Farm Bill Policy Chokes Out Local Foods

In Saturday's Times, a vegetable farmer I know, Jack Hedin, wrote an Op-Ed that has been getting a lot of attention. I had written about Jack in Organic Inc. and also blogged on the disastrous floods that struck his farm in Minnesota last summer. Now, trying to expand his land, he has run into a roadblock erected by US farm policy that effectively marginalizes local fruit and vegetable production outside of California and Florida. Here is Jack's piece, reprinted with permission of the author.

My Forbidden Fruits (and Vegetables)

 

By JACK HEDIN

 

Rushford, Minn. - If you’ve stood in line at a farmers’ market recently, you know that the local food movement is thriving, to the point that small farmers are having a tough time keeping up with the demand.

But consumers who would like to be able to buy local fruits and vegetables not just at farmers’ markets, but also in the produce aisle of their supermarket, will be dismayed to learn that the federal government works deliberately and forcefully to prevent the local food movement from expanding. And the barriers that the United States Department of Agriculture has put in place will be extended when the farm bill that House and Senate negotiators are working on now goes into effect.

As a small organic vegetable producer in southern Minnesota, I know this because my efforts to expand production to meet regional demand have been severely hampered by the Agriculture Department’s commodity farm program. As I’ve looked into the politics behind those restrictions, I’ve come to understand that this is precisely the outcome that the program’s backers in California and Florida have in mind: they want to snuff out the local competition before it even gets started.

Last year, knowing that my own 100 acres wouldn’t be enough to meet demand, I rented 25 acres on two nearby corn farms. I plowed under the alfalfa hay that was established there, and planted watermelons, tomatoes and vegetables for natural-food stores and a community-supported agriculture program.

All went well until early July. That’s when the two landowners discovered that there was a problem with the local office of the Farm Service Administration, the Agriculture Department branch that runs the commodity farm program, and it was going to be expensive to fix.

The commodity farm program effectively forbids farmers who usually grow corn or the other four federally subsidized commodity crops (soybeans, rice, wheat and cotton) from trying fruit and vegetables. Because my watermelons and tomatoes had been planted on “corn base” acres, the Farm Service said, my landlords were out of compliance with the commodity program.

I’ve discovered that typically, a farmer who grows the forbidden fruits and vegetables on corn acreage not only has to give up his subsidy for the year on that acreage, he is also penalized the market value of the illicit crop, and runs the risk that those acres will be permanently ineligible for any subsidies in the future. (The penalties apply only to fruits and vegetables — if the farmer decides to grow another commodity crop, or even nothing at all, there’s no problem.)

In my case, that meant I paid my landlords $8,771 — for one season alone! And this was in a year when the high price of grain meant that only one of the government’s three crop-support programs was in effect; the total bill might be much worse in the future.

In addition, the bureaucratic entanglements that these two farmers faced at the Farm Service office were substantial. The federal farm program is making it next to impossible for farmers to rent land to me to grow fresh organic vegetables.

Why? Because national fruit and vegetable growers based in California, Florida and Texas fear competition from regional producers like myself. Through their control of Congressional delegations from those states, they have been able to virtually monopolize the country’s fresh produce markets.

That’s unfortunate, because small producers will have to expand on a significant scale across the nation if local foods are to continue to enter the mainstream as the public demands. My problems are just the tip of the iceberg.

Last year, Midwestern lawmakers proposed an amendment to the farm bill that would provide some farmers, though only those who supply processors, with some relief from the penalties that I’ve faced — for example, a soybean farmer who wanted to grow tomatoes would give up his usual subsidy on those acres but suffer none of the other penalties. However, the Congressional delegations from the big produce states made the death of what is known as Farm Flex their highest farm bill priority, and so it appears to be going nowhere, except perhaps as a tiny pilot program.

Who pays the price for this senselessness? Certainly I do, as a Midwestern vegetable farmer. But anyone trying to do what I do on, say, wheat acreage in the Dakotas, or rice acreage in Arkansas would face the same penalties. Local and regional fruit and vegetable production will languish anywhere that the commodity program has influence.

Ultimately of course, it is the consumer who will pay the greatest price for this — whether it is in the form of higher prices I will have to charge to absorb the government’s fines, or in the form of less access to the kind of fresh, local produce that the country is crying out for.

Farmers need the choice of what to plant on their farms, and consumers need more farms like mine producing high-quality fresh fruits and vegetables to meet increasing demand from local markets — without the federal government actively discouraging them.

Comments

[Crunchy Chicken]

Check out the campaign to contact members of Congress to address the issues with commodity farmland in the Farm Bill:

http://crunchychicken.blogspot.com/2008/03/fix-farm-bill.html

[Karen Jones, RN]

Sustainability is another key issue. The cost of depending on large, centrally located farms is too high. Fuel and secondary evironmental pollution and collateral damage to health are costs no longer affordable for any of us on this small planet.

It is estimated that 10% of the energy used annually in the US is by the food industry, according to a University of Michigan Study*

*(Heller, Martin C., and Gregory A. Keoleian. Life Cycle-Based Sustainability Indicators for Assessment of the U.S. Food System. Ann Arbor, MI: Center for Sustainable Systems, University of Michigan, 2000: 42.).

[Ed Bruske]

Sam, that's incredible, something that had never occured to me. Yet it makes perfect sense. We really have stepped into a kind of Twilight Zone agriculture.

[Sylvia Burgos]

I drive through miles of corn and soybeans twice a day as I commute back and forth from rural Wisconsin to St. Paul, MN to work. I'm awash in grain and bean fields, but the vegetable farms are as rare as hen's teeth. The Farm Bill is a travesty on our health and economy. The subsidies work to degrade the health of our nation while channeling tax supports for the benefit of a tiny handful of commodity dealers. When combined with other regulations and policies, the Farm Bill is an affront to our dinner table and to local economies.
I've written my state senators and hope others will do the same.

[Andy Steinke]

I am a journalist, and I'm trying to get ahold of Jack for a story. Do you know how I can reach him? E-mail me if you do.