! None to be found in my town - I was told that even if they are grown here, they are shipped to China to be processed and packaged! Can you imagine that? Just think of the shipping expenses involved - who is subsidizing that? We can’t even feed ourselves anymore? What’s that???
I lived on farms and ranches and also know how to run an efficient truck-garden - but in the past, growing veggies locally has just been a hobby - nobody can make a living on it anymore. (But they could when I was a kid.) As for replacing corporate farms - it isn’t that hard. People in Wisconsin used to make a living on a quarter-section or less - once the government got into the act, it took sections of farmland and millions in equipment just to make ends meet - that’s why and how the subsidies created a corporate spiral that drove out family farms decades ago. But plenty of people remember how to farm and could do it again, if necessary. Some of us even remember farming with draft horses - not competitive at the time, but as oil goes away, it might be an option again. It’s all a matter of incentives. This whole system was created by incentives and welfare - it can be changed just as easily, and probably in less than a decade. And there are plenty of ‘hobby farms’ that could compete in a fair economy…
The entire issue of growing food in one place and then shipping it to another to be processed and packaged and then back again to be sold is outrageous! The more people decide to grow as much of their own as possible, the more this practice should be diminished.
I know I’m probably preaching to the choir here, but we all need to encourage as many people as possible to get together and grow gardens. Some plants produce way more than a family can consume (here in West Virginia, as in many other places, I imagine, we joke that in August you have to lock your car or you will find the back seat full of zucchinis when you come back to it). Other plants may cross pollinate, so they can’t be grown near each other in small gardens - gourds and pumpkins or winter squash, and even cucumbers for example, can be a problem. And some things deplete the soil and need to be rotated, like corn, especially if you are going organic.
If friends and neighbors get together, they can plant different vegetables and barter or share. In fact, in many cases, it’s hard to use up all the produce from even a small family garden. One of my friends had such a great crop of peas this year, she froze 40 gallons. She only planted one package of peas! The same was true of string beans. One year I had 18 brussels sprouts plants and had a bumper crop that I shared with everyone I know. I just today gave a quart of the last of my grape tomatoes to my coworkers - and they came from plants that volunteer every year. I don’t even have to buy seeds to get literally (not virtually or figuratively, but really, literally) hundreds and hundreds of grape tomatoes from midsummer to autumn.
Droughts can be devastating here in the summer, but I’ve found that spreading at least 18 inches of straw around all my vegetables keeps the garden moist in the worst dry spells, and I never even have to water at all. It also keeps the weeds down and provides nourishment for the soil.
In the spring, my lettuce is so abundant in just a small 2 X 4 foot raised bed, I have to beg people to take it and usually wind up giving a lot of it away for friends who raise rabbits. And still, about 60% of it goes to seed in the summer.
I also save seeds in order to find out which ones are viable. I have several that are heirlooms and others that just come back every year. Two years ago I bought a pumpkin in a grocery store and threw the seeds in my compost. Then last year, I had a pumpkin vine with two huge pumpkins on it. For some reason, I didn’t save the seeds and threw them in the compost again. This time, I got a vine with eight pumpkins the size of basektballs. Needless to say, I actually am saving the ones I get this year so I can put the vines where I really want them.
I’ve been very successful with flower seeds, too. Cosmos, touch-me-nots, marigolds, cleome, portulaca, and a host of others are easy to gather, store, and grow from year to year. Flower gardens also encourage bees, butterflies, and birds to visit. Although many people had problems with japanese beetles this year, I have virtually no bug infestations because we have bird feeders in the flower garden. Creating an environmental haven benefits everyone.
Gardening and saving seeds may seem like tiny steps in view of the huge devastation going on from farming, mining, and drilling for gas or oil, but they do make a difference if enough people do it. No packaging, no shipping, no factories for processing - these are all good things.
Grow your own! You may not be able to grow all of it, but every little bit helps. (By the way, I’m not country born or raised. I grew up in center city Allentown, PA - so anyone can do this.)
LeeAnnG-I’m a farmer and a gardener. Apparently I can’t get enough of growing things. We have a nice vegetable garden and large flower gardens-mostly perennials and re-seeders. I’m working on different strategies for dealing with weeds. I think I’ll eventually end up with a few favorite ground covers around larger plants and shrubs. A beautiful garden to work in or design is spiritually refreshing.
Actually, of the five big commodities that are subsidized Monsanto has patents for herbicide resistant seeds for four of the five. I don’t think they have patented rice yet. Also, when genetic pollution contaminates food as in Starlink corn, taxpayers paid 20 million to purchase the recalled corn. This does not include government subsidy for research and patents.
I wonder if taxpayers will compensate agribusiness giants when they lose money from contaminated commodities that other countries will not accept.