Comments occidentalpoppy has made

  • Contract Farmers

    Thank you for your thoughtful analysis.  It is hard to see the farmers for the agribusiness, and the agribusiness loves to disguise itself as family farmers.  Talking about contract farmers is tricky; on the one hand, no one wants to rob them of the dignity of the perception that they are self-employed farmers, yet often the legal and economic truth is that they are independent contractors.  If you look too closely at what happens when you support new, beginning, limited resource, minority, etc. farmers, you may realize you are subsidizing and stabilizing the cheap labor at the bottom of the food supply chain.  This is true in fresh produce as well as in commodities.  Agriculture provides critical primary or supplemental income to many families, even under illegal and exploitive terms.  It is easy to get suckered into supporting family farmers (but actually supporting the industrial status quo) and easy to get suckered into bashing the industrial status quo (while forgetting all the individual family farms that feed into the system.)  We need more voices like yours that can keep the two separate.  I look forward to the rest of your series.On Why we shouldn't target farmers for our farm bill frustrations posted 1 year, 11 months ago 9 Responses

  • Alternatives to the status quo

         I am enjoying this discussion about subsidies and the role they do or don't play in overproduction of monocropped starches and proteins.   I think it is important to remember that the economics of fresh produce are entirely different from the economics of storable commodities.  Farmers gravitate to commodity crops in part because the fact that they store allows for supply management, i.e. protection against poor harvests or poor prices.  Fresh crops are riskier in part because they don't store, and the higher prices of fresh crops correctly reflects the higher risk of growing them.  

         We who believe the goal of farm policy should be affordable and abundant fresh produce with minimum environmental impact should be less concerned with the economics of commodity crops and more concerned with the economics of the fresh market.  The cheap price of corn would not be a major nutritional issue if high quality fresh produce was available along side, and raising the price of corn will not change the availability of fresh produce in rural America or in the inner cities.   If we subsidize either producers or consumers we will simply have more escalation of land prices and environmental problems in the prime specialty crop regions of the country and still no distribution networks serving marginal markets.  What we need is investment in the cooling and distribution infrastructure that will make localized fresh market production viable.  Farmers growing for the fresh market should be able to make tax deductible contributions to self insurance accounts from which they could withdraw tax free if crop or market conditions were certified as losses.  Every school system should have money to contract for fresh procurement and processing (including cooking and distributing to individual schools,) there should be generous tax credits for new regional cooling and distributing operations, and grants and easy credit for cooling and marketing in the most marginal markets.  These investments would improve the quality of the American diet and the economic health of our poorest and least economically diversified communities.

         I agree with Michael Pollen's assessment that we have been long on critique of the current system and short on alternatives.  The people who produce subsidized commodities have a stake in a food system that provides abundant affordable fresh produce and a stake in clean waterways and wildlife habitat, but they are more immediately motivated to preserve their livelihoods and the fragile economies of their rural communities.  The direct subsidy system will not be overturned in a single Farm Bill.  Entrenched industrial ag interests are going to fight for subsidies every step of the way, and many individual producers will support the status quo.  Rather than taking on the rightness or wrongness of subsidies, we should do more to argue the benefits of investments in business that will support rural economies and improved diets.  Pitting the urban public against an apocryphal Park Avenue welfare farmer is not the way to bring about a new vision of a food and farming system in the public interest; not in the city, not for specialty crop producers, and certainly not for the producers currently taking direct subsidies.
    On A response to my critics posted 2 years ago 11 Responses