It's great to see this article at Common Dreams. These matters are too little understood across the country, throughout the mainstream media, and among progressives.

Check out the Family Farm Defenders Web site. They do the good Commodity Title stuff, the organic stuff, and the LDC dumping stuff. I just met a bunch of them at the huge MOSES organic farming conference in LaCross. 2000 people attended. They're great pamphleteers.

Kinsman himself has been at this for a long, long time. He's the kind of guy that deserves a Nobel prize. He fought with African American farmers during the civil rights movement in the South.

Vandana Shiva, the excellent leader and author from India, spoke at MOSES this year. I spoke with her. She fully supports price floors and ceilings, supply management and strategic grain reserves that Kinsman supports, as in the National Family Farm Coalition's Food from Family Farms Act, and as I've often advocated for here. Iowa Senator Tom Harkin, Senate Ag Chair, with his former Harkin-Gephardt farm bill (not his recent freedom to farm with a green mask) is key on the issues raised here. Also all of the ag committee.

The powers that be probably figure they can simply import farmers.

How does HR 875 and Senate Bill 814 effect this? I have heard rumor those pieces of legislation will drive small sustainable ag to extinction... A quick look via Thomas.gov seems to confirm those fears, and a friend of mine, w/ a small family farm, concurs. Yet certainly, our environmental survival NEEDS these small, local farms now more than ever. Will Monsanto et al be the ruin of us no matter what?

According to Richard Heinberg, the US alone needs 50 million new farmers or with the economic collapse that's now in its beginning stages, we'll all go hungry. Guess we'll need someone to invent a video game about farming instead of zombie killing and senseless battles, to get the kiddy population up and jived for their new lives as backyard serfs...

The good example of Canada's sense of fairness is cited by this author in promoting dairy prices; he describes "the Canadian dairy pricing system is the best example..." and I would add that Canada is routinely cited for its success in providing universal and affordable health coverage. "Universal" as in "For Everyone."

Health care along with dairy-pricing policy are two areas that we in the US would do well to adopt the successful ideas of our neighbors to the north.

Plus, Canada provided us Gordon Lightfoot. After all these years, I can still listen to him any time.

Prior to 1981, farmers were paid to overproduce. Surplus food went into storage or was use as "aid" to developing countries. The US Government subsidized this foreign aid through payments to American farmers.

While populations in developing countries were better fed, farmers in the developing countries could not compete with subsidized imports. Some nations, such as Rhodesia produced a surplus. The same nation, now Zimbabwe no longer produces anything but cholera. Politicians in Zimbabwe were able to buy the local populations through US subsidized food. Small farmers could not compete.

Local agricultural systems were underdeveloped to a large extent and entire populations left the farm and headed to rapidly growing cities.

Modern American agriculture does not make its money through subsidies. It makes its money through commodity futures and extremely unsafe factory farms. The small farmer cannot compete.

With the death of subsidies, there has been an extreme cutback in food aid to now dependent countries which no longer have any agriocultural capacity.

With the golbal economic meltdown, combined with ecological insanity, we are approaching the point where hundreds of millions of people will suffer severe malnutrition and famine.

The small farmers who fed America and the world has been forced off the farm.

The end result ... extreme food insecurity in the US and the world/

Saw an article the other day about the way the market has affected beef producers. Beef steers are produced and grown on ranches and farms belonging, usually, to families. When they are weaned, they are sold to corporations that then fatten them in feedlots. Not too many years ago the calf producers got about a dollar a pound of live weight. It is now less than half that because a very few big corporations that slaughter and market the beef have cornered the market and can pay whatever they want. You will notice, however, that the price in the supermarket hasn't gone down by a similar percentage because the packing houses are keeping a much bigger cut for themselves.

Real Milk is YELLOW AND RAW

...As an example, dairy farmers in the Northeast and Midwest must be paid between 30 and 35 cents per pound for their milk to pay production costs and provide basic living expenses. Until 1980, farmers received a price equal to 80 percent of parity, meaning that farmers' purchasing power kept up with the rest of the economy. Unfortunately, a 1981 political decision discontinued parity, and today the dairy farmers' share is below 40 percent.
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This paragraph doesn't make sense to me and I've read it three times.

Can anybody do a better job of explaining this.

We need to change the way we produce milk and stop denaturing it into poison with pasteurization. "A hundred years of tradition unmarred by progress"

Our company Circul8.com is a holistic closed loop nutrient management system. The nutrients that go into and then out of the cows are flushed from the free-stall barn alleys. The solid nutrients are then separated from the liquid nutrients. The liquid nutrients are then routed to our CIRCUL8-ed lagoons where they are stabilized in the bodies of the hungry phototropic Purple Sulfur Bacteria (PSB) that appear naturally. “Build it and they will come.” The nutrients are therefore not allowed to putrefy, or volatize in the form of methane, ammonia and hydrogen sulfide. The nearly pathogen free, non-crop burning “Nutrient Waters” from the lagoons are used to irrigate pastures (nearly 30% protein) and other fodder crops in balanced, measurable agronomic amounts preventing soil and ground water contamination. The very healthy and “Happy Cows” then feed on the nutrient rich crops, lowering veterinary bills and raising milk quality. The “Nutrient Waters” chock full of hungry PSB, are also used to flush/scrub the free-stall alleys preventing putrid off gassing, bacterial slime and hoof problems, also lowering incidents of lunger and downer cows. The monetary value of the nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium stabilized in the “Nutrient Waters” and not lost to the atmosphere, is worth between $ 300 and $400 per cow per year. (depending on fuel and amendment prices}. The odorless separated solids are processed into high nutritive value compost that can be used as soil amendments, or as a pathogen free bedding material in the free-stalls barns.

Dairy producers do not have to be perceived as gross polluters In fact, they can be revered as “Climate Change Heroes”. By transforming the biology in their lagoons from toxic cesspools into beneficial “Nutrient Waters” they can become the nutrient engine for regenerative organic crops. Dairy farmers can sequester carbon and store water in the healthy soil that will be created by utilizing what is now considered “Dairy Waste”, lessoning our dependence on high cost hydrocarbon based fertilizer.

“With regenerative farming, we're building in the soil mychorrhiza fungi, which creates a protein, an encasement, that has a 1,000-year half-life. So it sits down there in the soil and holds carbon for a long, long time. When you pour fertilizer down there, you kill the fungi and it volatizes into the atmosphere into carbon dioxide. Agriculture as we now practice it is one of the biggest contributors to global warming, but it could be one of the biggest mitigators. Organic farming can also help us deal with another actor of global warming: droughts. We know that healthy, carbon-rich soil holds water: 1 pound of carbon holds 40 pounds of water. We know that we can put 1,000 pounds of carbon back into an acre each season; that means 40,000 pounds of water will be in that soil. In wet years it will permeate through the soil. The plants will do better.” Timothy LaSalle
Please see Rodale Institute CEO Timothy LaSalle’s excellent interview in Grist magazine http://www.grist.org/feature/2008/05/09/index.html

Todd Callaway a USDA researcher reviewed DNA scans performed in 2003 by J. McGarvey to identify pathogens in Prins Dairy lagoon, He determined that no methane producing Achaea were detectable. No Archaea, means no methane. He has proposed a testing protocol to better substantiate our claims. (Attached) It would be nice to be on the same testing protocol page with the Air Board. Perhaps someone at the board has suggestions as to what they would like the testing to include.

The proven Circul8 System has successfully helped dairies in several states over the last decade to stop stinking and significantly reduce both air and water pollution, while increasing animal health and profits. The two most mature installations of the CIRCUL8 System are the Prins and Verburg Dairies, both located in Modesto CA.

Please accept our invitation to visit our dairies and see for yourself what we can do to create environmental and economic health for dairy farmers and their communities.

Our system works for swine and humanure also.

8 years of Bush equals much more unprotected people

masso

In China there is a 'back to the farm' movement from recently unemployed peasants who flocked to the cities for manufacturing jobs a few short years ago. Sort of what Americans did during the Great Depression.

Except we don't have grandpa and grandma's cow and chickens and pea patch to return to, and too many of us think a hoe is an easy lady rather than hard work.

Dig out those old Whole Earth Catalogs in your parent's attic and learn to homestead.

Of course there's also Eat the Rich.

If commodities prices are falling why are retail food prices increasing? The cost of fuel has come down, but not the price of food, so transportation to market cannot be the cost. Jobs in food processing have been taken over by illegal immigrants working for a third of the former employees so it can't be labor costs. Why? It couldn't possibly be price gouging because... er... well... it just couldn't, because Americans wouldn't do that to each other.

d.k.shaw

Because Europe has better subsidies.

The loss of the small farmer was one of the factors involved in the decline of the Roman Empire. There may be hope, as the city folk are starting to see some light. Laying hens raised in back yards are a new rage. This will get them in the right frame of mind.

John is right about the current situation regarding the state of our smaller US farms. I was a dairy farmer until last year but kept the land. There are many farmers such as me who could be re-employed on the farms we still hold. The methods we got sucked into since WWII have killed our soils, water, livestock, crops and souls. None of these are DOA yet. The land can be brought back to viability. So would the food produced by us.

One ray of hope is the young who enter farming these days. They are not our kids(who saw no future on our farms) but professionals who have burnt out from the same soul killing going on in our business models all across the economy. They bring to farming new paradigms, based on ages old understandings, which embrace the elegant dance of the energies at play in a healthy farm which the boardroomers controlling our "modern" agricultural practices never concieved of. I also know retired farmers who do not want their farms sold off to development( a corruption of that word!) but who don't know exactly how to manage the transition of their farms, which are quite large and relatively secure assets, to the next generation of farmers while allowing them fair compensation beyond the securing of the futures of their land as farms. Perhaps even some of our children may return to the land as we adopt healthier production methods and local food practice.
Policy makers need to tackle ways we can promote the well being of the PEOPLE of farming to promote a secure source of food. I have no doubt that we still have the basic elements of a viable farm sector. It's just been diverted on a temporary fools errand that can be corrected fairly rapidly given the energy and resourcefulness of farmers.

The plight of small farms is catastrophic and must be dealt with. This article however, should have been written by a tobacco farmer or cocaine grower pleading for a subsidy, as neither product is more dangerous to your health than dairy. Heart disease in non-dairy consuming societies is a minute fraction of those societies that use it as a regular part of their diet. The osteoporosis level for women in societies that traditionally do not consume dairy is almost zero. The diseases of dairy are legion and affect almost everyone who consumes it. If you need milk, suck your mother tits.

Dairy farmers are a big part of the problem, but dairy consumers are an even bigger part. Extreme environmental degradation is caused by dairy farming as well. To subsidize dairy is to perpetuate the calamities.

On the other hand, most organic vegetable farms, large and small, are prospering despite the collapsing economy, and urban food gardens in every back yard and empty lot are urgently needed to help repair the nation's broken food system that requires most of the ingredients for a simple salad to be shipped thousands of miles.

http://www.notmilk.com/kradjian.html

http://209.85.173.132/search?q=cache:FFqIMlA77pwJ:www.rense.com/general26/milk.htm+dairy+dangers&hl=en...

http://us.mc564.mail.yahoo.com/mc/compose?.rand=59430155&uc=1

http://www.vegparadise.com/otherbirds10.html

That's true. For the past nearly 50 years, the decline in family farms has actually lead to the depopulation of most of my state. And I have to travel to Omaha to get a decent paying part time job since all that's offered in my rural town are funeral jobs.

Mr. Bush was a disaster of biblical proportions. His administration screwed up banking, wall street, public safety, transportation, energy, medical care, and farming. I'm sure the list can go on.

And the American people voted for him, twice. Now they have Mr. Obama who is proving to be Mr. Bush Lite.

American's are dumber than a sack of door knobs.

Did you see the stock market after the proposed third rescue of CitiBank? It is down, and CitiBank shares down about 30 percent. Guess the market does not have confidence in Mr. Obama either.

Nationalize the banks Mr. Obama.

I come from that region.

Nobody stays back to farm.

The only people left doing the 'family farming' are essentially past retirement age.

When they die or finally decide they have had enough they either:
1). Cash rent to a corporation.
2). Let the land go fallow and collect set-aside payments (gov. subsidy)
3). Sell to a developer or corporate farm interest.

The problem is huge. If you want to preserve a family farm it means having farmers who are rich enough to teach their children that farming is a good living with a future.

Americans really do not like to support people so they can actually do better than poorly in their lives.

So I see a major cultural problem that will make the political problem insurmountable for a long time to come.