We’ll Reap What We Sow
If you’ve ever driven through the southern end of California’s Central Valley in September, you’re familiar with the grids of lint-strewn cotton fields that blur by for nearly 2 1/2 hours. You might even have pondered the wisdom of planting such a thirsty crop as cotton on a million acres — an area larger than Yosemite National Park — in a state facing a water crisis. Then again, you might ask a similar question about the half a million acres of rice, a grain adapted to the monsoons of Asia, on the valley’s northern end.
Cheap irrigation water is part of the equation, but there is another common denominator. It’s a massive federal legislation package passed every five years known as the farm bill, which House and Senate members are scrambling to reauthorize by an April 18 deadline. Over the last decade, the farm bill has allowed the U.S. Department of Agriculture to shower tens of billions of dollars in subsidies on the nation’s cotton and rice farmers (along with corn, soybean, wheat, sugar and milk producers). These subsidies flow whether growers need them or not. They flow even as they damage the environment and our nutritional well-being. They flow, all the while enabling the biggest farms to consolidate into mega-farms.
It wasn’t always this way. The farm bill emerged during the Dust Bowl and Great Depression as a temporary financial safety net for family farmers. It included programs to promote soil conservation and distribute food surpluses to the needy. In the seven decades since that genie was let out of the bottle, however, the farm bill has become a high-stakes game of political horse-trading that has changed how we farm and what we eat. Today, more than a third of the budget goes to an elite group of commodity farms that grow grains and oilseed crops, mainly for feeding livestock and making processed foods (and now, fuels).
When current farm bill negotiations started in 2006, a proverbial food fight erupted. An array of nonprofit organizations, including Oxfam, Bread for the World and the Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, pushed for a bill that would emphasize farming livelihoods, more effective environmental protection and better nutrition. Prices on nearly all commodities, except cotton, have been soaring. Average 2008 farm household income is anticipated to reach $90,000 — nearly 20% above the national average. Meantime, commodity farmers were set to receive $13 billion in direct and indirect payments, disaster bailouts, crop insurance and (some worthy) conservation incentives in 2008 alone. Surely, reformers argued, this was the right time to stop throwing money at giant farming operations already making hay in current markets.
They lobbied for a $250,000-per-farm subsidy cap, but that got struck down by a status-quo Senate. They pushed for more locally grown produce in public school cafeterias, a noble effort but minimally successful. The efforts to cut cotton farming subsidies — which distort global trade — fell short. They fought for full funding for the Conservation Security Program, which rewards farmers for good land stewardship — reducing use of chemicals, diversifying crops, saving water, etc. Here, reformers won a large increase, but the fund remains vulnerable; year-to-year, it often gets robbed to fund commodity programs.
A few worthy new programs also were added: funds for organic farming research and to help pay organic certification fees; an expansion of local farmers markets; assistance for beginning farmers; and support for “specialty crop” producers, who for decades have been locked out of the subsidy game. (Specialty crops is farm bill-speak for crops that are actually edible, such as fruits, nuts and vegetables, which many California farmers supply to the nation.)
But, by and large, the farm bill song remains the same: Commodity agribusiness gets the lion’s share; reformers get table scraps. Absent a more vocal public outcry, the agribusiness lobby, which spent $80 million in 2007, again holds the winning hand.
What can we citizens expect if the proposed $300-billion farm bill is signed into law? Federally subsidized feed — corn, soybeans and cottonseed — for animal factory farms that spread disease, greenhouse gases and dangerous working conditions wherever they set up shop. (Farm bill “environmental quality” programs will even pay up to $450,000 for the construction of lined “lagoons” to be filled with lethal concentrations of manure.) The continuation of America’s obesity campaign, which ensures the cheapest and most widely available foods are made up of such high-calorie ingredients as high-fructose corn syrup, refined flours, saturated fats and unhealthy meat and dairy products. And more federally backed exports of California’s water — in the form of cotton and rice, mostly sold overseas.
But here’s the one that’s really hard to stomach. More than $4 billion in permanent disaster assistance to growers in the Northern Plains. The brainchild of Montana Democrat and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, this is essentially a trust fund to guarantee income to farmers plowing up prairies and grasslands — lands prone to drought and erosion — to plant corn and wheat. Many observers fear a second Dust Bowl.
No final bill has been passed, and President Bush, who signed the extravagant 2002 farm bill, has threatened a veto if considerable reforms aren’t made to commodity programs. There is still time to let everyone in Congress know that they should vote on the farm bill as if the nation’s very health, future and security is at stake. Because it is. And we deserve better.
Daniel Imhoff is the author of “Food Fight: The Citizen’s Guide to a Food and Farm Bill.”
Copyright 2008 Los Angeles Times
There must be subsidies to the meat industry as well. In Canada the government props it up. US ranchers must be getting lost of freebies–just in terms of “pest control” services I bet. Buffalo slaughter programs, etc.
Nature can be vioolated for only so long before she takes her vengence. Her greatest vengence is the reality that without her cooperation all humanity will die. Nature if left alone can heal herself.
If studied carefully by humanity (such as those we variously call aboriginal, indiginous, or native peoples)humanity can assist nature’s healing by working with instead of against nature. On the evidence available humanity is not going to do this and so will arrange its own (and countless other species)death.
Many people have rightly questioned why oil companies need tax breaks now that the price of oil is so high.
A similar argument could now be made about subsidies to agribusiness (especially incorporated entities) with respect that short list of cotton, wheat, rice, corn, soybeans, sugar and milk. They’re not suffering low prices either. Why, other than politics, are taxpayers on the hook for this?
Daniel Imhoff has come out with another scare story full of misinformation as so many are. He thinks it is a travesty for farmers to make above the average income level for a year or two, but I do not remenber decades of farmers barely making ends meet getting much attention. No doubt Imhoff has a very small income, and if it gets to average level, gives the extra to the poor.
It remains to be seen whether any direct payments will be made this year or coming years, and certainly none will be made to compensate for poor prices. The disaster provisions are necessary to keep whole communities from going under as well as individuals. The federal crop insurance is not free but is only subsidized to make it possible to carry and the premiums are not cheap even then.
No mention is made in the article that usually half or more of the farm programs are used for the food stamp program, which benefits poor or needy people everywhere in the country.
If one wants to write your congress person, a much smarter thing would be to tell them to stop this stupid occupation, which is where the money is going. Don`t worry so much about the people that are feeding the country making a decent living for a few years, as it may be quite important to keep them operating. It would take hundreds of farmers to have the income that one greedy CEO makes in a year.
What is happening here is nothing compared to what the coal companies receive at the state and federal levels. I’ve been reading Big Coal, the dirty secret behind Amerika’s energy future by Jeff Goodell and it’s scary what coal companies and state representatives are doing to West Virginia and other states. I checked out some of the video damage coal companies have done to the environment and to the people in West Virginia by using youtube and was blown away; mountain tops removed, over 1,000 miles of streams and creeks destroyed and the crippling effects of pollution on our children.
“Only when the last tree has died and the last river poisoned, and the last fish has been caught, we will realize that we can’t eat money”. Cree proverb
What a country!
The Senate Housing Bill gives a $7000 tax credit for buying a forclosed home. Help yourself to a dozen, cash the check and walk away. What a country!
just another example of the stupidity of humanity. We think we are so far removed from nature that our actions don’t matter… but that’s not the case at all…
Food riots are breaking out all over in those less fortunate nations where prices have increased dramatically and the footprint of US policy is nothing but wet mud. In the US applications for food stamps have increased, particularly in Ohio and other rust belt states where good paying jobs are gone. Meanwhile president ding-dong and his complicit congress critters are lounging about in luxury knowing that they have achieved another low approval rating from their peers. I wonder when and what angry US citizens will burn when we join the worlds angry mob for economic and equitable justice. I’m looking forward to that endeavor.
Kernel,
“Daniel Imhoff has come out with another scare story full of misinformation as so many are. He thinks it is a travesty for farmers to make above the average income level for a year or two,….”
I have no problem with farm programs that actually help small farmers and land conservation, but just what in the world are we doing mailing support checks to people that are already millionaires? Those are my tax dollars and I want to know why I should send them to someone making a hell of a lot more money than me. Just precisely what is wrong with limiting the support to farmers making less than $250,000 a year (still a hell of a lot of money)? Tell me, in what other industries is an entrepeneur guaranteed a living? You need trucks to get your product to market and the truck driver promised income is…..?
What kind of BS artist are you Kernel? Do you work for ADM or some other pirate of the prairies?
Humankind’s decisions are creating the very cicumstances that will lead to its own extinction. Mother Gaia has a great deal of power at her disposal and she is not about to be ” taken out” by one small group of parasites running around infecting her at any number of levels. Sheis already utilizing many of her cleansing techniques, and she will survive, my friends, but like it or not, unless we make a very big shift in our own collective consciousness, WE WILL NOT SURVIVE.
It isn’t mysterious at all—it’s survival of the fittest, and Gaia, despite the attacks on her health and well being, is way stronger than her attackers. WAKE UP MY FRIENDS!!! We are in this way over our heads, and we are all part of this particular web of life that is straining to the breaking point—at least, the “life” we have come to know. LIFE itself is not destructible and will survive and thrive despite our self destructive ways.
starofthesea
I see that you’re a fan of “Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within.”
jj
The very word “subsidy” would imply that the resipient would need the “subsidy” to subsist :to have or acquire the necessities of life(as food or clothing)unfortunately this is not the case.These programs help mostly large farmers and not subsistance farmers.These cotton grounds could grow Hemp without subsidization,with no herbicides,less fertilizers and no irrigation.Commodities Agribiz needs no subsidization they have capitalisation.It is the small producer,the organic farmer,the diversified family farm that needs help.They are threatened by genetic contamination from genetically engineered crops which destroys thier crop value and put them at risk from lawsuits from firms like Monsanto.They are endangered by high property values and taxes,high labor costs,a lack of a reliable labor pool ,high fuel costs ,and overregulation and paperwork loads.We need to support small farms and protect consumers from dangerous foods and inflated prices.”Food disparagement ” laws which prevent lawsuits and legal action against multinationals ,and thier food piracy are also a drain on small farmers..Subsidies should also protect consumers against unreasonable food prices due to feedstock pressures and reflect fuel costs and middleman surcharges.The farm bill should reflect the recession, fuel costs and the retail costs to consumers,not just the needs of corporate agriculture,it is meant to aid small farmers and preserve the endangered family farmer!peas in
One reason that the farm bill has gotten so little scrutiny is that Americans have become divorced from our food source. We don’t know where our food comes from or how it is made. Many foods we buy in the supermarket looks nothing like the living beings it once was. Many children believe that chocolate milk comes from brown cows! Many adults have equally silly and romantic notions about farm life, which is agribusiness in today’s world.
The only way the US, with its drastically widening gap between rich and poor, will survive the food riots that have already begun in less insulated parts of the world, is to transition as rapidly as possible to a system of locally grown food. No more irrigating cotton in southern California, and no more trucking California produce around the nation. No more chemical inputs: organic, sustainable farming, with an emphasis on small producers, which in the long term produce more food - with significantly higher nutritional value - than enormous monoculture crops. Emphasis on cultivating diverse heirloom varietals. A reduction in the amount of meat and soy in American diets, and the elimination of high fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated vegetable oil. Eating what is available locally and in season. No strawberries in February in New York, goddammit. Learn to live with what you’ve got. And absolutely no food crops grown for the express purpose of either feeding meat animals or gas tanks - we do not have the acreage to spare.
Do I think it’s going to happen? Not until agricultural and energy policy is no longer dictated by Monsanto, Cargill, and Exxon. So I’ll just be off to my five acres in the fertile Pacific Northwest providing for myself. I intend to survive the coming madness. Good luck to the rest of you.
See what I mean by silly and romantic notions of rural life?
kendpotter___I actually do agree with your view on the farm payment cap being set at 250,000. However, we are not making the program provisions, and as in every other business the ones with the money and power get their way.
No, I am not a Monsanto plant or an employee of ADM. I have been a farmer and stockman my entire life and with the help of my wife and kids, managed to keep going. Starting with very little but a run-down farm, I have to say that even we smaller farmers have benefitted through the years from some of the farm programs.
As for the notion that small farms are more productive than large ones , that is no longer true as the newer machinery and methods are impossible for smaller farmers to purchase and make use of. That is like saying small trucks could haul products more efficiently than semi`s or train cars.
Why do people have the idea that farming can stand still and use outdated methods when the rest of our ecomomy is going full steam ahead with new developments? Small farms are great, as I am still on one, but we will never be able to go back to the days of high labor, low productivity agriculture.
I was intrigued by the article until I got to the part about the average farm household income being $90,000. Then I said, this guy is George Bush in overalls. Remember how Bush was giving everyone an average $1000 tax cut? It’s the same mathematics. One megafarm makes a couple million and a lot of medium farms make $40,000. Once Imhoff did that, everything else he said became suspect.
Did you notice how he was upset about storing manure in lagoons? Did you wonder where it would go if it weren’t kept there to decompose? Do you really want it in your aquifer? Or running into the local stream?
And then the bit about factory animal farms spreading disease is to shake one’s head in disbelief. Where did the Salmonella outbreak a couple years ago come from? Spinach farms. What is the result of that outbreak? Rules that prevent any animal whatsoever from a mouse to a deer from entering a vegetable field. Where does this leave organic farmers who want to use organic fertilizer (see lagoons above)? Got me. They’ve been forbidden because they spread disease. Check the CDC site on food poisoning and you will find that year in and year out plants are responsible for more outbreaks of food poisoning than meat, milk and eggs.
What Kernel has to say is significant. May I add that data from ag economics departments show that farming gives you the lowest return on capital of any industry. If you figure in the farmer’s labor, in bad years that come too frequently, he is not even making minimum wage. A family dairy farm usually is that way. People don’t farm to make money. We farm because we enjoy the lifestyle, the association with growing, living things. Complain about the cost of food, but before you blame farmers, check how much of each dollar goes to the farmer and how much to the middlemen.
I was intrigued by the article until I got to the part about the average farm household income being $90,000. Then I said, this guy is George Bush in overalls. Remember how Bush was giving everyone an average $1000 tax cut? It’s the same mathematics. One megafarm makes a couple million and a lot of medium farms make $40,000. Once Imhoff did that, everything else he said became suspect.
Did you notice how he was upset about storing manure in lagoons? Did you wonder where it would go if it weren’t kept there to decompose? Do you really want it in your aquifer? Or running into the local stream?
And then the bit about factory animal farms spreading disease is to shake one’s head in disbelief. Where did the Salmonella outbreak a couple years ago come from? Spinach farms. What is the result of that outbreak? Rules that prevent any animal whatsoever from a mouse to a deer from entering a vegetable field. Where does this leave organic farmers who want to use organic fertilizer (see lagoons above)? Got me. They’ve been forbidden because they spread disease. Check the CDC site on food poisoning and you will find that year in and year out plants are responsible for more outbreaks of food poisoning than meat, milk and eggs.
What Kernel has to say is significant. May I add that data from ag economics departments show that farming gives you the lowest return on capital of any industry. If you figure in the farmer’s labor, in bad years that come too frequently, he is not even making minimum wage. A family dairy farm usually is that way. People don’t farm to make money. We farm because we enjoy the lifestyle, the association with growing, living things. Complain about the cost of food, but before you blame farmers, check how much of each dollar goes to the farmer and how much to the middlemen.
An aside on the comment above about prices for farm products being high. Everyone has noticed that milk has gone way up. The dairy farmers must be making a killing, right? Did you notice that corn and soybeans have gone up even more than milk? Since by far the biggest expense of raising dairy cattle is feeding them, that doesn’t leave a whole lot of wiggle room. Now some knownothing is going to go on about cows should be eating only grass. Where is the grazing land supposed to come from? You people are building your housing developments all over it. And the farmer then has to pay even higher property taxes because you people, who want to enjoy the benefits of “country life” without the disadvantages, have more than doubled and tripled the price of land. You can’t produce enough milk off grass to pay expenses under those conditions.
“Average 2008 farm household income is anticipated to reach $90,000 - nearly 20% above the national average.” In 2006 the median household income in the U.S.A. was $40,200. It is unlikely that the median household income has gone up much if at all since 2006. So, $90,000 would be 87% higher than the median household income. But median and average have two different meanings. Median is the exact middle with as many households earning less as those earning more. Average household income is the total amount of all incomes divided by the number of households. The Bill Gates’ household, for example, would increase the average household income above the median household income. Median household income certainly is more relevant to most people. Maybe farmers deserve to make 87% above median. After all they have a huge investment, deal with many risks and at times work long hours. Most farmland, however, is not owned and worked by small households. As the article states, most is run by mega corporations whose income exceeds $90,000 a year by a tad.
It is simple and clear logic that is dissed more and more –the more we disconnect ourselves and life processes from the natural order (the supreme governance of life) — the more we disconnect ourselves from what sustains us. We will reap what we sow and — what we reap is the commodification of life — and what we sow is our self-destruction. Period!
Jeffrey Courrion–This was exactly the point I was trying to make.
dkm: though I don’t remember the final conclusion of the spinach salmonella episode, I thought it was linked to a leaking manure pit. Which in itself seems odd, becuse the contaminant there would be fecal coliform, not so sure about s. Yeah, the article was hilarious in some parts, lets just run it into the creek, like we used to. The problem from what I’ve read is the large farms produce more manure than they can spread raw, or can digest for later application.
The article took a stab at so many different things I really expected this thread to be lit up, but Mr. Obvious hasn’t even been here to set us straight. Probably out planting vegetables.
Jeffrey Courion & GKL__I agree, it looks as if our country is headed for extinction, and many seem to be trying to hurry the process along. However, there are inumerable problems developing so we need to be aware that agriculture is not the only or worst area to be concerned with.
Just because there are a few very large farming corporations does not mean there are not thousands of hard working people on farms doing their best to make an honest living. We do not condemn all people working for a firm whose executives make many millions per year while firing people to show a paper profit.
There are a good number of farmers who not only do not make 90,000, but show a loss in a year for their work. The price of commodities has risen to double or triple from only about a year ago so we cannot use that as normal. All inputs have risen greatly also and they will go back down much slower than crop prices will.
Just a few other things to work on–the Bush occupation, our crushing national debt, the financial meltdown, an increase in violence, drugs, corruption, divorce, credit overuse, our loss of privacy, the healthcare fiasco, and on & on. Please do not think farmers are a bunch of greedy free-loaders because our farm program is not as perfect as we would all like it to be.
About half of it goes for food stamps which most farmers do not use and the rest would be nothing compared with the huge military expenditures with no end in sight.
Kernel How about we have a safety net of money for every small or medium business entrepreneur; no difference if they are growing crops or have a printing business, a mortgage company, a restaurant…
Subsidies should only be given for HEALTHY food production - a plant based vegan diet, and yes, everybody can be vegan. Health care costs alone would be billions and billions of dollars if everyone would simply wake up, face reality, feed the whole planet, use subisidies to promote HEALTHY food choices - a plant based diet properly balanced will help the whole entire planet, save us billions, end animal agriculture abuses towards animals incl. human animals. I know we vegans get ridiculed but on this one thing I am 100% certain - everybody should be vegan and there is no excuse for continuing to harm our bodies and exploit animals. Wrap your brains around this and face reality. I urge everyone to go vegan!!!!!
I won’t argue with fools about this topic. It’s the one thing I absolutely know to be true and I don’t put up with stupidity.
Kernel- I think the next decade or so will demonstrate that not only CAN we “go back” to higher labor (i.e. higher human and animal labor, that 16-row combine and the fossil fuel running it are laboring quite hard actually) and “lower” production (in the sense of yeild weight, though with the nutrient loss from artificial fertilizer and other flaws in industial monoculture perhaps the drop in food value will be less) but that in fact we MUST.
People can usually be relied upon to cite all the “environmental” or sort of Human relations with the Biosphere kind of reasons for this Local Organic Farming resurgence, and I see they have, so I throw out some other angles to look from.
1. Economic =A lot of the debts that genuine farmers, as opposed to agribusinessmen, face are due to features of Industial Agriculture that could be gotten rid of -provided the farmer has a market for his non-commodity foods and some sort of social or legal regulation protects this market from Industrial producers.
Also, the United States is going to need a lot of “job creation” strategies for the working class now that the suburban build-out is failing. Farming could be one of the options IF there was a greater need for not just labor, but also management and operation. Labor only gets you “The Grapes of Wrath”. But instead of merely attempting to save the stupid suburban houses of so many citizens, national, state, and county budgets could support converting the ‘burbs into small, Local-scale Agricultural communities. That is what most of the small towns and villages the suburbs have grown on like tumors used to be after all.
2. Political. A basic fact about farmers -at least those who actually OWN their land and equipment not “own” them with a mortgage- is that they can be extremely self-sufficient and therefore secure.
A farm that is working right can operate as nearly a closed-loop productive eco-system, and even those inputs and outputs that cannot be managed on the property itself usually only need the local watershed or perhaps bioregion to be truly closed-loop.
But this has more than just a dreary, environmental lecture upside.
The security and surety of meeting the 6 human needs (water, food, shelter, health, social interaction, and creative expression) has a direct effect on the political arena.
A truly democratic system requires a very high surety of meeting at least the three most essential needs -water, food, shelter. People that are thirsty, hungry, or cold cannot be expected to and should not be relied upon to uphold democratic rights and systems -no one likes voting or free speech more than water.
A society that has a foundational concept of liberty would not require its memebers to bend and sway to the movements of progress and change in order to meet their 6 needs (or at least the big 3). The best way to avoid this forced change is to have many -if not most- of the people in a society directly involved in food production, whether farming, gardening, hunting, gathering, or cooking/brewing/packing/selling, AND have many -if not most- of the families and communities involved in the ownership end of this production, i.e. land, equipment, etc.
An Agrarian Republic stays a republic in more than just name longer than an Industrial one for these reasons. I’m not sure the Founders would have ever expected their ideas to work in a Corporate Industrial system with only a tiny fraction of the population on the farm and only a fraction of them doing anything other than commodity agribusiness.
———————————————–
So perhaps this is food for thought.
-matti
Whatever happened to FREE TRADE??????
Other countries who assist their industries with subsidies and/or tariffs are liable to be taken to court by the WTO and have sanctions or fines levied against them.
Also remember that the yeild issues of low-tech production need not necessarily be so stark.
Look at how many sides of beef, pigs, rabbits, eggs and chickens Joel Salatin is churning out of his little 150 acres of pasture and 400 or so of woods. And with very little besides a tractor and an electric fence in terms of Industrial Technology.
Also think about the general silliness of a society where so few even have the knowledge on how to produce reliable food from the Earth (including BTW many farmers who use machine techniques and don’t garden, could even they produce crops without the machines).
This is important because Industrial Food Production may indeed have a “shelf-life”. Unless you think we can afford to build a couple hundred nuclear power generators to run all the electric farm machinery of the future (and no, ten million wind generators won’t work either unless we can obtain all those exotic metals from Mars or something), or that vast tracts of arable land be dedicated to biofuels.
Of course some sort of techno-miracle might come to our rescue -nuclear fusion, non-destructive biofuel- but many of these new energy technologies have scalability issues and may never really be able to replace fossil fuels.
But wouldn’t it be better if we didn’t NEED such rescue in the first place?
If the ability to derive one’s needs from the Earth or Sea utilizing just human and animal power was commonplace, rather than rare?
-matti
Well colour me amazed… you mean to say the government funded a scheme which it sold to the public as being for the benefit of the downtrodden, and that scheme was perverted and captured and eventually all them dollars went into the pockets of political cronies?
Wow… I am amazed. I’ll bet that this is the first time in all of recorded history that such a thing happened. After all, we all know that Momma Gummint is an inherently non-wateful, benevolent institution that only looks out for the poor, the tired and the huddled masses… or maybe that’s just in poems.
Idiocy makes baby Jeebus cry, people.
Cheerio
GT
France
PS I’m not French, so don’t give me baloney about European farm subsidies (which are just as wasteful, but don’t go mostly to ConAgra).
Kernel, you seem to have survived as a small farmer with some federal subsidies but minus ArchieDannoMadland, Carkill, and Monstinko and the others leeching the lions share of subsidies, taxpayers could keep more of their wealth. Comparing the productivity of large versus small farms, large farms are anti-competitive consolidations of power which generally degrades efficiencies. Almost every sector of the US economy is a glaring example. This would take a lot of space to review, but just take a look at energy - 75% of energy converted in the US is wasted. And healthcare - 50% of that activity is wasted.
Allocating resources to improve the efficiency of large farms over small farms benefits elites at the expense of people, and must be change. The equipment you mentioned that can only improve the efficiency of large farms should simply be replaced with equipment designed to improve the efficiencies of small farms. The infrastructure for disseminating the information is in place. The equipment may be built in local craftsman shops.
We have to decide we want small farms instead of large farms. Small farms have all the many benefits: Economic: greater production efficiency, market value; Social: greater independence, justice, culture; Environmental: small farmers are best stewards of the land. Everything is moving local - local economies based on small farmers, craftsmen, merchants.
rtdrury___I am ready to make the transition back to the way we were farming a few decades ago. My smaller tractors and machinery are in working order and are still used on a limited acreage, while I watch the 24 row outfit on the majority of the acreage make only two trips a year to raise a crop with the self steering tractor that I could not afford to buy or lease.
When we make the change, I will not expect to see any big SUV`s on the road, no mega stores, no cable or satellite TV, no electric heating, no internet, no large planes flying,etc. We got along just fine without all of those wasteful and polluting machines and toys when I was farming for many years and people will be much happier without all of that.
mikk
“Whatever happened to FREE TRADE??????
Other countries who assist their industries with subsidies and/or tariffs are liable to be taken to court by the WTO and have sanctions or fines levied against them.”
I don’t know what planet it is that you are reffering to. Agriculture is the most protected sector of most nations economies - Here, Europe, Japan, everywhere. It was the ag subsidies that broke the last round of negotiations on the General Agreement on Tarrifs and Trade (GATT).
kernel,
Here in Eastern Washington, farms are going one of two paths. The dry-land wheat farmers are all selling out either to each other or agribusinesses because the economies of scale dictate huge farms (as you note) when dealing with commodity crops.
On the other hand, specialty crops, wine grapes, hops, asparagus, truck farming, organics, etc. are allowing smaller operations to stay in business. There also tends to be more direct sales to the retail public either through pre-paid distribution or increasing numbers of farmers markets.
This is obviously a limited solution. Not suitable for some guy with 1000 acres of Nebraska corn 300 miles from anywhere.
Yes, and under the guise of ‘free trade’ cheap subsidized rice is sent to Haiti, ruining every single Haitian rice farmer. The same ‘benefit’ is experienced by Mexican corn farmers who are going broke on account of cheap, subsidized American corn.
So in reality all this “Free Trade” talk and meetings of the WTO and GATT were socialist claptrap and the capitalists really believe in corporate and rural welfare and taxpayer subsidies and protectionism???
What planet am I living on indeed!!!!!!
It sounds like corn farmers can get subsidies on two fronts. They can get them from the Farm Bill and again when the 50 cent per gallon subsidy for ethanol is handed out. All you have to do is be as big as ADM and you are all set.
The Forbidden Fuel
Alcohol Can Be a Gas by Dave Blume, published by the
International Institute for Ecological Agriculture, 2007, 630 pages, $59 hardcover.
In the forward written for this book in 1983, when the project was first started, R. Buckminster Fuller writes that it is possible to harvest enough energy to sustainably meet humanity’s needs through solar sources while completely phasing out all fossil fuels and atomic energy. Many know Bucky Fuller for his work on geodesic domes. Few are aware that he was also in charge of alternative energy research for the U.S. military during WWII, and held ethanol fuel in great esteem. The author was inspired and mentored by Fuller in the 1980’s, and it could be said that this book is the culmination of Fuller’s work in this field.
The intent of the 600+ pages of Alcohol Can Be a Gas is to act as a complete tool kit to revolutionize our transportation fuel system, from the grassroots up. It combines sweeping vision with intricate ecological and mechanical detail, starting with a thorough history of the use of alcohol as a fuel for internal combustion engines.
The Model T car was designed as a flex-fuel vehicle, and got 34 MPG on alcohol until prohibition put an end to small-scale ethanol production. “There’s a lot that goes on in the world of energy that you never see on the 11 o’clock news” writes the author. “The control of a country’s energy is the ultimate control of its people.”
Blume has seen his share of the dark underbelly of the big energy conglomerates in his 25+ years working in this field, and carries the scars to prove it. There are six big sections to this tome, each of which could be a book in its own right, comprising 29 chapters. Section I gives the sweeping vision of ethanol set within the context of an ecologically renewed agriculture. The great promise of alternative energy development under President Carter during the first energy crisis is summarized, and what the author dubs ‘MegaOilron’s’ success at squashing it.
Blume dives quickly into the controversies swirling around ethanol as a fuel with a chapter entitled ‘Busting The Myths.’ These myths include: ‘Ethanol’s net energy is negative’ (studies from Brazil show ethanol has a positive net energy ratio of 9.0 when using sugarcane); ‘There isn’t enough land to grow the crops for ethanol’ (highway medians could grow enough ethanol crops to supply 40% of America’s gasoline); Ethanol is an ecological nightmare’ (a permaculture ethanol system vastly improves soil fertility); ‘It’s food vs. fuel’ (cattails grown in wastewater show tremendous promise); and ‘Ethanol fuel does not address global warming’ (the growing of plants, especially if organic, ties up much more CO2 than goes into the ethanol).
Part of the beauty of this book is its ecological sensibility. Blume is an organic farmer and brings 20+ years of bioregional wisdom to his writing. Two chapters contrast the nightmare of America continuing on its present energy course vs. retooling the way we do agriculture and energy along the regenerative principles of Permaculture design. There are sidebars on the restoration of degraded prairie farmland using highly complex fuel crop polycultures, and the practice of swale contour farming to replenish groundwater and topsoil.
His vision for a grassroots ethanol revolution is ambitious but conceivable: “A nationwide switch to organic farming is in order, but it can’t work if we maintain a monoculture-based system, with its present emphasis on corn farming.”
The second big section of Alcohol Can Be a Gas has five chapters laying out the How To’s of alcohol production for fuel, including chapters on feedstocks (everything from algae to buffalo gourd), fermentation technology, distillation, and plant design.
Section III deals with saleable or otherwise useful ‘co-products’ from alcohol production — from livestock and aquaculture feeds to yeast, methane, protein and propagation material for mushroom production. Sections IV, V & VI address the mechanics, regulations and subsidies for using alcohol in engines: “We can put 85% alcohol in our cars now! Really!”
Included are chapters on the business of alcohol, its economic, regulatory and legal considerations and a practical vision of small-scale production that Blume dubs “Community Supported Energy.” Six case studies depict the type of grassroots on-farm ethanol production the author envisions in his revolution.
One of the few criticisms I have of Alcohol Can Be a Gas is that Blume is unabashedly caustic towards the large energy corporations. The book will likely alienate middle Americans who are uninformed about the politics of energy. Instead, it is tailor written for activists who want to put their shoulders to the millstone and do something. Despite its narrow-minded focus on ethanol as The solution to our looming energy crises, this book has the feel of a resource one does not want to be without — the depth of a Whole Earth Catalog hybridized with the humor of a Humanure Handbook.
Those people working on biofuel development would be well advised to study the history of ethanol cooperatives described in this book — honesty, integrity and setting a high ethical standard seem to be crucial to success.