In Saturday's Times, a vegetable farmer I know, Jack Hedin, wrote an Op-Ed that has been getting a lot of attention. I had written about Jack in Organic Inc. and also blogged on the disastrous floods that struck his farm in Minnesota last summer. Now, trying to expand his land, he has run into a roadblock erected by US farm policy that effectively marginalizes local fruit and vegetable production outside of California and Florida. Here is Jack's piece, reprinted with permission of the author.
My Forbidden Fruits (and Vegetables)
By JACK HEDIN
Rushford, Minn. - If you’ve stood in line at a farmers’ market recently, you know that
the local food movement is thriving, to the point that small farmers
are having a tough time keeping up with the demand.
But consumers who would like to be able to buy local fruits and
vegetables not just at farmers’ markets, but also in the produce aisle
of their supermarket, will be dismayed to learn that the federal
government works deliberately and forcefully to prevent the local food
movement from expanding. And the barriers that the United States
Department of Agriculture has put in place will be extended when the
farm bill that House and Senate negotiators are working on now goes
into effect.
As a small organic vegetable producer in southern Minnesota, I know
this because my efforts to expand production to meet regional demand
have been severely hampered by the Agriculture Department’s commodity
farm program. As I’ve looked into the politics behind those
restrictions, I’ve come to understand that this is precisely the
outcome that the program’s backers in California and Florida have in
mind: they want to snuff out the local competition before it even gets
started.
Last year, knowing that my own 100 acres wouldn’t be enough to meet
demand, I rented 25 acres on two nearby corn farms. I plowed under the
alfalfa hay that was established there, and planted watermelons,
tomatoes and vegetables for natural-food stores and a
community-supported agriculture program.
All went well until early July. That’s when the two landowners
discovered that there was a problem with the local office of the Farm
Service Administration, the Agriculture Department branch that runs the
commodity farm program, and it was going to be expensive to fix.
The commodity farm program effectively forbids farmers who usually
grow corn or the other four federally subsidized commodity crops
(soybeans, rice, wheat and cotton) from trying fruit and vegetables.
Because my watermelons and tomatoes had been planted on “corn base”
acres, the Farm Service said, my landlords were out of compliance with
the commodity program.
I’ve discovered that typically, a farmer who grows the forbidden
fruits and vegetables on corn acreage not only has to give up his
subsidy for the year on that acreage, he is also penalized the market
value of the illicit crop, and runs the risk that those acres will be
permanently ineligible for any subsidies in the future. (The penalties
apply only to fruits and vegetables — if the farmer decides to grow
another commodity crop, or even nothing at all, there’s no problem.)
In my case, that meant I paid my landlords $8,771 — for one season
alone! And this was in a year when the high price of grain meant that
only one of the government’s three crop-support programs was in effect;
the total bill might be much worse in the future.
In addition, the bureaucratic entanglements that these two farmers
faced at the Farm Service office were substantial. The federal farm
program is making it next to impossible for farmers to rent land to me
to grow fresh organic vegetables.
Why? Because national fruit and vegetable growers based in
California, Florida and Texas fear competition from regional producers
like myself. Through their control of Congressional delegations from
those states, they have been able to virtually monopolize the country’s
fresh produce markets.
That’s unfortunate, because small producers will have to expand on a
significant scale across the nation if local foods are to continue to
enter the mainstream as the public demands. My problems are just the
tip of the iceberg.
Last year, Midwestern lawmakers proposed an amendment to the farm
bill that would provide some farmers, though only those who supply
processors, with some relief from the penalties that I’ve faced — for
example, a soybean farmer who wanted to grow tomatoes would give up his
usual subsidy on those acres but suffer none of the other penalties.
However, the Congressional delegations from the big produce states made
the death of what is known as Farm Flex their highest farm bill
priority, and so it appears to be going nowhere, except perhaps as a
tiny pilot program.
Who pays the price for this senselessness? Certainly I do, as a
Midwestern vegetable farmer. But anyone trying to do what I do on, say,
wheat acreage in the Dakotas, or rice acreage in Arkansas would face
the same penalties. Local and regional fruit and vegetable production
will languish anywhere that the commodity program has influence.
Ultimately of course, it is the consumer who will pay the greatest
price for this — whether it is in the form of higher prices I will have
to charge to absorb the government’s fines, or in the form of less
access to the kind of fresh, local produce that the country is crying
out for.
Farmers need the choice of what to plant on their farms, and
consumers need more farms like mine producing high-quality fresh fruits
and vegetables to meet increasing demand from local markets — without
the federal government actively discouraging them.
