Farm Bill Girl’s Recent Comments

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  hopefully it'd be good to acknowledge those family farm and citizens groups that have been battling the CAFO menace for decades now, and trying to raise public awareness. 90% of our nation's independent hog farmers are now gone, thanks to all the consolidation in the industry and trend towards factory farms. The National Family Farm Coalition has been one of the few in DC raising awareness of this, but we're never called to testify at hearings and instead, it's the National Pork Producers Council who gets to be the "voice of farmers". FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: Katherine Ozer (202) 543-5675 Cell: (202) 421-4544 HOUSE AGRICULTURE SUBCOMMITTEE FAILS TO LOOK AT REAL CAUSES BEHIND PORK CRISIS Hearing Featured Solely Corporate Agriculture Witnesses and no Family Farmer Voice Washington D.C. (October 23, 2009) – The National Family Farm Coalition denounced yesterday’s hearing of the House Agriculture Subcommittee on Livestock, Dairy and Poultry on the “U.S. Pork Industry Economic Crisis” for featuring a stacked panel of corporate hog producers and failing to offer real solutions to the current crisis. Rhonda Perry, a Missouri livestock farmer said, “The hearing featured the same tired solutions of more free trade and pork buyouts from the voices of corporate agribusiness and failed to look at the real problems behind the pork crisis. When four companies control 66% of the hog industry, it’s no wonder why we’ve lost 90% of our hog farmers since 1980!” The stacked panel featured a representative from the National Pork Producers Council and one of the state affiliates, the Iowa Pork Producers Association and the CEO of Seaboard Foods. There were no voices representing independent hog producers. Instead of blaming swine flu and the collapse in export markets, NFFC believes USDA must look at issues of market structure and access and the continued subsidizing of specialized hog facilities that are contributing to overproduction. Perry said, “This cycle of promoting the expansion of corporate livestock production with taxpayer money, then bailing out the industry because of overproduction with taxpayer money is an irresponsible practice and must come to an end. You can’t justify loans for new operations and more livestock when the current hog farmers are barely treading water or are going out of business all together.” This issue was ignored by the Committee. Over the past two years, USDA has spent $264 million on direct and guaranteed loans. NFFC has called for Farm Service Agency to suspend direct and guaranteed loans to new or expanding specialized hog facilities. A petition with over 25,000 signatures calling on the loan suspension was delivered to Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack this week. To view the letter go to http://www.iowacci.org/whatcanido/stopUSDAloan.html To view the cover letter to Secretary Vilsack click here. NFFC Executive Director Katherine Ozer also urged the House Agriculture Subcommittee to look at the issue of consolidation in the pork markets and noted that USDA would soon be issuing rules designed to provide fairer markets for independent hog farmers. “The National Pork Producers Council fails to represent America’s hog farmers with its misplaced focus on exports, more free trade agreements and blaming swine flu instead of addressing the real reason why hog farmers can’t get a fair price for their meat. Without real captive supply reform of the markets to ensure agribusinesses like Seaboard pay farmers a fair price, America’s hog producers will continue to suffer.”On Time for the mainstream media to face the factory farm-swine flu link posted 1 week, 2 days ago 21 Responses

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  And my .02 cents on Obama's ag policy: Willing to toss a few bones at the organic/sustainable folks who can be deluded into thinking Obama actually is on their side and that a White House farmers market represents real "change," not willing to challenge the industrial ag guys fundamentally who run Washington. Does Monsanto or ADM really give a rat's ass about Merrigan's Know your Farmer initaitive as long as we keep a cheap grain, pro-export market/free trade, pro-biotech structure in place? Now the Antitrust workshops in 2010 to me ARE a serious threat to agribusiness and business as usual. It could be window dressing or represent the deep structural challenge we need to the current system. I think it's up to us to make sure it's not window dresing and something substantive comes out of it. so for now, i'll praise Obama to the moon on that front. Too bad The Nation was too busy featuring celebrity chefs to actually cover these more structural issues and the people doing shit to address corporate control of our food system!On Another Monsanto man in a key USDA post? Obama's ag policy's giving me whiplash posted 1 month, 3 weeks ago 20 Responses

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  And my .02 cents on Obama's ag policy: Willing to toss a few bones at the organic/sustainable folks who can be deluded into thinking Obama actually is on their side and that a White House farmers market represents real "change," not willing to challenge the industrial ag guys fundamentally who run Washington. Does Monsanto or ADM really give a rat's ass about Merrigan's Know your Farmer initaitive as long as we keep a cheap grain, pro-export market/free trade, pro-biotech structure in place? Now the Antitrust workshops in 2010 to me ARE a serious threat to agribusiness and business as usual. It could be window dressing or represent the deep structural challenge we need to the current system. I think it's up to us to make sure it's not window dresing and something substantive comes out of it. so for now, i'll praise Obama to the moon on that front. Too bad The Nation in their food issue was too busy featuring celebrity chefs to actually cover these more structural issues and the people doing shit to address corporate control of our food system!On Another Monsanto man in a key USDA post? Obama's ag policy's giving me whiplash posted 1 month, 3 weeks ago 20 Responses

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  There are two structural solutions that need to be done in order to address sustainable agriculture, and which are often overlooked by food justice advocates who focus on buying local, organic and cooing over Joel Salatin.

   

  The first HUGE opportunity we have to finally address how independent livestock farmers and ranchers can sustain themselves and we can put a dent in Smithfield/Tyson's market power and love of factory farms, is that USDA and the DOJ for the first time have announced workshops to address competition issues in agriculture. The corporatization of agriculture has sucked the liveblood out of rural America and given us all the ills of our current industrial food system. NPR did a great story on this issue and the upcoming hearings.

  
  http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112035045&ps=cprs

  
  Also, USDA will also be issuing regulations that will restore some fairness to the livestock markets.We need all consumers and concerned eaters to be commenting on these when they come out. This is very unprecedented for the Obama Administration to be tackling FINALLY the issue of corporate control of our meat industry.

  
  From his rural plan:

  Prevent Anticompetitive Behavior Against Family Farms: In an era of market consolidation, Barack Obama will fight to ensure family and independent farmers have fair access to markets, control over their production decisions, and transparency in prices. Obama is a strong supporter of Senator Tom Harkin's (DIA) legislation that protects independent producers by banning the ownership of livestock by meat packers, and he will fight for passage of the law as president. Today meatpackers produce more than 20 percent of the nation's hogs, and their share is growing. When meatpackers own livestock, they bid less aggressively for the hogs and cattle produced by independent farmers. When supplies are short and prices are rising, they are able to stop buying livestock, which disrupts the market.

  The 1921 Packers and Stockyards Act prohibits price discrimination by meatpackers against small and midsize farmers, but the law has not been enforced. Obama will issue regulations for what constitutes undue price discrimination and his administration will enforce the law. He will also strengthen anti-monopoly laws; change federal agriculture policy to strengthen producer protection from fraud, abuse, and market manipulation; and make sure that farm programs are helping family farmers, as opposed to large, vertically integrated corporate agribusiness.

  And Part two, we need to reform our trade agreements. NAFTA/WTO are intended to allow agribusiness to export our GMO-industrial-factory farm model to the rest of the world. The swine flu link in Mexico shows the fallacy of this ideology. SMithfield is now in Romania/Poland and looking to China for growth. Meanwhile, apples, garlic, honey is being dumped here from China, undercutting US farmers. Milk protein concentrates come in from Russia and New Zealand to be used as garbage in Cheez Whiz and other Nestle/Kraft krap products. Reforming our trade policy needs to be central to rebuilding local food systems towards food sovereignty.

   

  On Sustainable ag meets the MSM -- and wins! posted 3 months ago 14 Responses

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  Right On!

  I work with both commodity crop farmers and those doing direct marketing and CSAs. I am very tired and irritated by all these foodie activists who continually bash "Iowa corn farmers" as some kind of epithet and especially Ken Cook and his diabolical database for making out the real enemies of the food system to be "millionaire" farmers on welfare when it's really corporate AGRIBUSINESS who gets the real profits off our cheap grain policy. Corn farmers are just a cog in the larger machine to fuel the profits of Monsanto and John Deere and ADM/Cargill. Farm Bureau somehow brainwashes farmers to believe that agribusinesses' interests align with farmers.

  
  Here at the National Family Farm Coalition, we have always advocated getting rid of subsidies and replacing them with a price floor (akin to min wage) to force agribusiness to pay a fair price to farmers. THis is what we had during the New Deal. Then you need a grain reserve to store excess production to release onto the market if prices spike too high. The AEI right wingers thought this was too Communistic, so eventually, we got the 1996 Freedom to Farm Bill, which was supposed to eliminate all price supports and subsidies and let the "free market" rule. Then commodity prices collapsed, Farm  BUreau realized it needed to do something to pretend it cared about farmers and thus why we have the current system of countercyclical payments and direct payments, but alas, no price floor to force Smithfield and ADM to pay fairly the farmer.

  
  Here is ag economist's Darryl Ray's landmark report advocating for such a policy, instead of the current cheap grain agribusiness policy that allows us to dump commodities as well into third world markets. I suggest all you folks who simply advocate for "getting rid of subsidies" and complete deregulation of commodity prices read this to get a more accurate view of how farm economics really works.

  http://www.agpolicy.org/blueprint/APACReport8-20-03WITHCOVER.pdf

  Several food activists (like Barbara Kingsolver) were misled by some of the Ron Kind-Richard Lugar alternative Farm Bills that wanted to take money from commodity subsidies to give to good "organic" farmers or nutrition programs. Frankly, it was a bill only Monsanto/Cargill could love. Farmers would still be producing corn/soybeans because the market is there, and the ones who would have benefitted the most from the coming collapse in corn prices would be ADM/Smithfield who get cheap HFCS and cheap feed for CAFOs.

  I can tell you how Farm Bureau justifies the commodity subsidies since I read their propaganda everyday. Americans have the "safest, cheapest most abundant food supply in the world." farm programs are meant to be only a safety net for when commodity prices collapse (yeah, funny they don't care about safety nets for anyone else of course...). free trade will help save farmers by getting them an export market so commodity prices may someday rise (never mind it's Cargill who does the trading, not farmers!). Farm programs take up less than 1% of the federal budget and help ensure we are never reliant on foreigners for our food (never mind that our relentless promotion of FTAs has already made us dependent on imported food..)

  On An 'agri-intellectual' talks back posted 3 months ago 49 Responses