The fight for hearts and stomachs
There’s a deep fissure on the farm.
On one side: the lion’s share of agriculture that participates in the industries, production, and distribution systems that fill supermarkets’ produce, dairy, and meat sections. This includes most of the North Country’s dairy farmers who sell their milk through a coop into the milkstream.
On the other side: mostly small fruit, vegetable, meat, and dairy farmers who are fighting for a more regional food economy. These are the farmers market and CSA farmers who are filling the locavore demand and putting “local” options in groceries and on restaurants’ menus.
Each side is fighting for the hearts, minds, and stomachs of the American consumer.
Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma and the film Food Inc raised many Americans’ awareness of how large-scale agriculture works. He’s pointed out how subsidies can skew our food systems, how feedlots can make our meat unsafe, how a few corporations can control the genetic backbone of many crops.
Many farmers and agriculture experts are frustrated by Pollan’s characterizations. They believe he’s painting with too broad a brush and giving the American farmer – already under siege financially – a bad name. The dramatic expansion of industrial agriculture since the 1960s has fueled an unprecedented level of food production. And they believe the industry is losing the battle for American public opinion.
According to a survey commissioned by the chemical company BASF U.S. Crop Operations, “nearly 23 percent of consumers believe stewardship practices are worse today than they were ten years ago, compared to just seven percent of farmers”.
Recently, the agriculture industry has been working aggressively to tell its own story. The St. Louis Agribusiness Club hosted a meeting of industry leaders last month to strategize on this very issue.
BASF has produced a very compelling youtube video making the case for U.S. agriculture feeding the world. You can watch it below.
As debate over the 2012 Farm Bill ramps up, a key thing to watch will be how this division between industry and “locavore farming” (for lack of a better term) evolves. People on both sides are lamenting the division. It’ll be interesting to see if it’s possible for the groups to come together to speak for agriculture in its totality.
The agricultural industry is not monolithic. Take beef cattle for example, ranchers have to play into this system but are not necessarily the allies of the meat processors or the feed lot operators. The same goes for the front line dairy farmer. A dairy farmer in St. Lawrence county, even some of our large ones has little in common with the massive corporations which often control other parts of the total supply or the giant dairy corporations operating on irrigated subsidized water out in the desert in California and the Southwest.
Everyone would gain to re-look at the entire system that is for sure.
Man, talk about a tough row to hoe! I have a hard time pictureing the agri-business giants and the organic movement, the midwest, eastern and western dairy producers, the mega farm and tiny little outfits all getting together on the same page. There are farmers who benefit tremendously from subsidies and others who’ve never knowingly seen a subsidy (like me) who are at opposite ends of the spectrum. Hard to imagine an anti-subsidy hawk like me and some multi million dollars corporate farm CEO seeing eye to eye on much.
The way we eat today is largely due to public policy in the form of senate-vote-buying farm subsidies. They are obscene, and they drive the entire economy of the midwest.
But, this should not make enemies of small, medium and agrobiz farmers. There is plenty of need for all levels around the country to be producing . The goal is to stop skewing the economics of growing so that the true cost of agricultural output can be compared across the different forms of farming.
It’s not an either or situation. Farmers who will continue to find and serve new markets as the public understanding around food grows and changes.
UNH has been awarded a $700,000 U.S. Department of Agriculture grant to create a computer model that measures the amount of greenhouse gases an organic dairy farm produces and thus provide ways to cut those emissions. [Friday, Nov. 5, 2010]
It’s the global warming nuts, again. No wonder the small farmer can’t make a go of it. Nice job, guys.
http://www.unionleader.com/article.aspx?headline=UNH+scientists+to+study+cow+burps+.+.+.+and+more&articleId=c43c3680-3551-47ed-be8a-0b5b87880d6e