Farmer Deb’s Recent Comments

• Click here to view comment in original post

  Food Fight

  It is not a 'foodie' issue to want kids to have access to fresh, local, healthy food. Can we please eliminate the term 'foodie' from political discourse? It's mind-numbing. Ok. Now I can focus since that is off my chest.

  As a farm to school advocate and a beginning farmer that just went to the Midwest organic farming conference with 2,600 attendees to the SNA/FRAC Anti-hunger conference in DC, I have been privy to the silos that exist between those that grow the good food to those that focus on filling bellies. Our mission should be one and the same: feed healthy, fair, good, and real food to all.

  Dr. Alan Greene gave the keynote at the farming conference and stated that he would rather tell a child she has cancer, than diabetes. You want to know why?

  Diabetes takes 10-20 years off of your life, on average. It costs $3 million to care for in a lifetime. If we spent $100 million for good, fresh, local food in school lunch, we would just need to prevent 33 kids from becoming diabetic. Sounds like a great investment to me. 1 in 3 kids will be diabetic, make that 1 in 2 if hispanic or black. That is a crime. Diabetes is preventable.

  Here's our common sense request:
  School meals are a vital part of our responsibility to ensure the health and wellbeing of future generations. Improving the quality of school meals, and making them accessible to all children, is essential to our nation's future. Farm to school programs ensure that our children eat the freshest, highest-quality food available. These programs deliver food that not only nourishes children's bodies immediately, but also knowledge that enhances their educational experience and cultivates long-term healthy eating habits. They are a win-win for kids, farmers, communities, educators, parents, and the environment.

  Thanks to the efforts of social entrepreneurs, farm to school programs have bloomed on their own in thousands of schools across the country. The Child Nutrition Act reauthorization is the perfect opportunity to enable more schools--and more children--to benefit from the healthy meals and educational opportunities that farm to school programs can provide.

  The two most effective ways Washington can rebalance the way American children eat in schools include:
  *    Enact $250 million over 5 years, with $50 million mandatory, for Section 122: Access to Local Foods and School Gardens for grants to schools. This would fund 100-500 projects per year up to $100,000 to cover start-up costs for farm to school programs. These competitive, one-time grants will allow schools to develop vendor relationships with nearby farmers, plan seasonal menus and promotional materials, start a school garden, and develop hands-on nutrition education to demonstrate the important interrelationship of nutrition and agriculture.

  *    Establish a farm to school initiative within the Secretary of Agriculture's Office. This initiative will help provide national leadership to a rapidly growing movement, helping to consolidate and guide the various policies and programs important to expand and institutionalize farm to school across the U.S.

  If you want to know more, go to www.farmtoschool.org On For the first time in decades, a healthy school-lunch debate opens posted 9 months ago 10 Responses

• Click here to view comment in original post

  When 1 +1 Doesn't Equal 2

  Thanks, Tom for laying out the difference between a support price that enables a farmer to pay his seed bill and forking out four dollars for a latte! Ken Cook's and Scott Faber's definition of "pass through" leaves much to be desired in rural reality.

  Please take a moment to read a response to EWG's database drafted by George Naylor, Iowa grain farmer and NFFC president, below:

  With the recent release of its new database on federal farm subsidies, the Environmental Working Group has once again made farmers out to be welfare cases. As a math major and farmer for 30 years, I can tell when statistics are deceiving.

  Unlike agribusiness commodity groups, most family farmers do not defend the current subsidy system and would agree with EWG that our current farm and food policy is broken. But EWG's database showing wealthy farmers as the main beneficiaries of our farm policy overlooks the real winners of the subsidy system: food processors, multinational grain traders, and industrial livestock operations.

  Why do we have subsidies in the first place? Due to perpetually low commodity prices that seldom meet the cost of production for farmers, subsidies were created to make up the difference.

  The 1996 Freedom to Farm Act removed all remaining vestiges of the New Deal price support and supply management policies, letting the "market" drive down prices as low as they could go. Prices not surprisingly collapsed, causing Congress in 2002 to institute "countercyclical" subsidies when prices were driven too low to make up for some of that lost income. Large subsidy payments reflect a food system that encourages production to achieve cheap commodity prices which mainly benefit the buyers of these commodities, not the producers. That is what needs to change.

  Corn prices are higher now, but during the past few years, corn was still selling for under $2 per bushel--less than farmers received in the 1970's   To make up for these low prices, I received $60,411 between 2003-2005 according to EWG's database. This comes out to about $20,000 annually or just enough to pay for my seed and repair bills. There have been no provisions to cover skyrocketing costs of fuel, rent, taxes, fertilizer or living expenses.

  This places my little 470 acre farm in the top 11% of EWG's database. So am I one of those "big welfare farmers" hogging all government subsidies? By throwing in my payments with those of larger farmers, EWG's tabulations make it look like farmers in my percentile received $46,000 instead of the actual $20,000 per year.  

  Framing farm bills as welfare bills that pit small farmers vs. big farmers, or farmers vs. non-farmers, hides from scrutiny who really benefits from our current policy favoring cheap prices for commodities. EWG tries to make farm programs fit a description of welfare programs, even though it's Tyson, Smithfield and Cargill who are the real welfare cases.

  Research by Tufts University has shown that from 1997 to 2005, the four largest broiler chicken companies paid $5 billion less than the cost of production for their feed-mostly corn and soybean meal produced by family farmers. The four largest hog companies (producing 50% of U.S. hogs) paid $3 billion less than the cost of production for their feed. These types of factory farms, including giant beef and dairy feedlots, are also some of the most egregious environmental polluters, yet EWG, as an environmental organization, fails to recognize them as the true beneficiaries of our subsidy policies.

  As president of the National Family Farm Coalition, an organization that truly does represent and advocate on behalf of family farmers, we don't like subsidies anymore than EWG does. What farmers need most of all is a fair price from the marketplace and price stability. What we don't need is sham Farmers "Risk Management Accounts" or privatized revenue insurance that dismantle our current system without addressing the problem of low prices, which is the core issue underlying our flawed farm policies, not subsidies.  

  NFFC's Food from Family Farms Act advocates farmers getting a fair price from the marketplace instead of relying on taxpayer subsidies. It accomplishes this by putting in place the original support programs we had for decades: a floor price for commodities in conjunction with conservation programs and emergency food, crop, acreage, and strategic energy reserves.

  We need a farm bill that favors family farmers and a healthy, safe food supply. Distorting statistics and refusing to point out who really wins with subsidies does nothing to lead us in the right direction.
   On Don't blame farmers for the farm-subsidy mess posted 2 years, 5 months ago 21 Responses