Jim, thankyou for this critique of agribusiness.
As a farmer, I'm writing to identify further aspects of the problem that are critical to its resolution.

People working the sheep farms and mountain common grazing here in Wales, just two generations ago, used to get about 60% of the retail price of their stock.
Now we are lucky to get 13%.
Even with subsidies (ending in 2012) we don't make the minimum wage for the hours we work -

We are, effectively, being suppressed in favour of industrialized livestock production abroad. The prices paid here reflect those imports' minimized production costs - which include practices that are both unethical and illegal here.

For example, to avoid the cost of annually dagging their flocks (shearing off shit-caked wool to avoid maggot attacks), it's been standard practice in some countries to skin the area (without anaesthetic) so that surviving ewes will have only wool-free scar tissue.

Those businesses can profitably undercut sustainable EU production costs while sending their meat halfway round the world.

Further raising the bar here for ethical and sustainable production standards will not help - it will only drive more small farms out of business while large concerns just set the costs against tax and swallow the failing small farms.

What is required is the reform of trade rules, from the vicious farce of "free" trade NOT to the gross follies of trade protectionism,
but rather to what should be called "Trade Stewardship."

This is about evaluating the sustainability of agricultural practices and, where particular imports are indexed significantly higher than the mean of the home product they are actively encouraged, but they are tarriffed if indexed significantly lower.

I suggest that there is no more powerful dynamic than trade, and the changes you propose will not only prove unachievable without the above reform of trade terms,
even if they were somehow achieved within USA your newly trained legions of farmers would promptly be put out of business by unsustainable cheap imports.

Is it time for Grist as a whole to face this fact that there is simply no prospect of "Sustainability Within One Country"
however great that country may believe itself to be ?

Surely the critical role for President Obama is not primarily within the US;
it is to help achieve the equitable and sustainable international agreements whereby all nations may start to optimize our common global interdependence.

Without those global agreements, local and national efforts, however laudable, are just pissing into the wind.

Regards,

Billhook

I believe what your are trying to reach for in your guest commentary here, Mr. Goodman, is the concept of 'externalization of costs.'  Industry in general, not excluding agricultural enterprises, is very adept at externalizing all sorts of costs, whether it be soil and nutrient loss, uninsured workers, or the costs of genetically altered organisms infiltrating a species' entire genome or inculcating resistance on the part of pest species.  
Likewise, manufacturers of agricultural produce - be it food or fibre - have long, long practiced the art of increasing the bottom line at share-holder pleasing rates against the producers of the agricultural goods they buy.  They are increasingly good at it - from manipulating pricing structures to fighting country-of-origin labeling (this pertains to the United States).  In fact, I find it patently absurd that labeling laws are so lax in the United States; not only does a manufacturer obfuscate about origins, but certain information on food is prohibited (another subject for another time).
However, if I were to critique this ideal of a wonderful future fed from small, mixed, prosperous farmsteads, it would be education and literacy.  The complexity of a farm increases exponentially with every added layer; to profitably, ethically, and humanely operate such an enterprise requires vast quantities of knowledge built over years of experience and education and other forms of informal knowledge exchange.  Parceling out good land to small-holders is one thing, but such a scheme can only succeed if it contains a strong component for education.

In New Zealand the roads feature "watch for falling sheep" signs, the sheep that remain unsheared get their wool soaked with water and fall down mountain sides from the weight.

"...just two generations ago, used to get about 60% of the retail price of their stock.
Now we are lucky to get 13%."

Do bottomline considerations of "free" trade skimming scams justify the cruelty to animals and humans?  Does the divine right of capital exclude any other value system?  Evidently so.  

The scammers have produced orders of magnitude of worthless electronic "paper" over and above any real economic value of labor and goods actually traded, some portion of that constitutes their "profits".  Meanwhile, we the people are on the hook for the whole imaginary mess.

These experts seem to have pre-taxed everyone's income for the next century or so, taken the skim, and merrily jet setted their way offshore with the loot.

Maybe we could bring back debtor's prison just for these billionaire scammers?  I bet they would give back the cash after a few years, just to get out.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin