Our Farm Bill

Sunday morning. We get two papers on Sunday, the SF Chronicle and the Contra Costa Times. A leisurely breakfast and time to read them both.

So there’s a great article in the Chron about the farm bill. Yeah, that one.

I know the House passed it and sent it on to the Senate. I know they made some important but very small changes. We continue to be in deep doo-doo, folks.

The crux of the article is that the farm bill is archaic. It had its use at first and hopefully, solved the problem it was created to solve. But like a lot of programs, it wasn’t supposed to live forever. Congress’s continual renewal of it is destructive and expensive.

We lobbied. We wrote letters and emails and sent faxes. We told our representatives over and over, what was wrong with the bill and what they needed to change. They aren’t listening. They continue to let the various food industries write their own portions of the bill. They continue to give billions of dollars to large-scale agriculture and corporate farms. They continue to subsidize, cotton, soy, corn, dairy, sugar, peanuts, etc. They continue to subsidize monoculture and fertilizer and pesticides.

They don’t subsidize vegetables, nuts, or fruit. They don’t subsidize organic. Sure, California complains about that because California grows most of the vegetables, nuts, and fruit, and not so much of the other stuff. But the point is not which state gets the money. The point is the damage done to our health and to the economy because our government subsidizes Big Ag.

This is also the bill that pays farmers to not grow something. Umm… how do I get in on that?

A lot of us question whether subsidies are good at all. Personally, I’d like to see them go away just on simple free market principles. The example in the article was about salad: if people are demanding a variety of nutritious, dark greens for their salads, but Congress is subsidizing iceberg – guess what a farmer grows? If he wants the subsidy, he grow iceberg. Sure, stubborn people scrounge around until they find a farmer who grows what they want. But why should it be so hard?

And because the market can’t control what’s available to buy, we have to pay much more for those nutritious greens. The subsidies for iceberg means it costs the farmer a lot more to grow them. (This is just an example - the farm bill does not subsidize iceberg lettuce.)

We want organic, we want fresh. We want research and innovation. We want rotated crops and farming methods that nourish the land.

We get monoculture. We get factory farms and sludge piles and fertilizer and pesticides. We can corn syrup as a way to use up all the corn that’s grown and the corn syrup gets put into nearly every kind of food that’s available to buy. We get diabetes. We get fat. We get cancer.

Follow the money.