Chews Wise

Farm Bill Policy Chokes Out Local Foods

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.

The New Local Middlemen

Middlemen are often derided as making a buck off the back of the little guy. What this simplistic picture misses is the vital role wholesalers play in creating markets for smaller, and yes, local, farmers who can't sell direct or who want to diversify their income stream.

This isn't a sexy business. You won't see stunning pictures of farmers in lush fields. More likely, just a steel warehouse with forklifts and trucks at the concrete loading dock. Some of these businesses, like Organically Grown Co., in Oregon, are working hard at reducing their carbon footprint by running trucks on biodiesel, retrofitting their warehouses, replacing lights, and migrating to reusable plastic produce bins instead of waxed cardboard boxes. Others I've come across include Co-Op Partners Warehouse in the Twin Cities, Veritable Vegetable in northern California, and Tuscarora Organic in the mid-Atlantic. There are many more, but not nearly enough.

Amid the din of the Iowa Caucus, NPR this morning profiled one start up in northern Michigan making a go at creating a local wholesale produce business. It's worth a listen. Expect more entrants into this niche as local food grows.

- Samuel Fromartz

This is Brooklyn?

I grew up in Brooklyn. I spent many hours on the subway, going to Coney Island, or to the Promenade in Brooklyn Heights. I went to school on Clinton Hill, skated in Prospect park, and cleaned up Fort Greene park on the first Earth Day. (There were empty drug vials in the park then, now there's a farmers' market). But in all that time, I never saw anything like this, ever. It shows how much the urban farm and garden movement has come, and it rocks. The farm, pictured above, is located on asphalt covered in 2 feet of compost. It's from an article by Kelle Carter, farm field coordinator for Seeds of Change, the organic seed and food company. I came across it looking for seeds. Worth a read.

Who Needs California?

OK, we're getting to the time of year when produce fiends like me begin to wish they live in California, because the veggies there never stop. But this past year, I had pretty good luck in DC, growing my own and eating veggies from the garden from late-April through this week. It may even go longer, though today we had our first real snow and it might have blown out the lettuce. We'll see.

Here are some pictures taken last Sunday of the veggies we've been eating (not pictured are kale and Swiss chard, both still going strong). Many people give up the garden in August, but for me that's when things really got going. I seeded a lot of greens, especially Asian greens in August and September, and am still reaping the bounty. For awhile now, most of the produce we've been buying is fruit. That little patch of mesclun mix lettuce, by the way, would amount to more than one pound.

Click on the image to start the slide show:

If You're Curious and Hungry in DC

I'll be speaking at a local foods panel at Todd Gray's Equinox Restaurant in Washington on Sunday at 4 p.m. Tracey Ryder, co-founder, Edible Communities publications, will also be on hand. If you're interested click on the link for a ticket, which includes a tasting too.

A Kenyan View of 'Food Miles'

The London Guardian has a valuable piece on the way the "food miles" debate plays out in the Third World, among Kenyan farmers who are growing organic food for British consumers. They object to a proposal by the UK's Soil Association (SA), the country's main certification body, to limit or ban imported organic food.

Starting with a debate in London tomorrow, the SA will hear views on the issue until September, when it may decide to introduce a limited or total ban. A ban would mean labelling air-freighted products so that they effectively lost their organic status due to their 'food miles'. Such a move would destroy the livelihoods of tens of thousands of smallholders across Africa in one of the continent's most enterprising export industries, forcing them back into poverty and subsistence farming.

'A ban on our export market will be death for us,' says Charles Kimani, who has put his children through school and college from the profits made from his fruit and vegetables on just seven acres of land.

The Limits of Local

I had a spirited discussion on Seattle's NPR affiliate, KUOW, on the local v. organic debate, but it wasn't much of a debate, since the highest standard everyone seemed to prefer was local AND organic. The chef and author Deborah Madison had a thoughtful piece on Culinate reaching the same conclusion.

The point I tried to make is that local alone is not sufficient. Buying within a certain radius of one's house could mean purchasing from Smithfield Farm if you're in North Carolina, and that might not be what locavores have in mind.

The problem with local is that distance gets the major emphasis, rather than environmental impact, the way the food is produced, or the myriad other issues to consider in reaching a higher food standard. Organic has been criticized because it's all about the method (rather than distance or social justice), but I expect local too will find itself facing similar criticisms. Take note that among the most active opponents to chemical and intensive animal farming are neighbors who live nearby the fields and manure ponds. They don't want this in their backyard, yet it's from a local farm. ...Oh wait, that's not what you mean by local. And Wal-Mart wasn't what organic was supposed to be either.

- Samuel Fromartz