What is the latest taxpayer-subsidized economic stimulus scheme?

Why, manure digesters on factory farms, of course!

At the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen last December, U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack unveiled plans to promote manure digesters as a way to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent. The trick is that you have to be a factory farm to qualify.

In his State of the State address in January, Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle announced his latest round of tax credits for factory farm expansion, including a whopping $6.6 million for two manure digesters in Dane County catering to just a handful of mega-dairies. Dane County Executive Kathleen Falk has also been pushing for $1 million in her budget for these digesters.

The real tragedy is that manure digesters actually make global warming worse while “solving” a manure problem that would not even exist if cows were allowed to graze on pasture rather than being confined indoors. As Paris Reidhead documents in the January 2010 issue of the Milkweed, methane is 21 times as bad as carbon dioxide when it comes to causing global warming, and this methane threat largely stems from factory farms that store liquid manure in lagoons under anaerobic conditions. In contrast, utilizing manure as compost under aerobic conditions reduces the “carbon footprint” of dairy cows by over 90 percent.

From Jan. 11 to 24 I was in Germany to speak on the dairy crisis in the U.S. as part of the International Dairy and Eco Fair Trade Conference in Berlin. Representatives from around the world spoke on the problems facing dairy farmers in their regions. We agreed on global strategies to raise farmgate prices and bring dignity to family dairy farmers.

The European Milk Board hosted the second half of my trip, including tours of dairy farms and milk plants. Our first stop was a 950-cow dairy on a former East German collective farm. The farm buildings and connected methane digester were several years old and received huge government subsidies to keep them operating. There were chronic problems with the digester and at the time the mixer in the tank was broken, requiring special scuba divers to repair it. Similar problems plague manure digesters in Wisconsin, which seem to be on perpetual high-tech life support.

While in Germany we also toured newer 600-800 cow dairies with digesters. The owners explained that these digesters were simply not profitable without huge government subsidies. As problems developed they were forced to install a newer more expensive system, and with that “fix” came newer problems. It seemed this treadmill was mostly designed to benefit sales people, technicians and manufacturers of manure digesters, not family farmers or the environment.

Without a fair milk price that actually covers their cost of production, many of the German farmers said they would not survive through 2010. The same crisis is facing dairy farmers in the U.S. who have endured a 50 percent decline in farmgate prices due to corporate control, even as consumer prices for milk have not budged and the dairy giants report record profits. In contrast, sustainable organic grass-based dairy farmers were a bit better off in Germany, as they are in the U.S., though their future is not secure either.

Numerous studies by Tom Kriegl of the UW Center for Dairy Profitability have shown that the most efficient dairy operations have less than 100 cows, mostly outside and eating grass — yet, such a family farm is not large enough to qualify for taxpayer support and does not create enough manure to require a methane digester.

As long as my tax dollars and those of other organic sustainable farmers are being used to bankroll schemes that just increase pollution for more corporate profit, there will be no economic recovery. Indigenous communities developed “earth-friendly” farming methods that kept our planet healthy for thousands of years. Many of these practices are being incorporated into family farming today. In fact, a recent 2008 study by 400 scientists for the United Nations International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development concluded that small-scale organic agriculture is not only the best means to feed the world, but also the best response to climate change.

Let’s stop wasting money on expensive digesters for a manure problem that does not need to exist, and put cows back outside on pasture where they belong. When manure is treated as a valuable resource, as it is on small farms, then we can eliminate or drastically reduce the need for petroleum-based chemical fertilizers. Ending factory farm subsidies and promoting sustainable agriculture instead will not only lead to fairer milk prices for family farmers and healthier food choices for consumers, but it will actually help spare the planet from climate change, too.

John Kinsman, an organic dairy farmer from La Valle, is president of Family Farm Defenders. The organization is located in Madison.

Natural Foods Merchandiser
By Dave Carter, executive director of the National Bison Association.

The meat industry took a public relations shellacking in 2009. The constant barrage of stories regarding E.coli, salmonella and ammonia-washed ground beef did little to instill consumer confidence in the nation’s meat supply.

To address these concerns, Patrick Boyle, president of the American Meat Institute, urged USDA to approve AMI’s long-standing petition to allow slaughterhouses to irradiate beef carcasses to eliminate the E.coli.

Say again? Irradiation is the answer?

Granted, E.coli can be present in any size plant, but the skyrocketing prevalence of this pathogen is also linked to the industrialization of the meat system. Animals fattened on concentrated diets are processed in plants handling more than 4,000 head per day. Trim from these carcasses are mixed and blended. A typical ground beef patty contains the remnants of more than 60 cattle.

Ignore for the purposes of argument that federal law flat-out prohibits irradiation in any certified organic product. Irradiation kills pathogens. Heck, with enough irradiation, cow manure can be made safe to eat. Yum.

Irradiation is not the food-safety silver bullet Large processors can easily afford expensive technology, and spread costs among the thousands of head processed each day. For smaller processors, irradiation represents one more expensive “solution” to solve a problem that they probably didn’t create.

There’s a better approach to addressing pathogens like E.coli that’s far more complex than zapping carcasses.

• We need to quit pushing animals from birth to slaughter as quickly as possible. The “hot” rations, growth hormones and antibiotics used to fatten livestock tend to create digestive conditions that cause high levels of E.coli.
• Let’s diversify — rather than concentrate — the meat processing sector. Slower processing speeds and less co-mingling will reduce conditions that allow the pathogens to spread from carcass to carcass.
• We need more facilities for pathogen testing. Federal guidelines encourage processors to “test and hold” products until results are known, but do not prohibit shipping products before receiving those results. The shortage of accredited facilities often forces small processors to wait several days to receive results. That’s a huge burden in terms of inventory management and loss of shelf life. Consequently, many processors ship products before test results are received, and then hope they do not have to issue a recall.

AMI has asked USDA to issue mandatory “test and hold” regulations. That’s a start. But speeding up the turnaround for results is critical as well.

Pathogens in meat are a significant factor in eroding consumer confidence. Perhaps restoring that confidence should involve a larger commitment than simply installing one more piece of expensive machinery.

Dave Carter is the executive director of the National Bison Association and principal of Crystal Springs Consulting Inc. He maintains a small herd of Buffalo in Colorado.

The Mark News
by Alexandra Morton – Professional biologist; Founder of non-profit Salmon Coast Field Station for research.

As I stand behind a young mother at the market checkout counter, the biologist in me wonders if my species no longer recognizes food. Item after item bears no resemblance to any food item that our species evolved to consume. Even the apples in the plastic bag were too toxic for any insect to touch. This would be like watching a mother bear trying to feed her cubs rocks and empty shells. I would not give that bear’s lineage high potential for survival. I look sadly at the mother, who without a doubt is trying her best to please and feed her children. She is just too distant from her roots as a living creature on planet earth to recognize what real food looks like.

Ten thousand years ago, glacier melt-water scoured the rocky British Columbia coast and the humans that first stepped into this landscape could barely survive. Birds brought the seeds of the hardy little shore pine, empty rivers beckoned to salmon as they swam past. Forest, fish, and humans hung on and eventually flourished.

These people’s lives depended on salmon and salmon are dependable because they return on a very precise schedule. The world around them can prosper if they set their clocks to the salmon. Legends and rules steeped the culture of the first people. They must have damaged some salmon runs and they must have learned from that, because without our current wealth of understanding of salmon biology, they managed the wild salmon runs extremely well.

They did this because their lives depended on it. I would argue we are no different today. In a world of corporate food experiments gone bad, there should be a global body created immediately to safeguard the remaining natural systems that produce clean air, food, and water. B.C. is one of these systems, and our wild salmon are a food resource we may dearly wish we had better managed.

Consider this. The city of Vancouver is a world-class city, producing waste like all other cities and yet one of earth’s largest wild salmon runs is still trying to migrate through its streets. This is a miracle, a gift no other city in the world can boast of! But, like the young mother, the city no longer recognizes food. The fish are vanishing and we don’t care because we think it has nothing to do with us.

Oh the folly of us humans. It pulls deeply at me as I have children and know we are risking their lives simply because we are disconnected and foolhardy. We actually think fish farms will feed the world. We drill deep into the earth, suck up oil, refine it, pour it into generators, all to throw food – real fish caught and moved the length of the planet and made into pellets – into pens where over-fed, fat farm fish defecate tons daily, despoiling the natural systems around them.

Lift your heads people and look at the sky. Power we cannot even measure blows storm clouds, oxygenating the ocean with waves, pouring water into watersheds where billions of salmon hatch. As they flow from the rivers, trillions of natural solar panels absorb the sun, making food which salmon collect and carry back to us land dwellers, and lay it at our feet even as they start the cycle over again.

This is the stuff of life. This is what made us. This is what we need. This is food security. We will live or die as a species based on whether we relearn how to work with the planet or not.

Five years ago, I gave up a career as a business writer in New York City to take over a small farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina with several friends. From the start, our goal was to help rebuild an ecologically sane local-food economy accessible to everyone in our community, from the second-home owners and vacationers who flock in every summer, to year-round residents with deep historical ties to the area.

That modest-sounding goal proved to be extremely challenging. Profit margins on small-scale organic farming are numbingly low, even when you charge prices that low-income folks can’t afford. We quickly found ourselves in a paradox: we were growing great food for the rich—which is not what we set out to do—and losing our shirts doing it.

I started to think about the situation as a business writer would. Why was it so hard to squeeze out a living on a small farm? And why were large agribusiness companies and food conglomerates making out like bandits, and doing so by selling dirt-cheap (and low-quality) food?

A classical economist would point to economies of scale. According to this view, vast operations are more efficient because they can spread costs out over a larger base, allowing them to profitably churn out cheap stuff. But scale advantages couldn’t fully explain it. For years, the U.S. government has paid out billions in subsidies every year to the large-scale farms that supply the industrial-food system. Between 1995 and 2006, the last year for which numbers are available, the federal government dropped a cool $140 billion in subsidies for a few crops, mainly corn and soy. That averages to $12 billion per year.

When you talk to longtime growers in my area, you find that the food-processing infrastructure has withered away over the past few decades. The plight of our county’s last dairy farmer sums it up. For the first year of our project, we would illicitly buy raw milk from an older farmer, who fed 50 cows on grass. He told us that 20 years earlier, the lush pastures of his valley had housed more than a dozen dairy farms, all selling to a bottler a few miles away. By the time we met him, long after his neighbors had given in, he was paying to have his milk hauled to the nearest processor, 40 miles away. Then the dairy giant Dean Foods bought the midsize processor the farmer had been selling to, and promptly shut down the (relatively) nearby processing plant. Now the nearest buyer was 70 miles away, and the extra 30 miles of freight, combined with heightened energy costs, wiped out what was left of his profits. The man shut down his dairy operation, telling us he had sold his herd to a large dairy farm in South Carolina. Similarly, today there’s no USDA-inspected slaughterhouse nearby, so livestock growers have to haul their animals a hundred miles and back if they want to sell meat locally.

What had happened to all the community-scale processing facilities that flourished a generation ago? The federal government watched idly, ignoring antitrust principles, while the food industry consolidated dramatically. Today, four companies process 90 percent of the beef consumed in the United States. In dairy, just two companies process nearly 70 percent of the milk produced nationally. As these giant companies scale up and buy competitors, they shutter smaller facilities and concentrate processing in vast factories geared to large-scale farms. In standard antitrust theory, when four players control more than 40 percent of a market, they have untoward power over their suppliers—in this case, farmers. The result has been a nearly wholesale obliteration of small livestock farms, and an explosion in the size of the remaining operations.

Of course, increased farm size doesn’t just translate to economies of scale. It also generates massive ecological and social problems. Large, confined livestock operations require daily doses of antibiotics, contributing to the spread of pathogens like methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), an antibiotic-resistant bacterium that now kills more Americans annually than AIDS. Concentrated animal-feedlot operations don’t treat the vast amounts of sewage they produce, and instead let it fester in open “lagoons,” from which it leaches into streams, fouling water and snuffing out marine life. As for working conditions in factory slaughterhouses, things have gotten so grim that in 2005 Human Rights Watch saw fit to issue a scathing report. (Article continued below…)

There has been a great emphasis in recent years on the importance of growing food sustainably; even the White House now has an organic garden. But if we want an ecologically sound local food system that’s available to everyone, we’ll need to figure out how to reinvest in that lost infrastructure. Small farmers can’t do it on their own. What we need is the government to make smart, relatively low-cost investments in infrastructure like small-scale slaughterhouses and passive-solar greenhouses. In fact, there’s already a program called Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food, set up to do just that. Under Know Your Farmer, launched early this fall, the Obama USDA has gathered myriad existing loan and support programs that can fund projects like county-scale slaughterhouses, and is making a concerted effort to encourage small farmers and their allies to use them for that purpose.

While the program is certainly a fine start, we should remember that it amounts to pennies on the dollar compared with what we’re paying to prop up Big Ag. I asked Ann Wright, USDA deputy undersecretary for marketing and regulatory programs, how much Know Your Farmer would invest in local and regional agriculture. She told me it would amount to a total of “several hundred million dollars” by 2013.

That’s a lot less than $12 billion annually, and it’s unlikely to do anything to affect the lax antitrust oversight that allowed a few giants to grab control of the food system. Reducing Big Ag subsidy payments and diverting the proceeds into local-food infrastructure sounds like change we can believe in…and savor.

Philpott is food editor at Grist.org and cofounder of Maverick Farms in Valle Crucis, N.C.

Why is conventional agriculture so wound up? Are they afraid of organic agriculture? What’s all the fuss about? After all, a recent study by the Lieberman Research Group showed that organic food sales account for only 3.5 percent of all food product sales in the U.S.

A column in the September 2009 Prairie Farmer leads me to believe that the author, a spokesperson for conventional agriculture, dislikes and even fears organic farming and its supporters.

The author admits to feeling self-satisfaction in knowing that organic farmers are suffering in a down economy. I doubt many people share her sentiments. Farmers generally have the attitude that “we are all in this together,” no matter what farming practices we use.

Still, Michael Pollan has conventional agriculture circling its wagons, Michelle Obama has an organic garden, and organic farmers are accused of riding the backs of conventional farmers.

To most conventional farmers, organic farming doesn’t even register. With agribusiness however, it’s another story. They’re not content with just 96.5 percent of the food system — they want it all.

Those who have their priorities confused need to figure out who their real enemies are.

Conventional farm milk prices have dropped by nearly 50 percent over the past year. Dean Foods controls 80 percent of the fluid milk market in some states and 40 percent of the market in the U.S. Their net profits more than doubled in the last year.

Conventional hog farmers have experienced losses for two straight years. Tyson, the second-largest food company in the U.S., controls 40 percent of the U.S. meat market. It reported a profitable third quarter for every segment of their business, including pork.

When the farm price for beef cattle dropped $0.08 per pound, consumers were paying $0.17 more per pound at the supermarket. Average retail beef processing margins across all companies increased 13 percent over 2008.

And guess what, none of that was caused by organic farmers.

Corporate agribusiness has a problem with organic farmers because they haven’t yet figured out a way to totally bleed them like they have conventional farmers. But as surely as corporate agriculture is working its way into the organic market, we suffer from its growing control.

While farm prices have trended downward for the past couple of years, food price decline has lagged far behind. As farm input costs have continued to climb, so have corporate profits.

Even in the toughest of economic times, the corporate buyers and sellers profit while farmers lose. A recent New York Times editorial points out the dangers of powerful corporations (specifically Monsanto) controlling seed supplies, their market control and their anti-competitive behavior.

Agribusiness spends multi-millions on lobbyists. Their lobbying efforts are aimed at increasing their profits, not farmer income or benefits to the consumer. They lobby for more cheap raw imports, less labeling, less restrictions on pesticide use and weaker environmental standards.

The Prairie Farmer tells us anyone who believes organic, sustainable and locally grown is the only way to feed the world is wrong. Contrary to their opinion, there is plenty of evidence that organic production is a viable means of producing food and that organic farming may be the best way for the world to feed itself.

Since we are all in this together, perhaps we can dismiss the ill will of the Prairie Farmer column and agree that there is more than enough room for all responsible farmers to do their thing, conventional or organic.

Corporate agribusiness is riding roughshod over all farmers and it’s time farmers recognized their real enemy.

Jim Goodman is a farmer in Wonewoc and a policy fellow for the Food and Society Fellows Program.

Mark Kastel

As many of you already know, I have left Capital Press to pursue other endeavors, some of them ag-related.

But I can’t leave without thanking the many people who have extended their help, expertise, and friendship to me. Farmers, ranchers, researchers, educators, Extension agents, 4-H and FFA members, elected officials, farmworkers, farmworker advocates, ag lobbyists, agency directors and staff members, organization officials and members, tribal leaders and members, environmentalists, ag advocates and so many others — all of you made my job as a field reporter with Capital Press for the past 12 years an incredibly rich and worthwhile experience.

Whether I was driving down country roads looking for “the first big red barn on the left after the Y in the road” or on the bus headed for Seattle to attend a WTO or climate-change conference, I always felt as though I was headed toward yet another adventure.

I sometimes chuckle when I think of how naive I was when I first got the job. I thought farming was about farming. And since I had grown up on a farm in Delaware and later had a small farm in North Idaho, I thought I was well-prepared for the job.

But it wasn’t long before I received a call from Jim Jesernig, the then-director of the state’s Agriculture Department, telling me that we needed to get together as soon as possible and talk about an incredibly important topic that was going to affect farmers for years to come. When I asked what that was, he replied with one word: “salmon.”

Salmon? Well, having been the editor of a statewide fishing magazine for several years, I thought I was well-versed on that subject. Heck, I even knew how to catch them.

Once in Seattle, where we met in former Gov. Mike Lowry’s office, Jesernig, an attorney by trade, immediately brought out an incredible assortment of posters and charts that highlighted all of the legal aspects of doing harm to salmon and salmon habitat.

It was an impressive presentation, and as I rode the bus back home, I realized that because salmon live significant parts of their lives in rivers and streams and because so much farmland is located along rivers and streams that protecting fish and protecting farming as a livelihood were intricately tied together.

I also remember learning about the power of the consumer. I was attending a national biotechnology conference in Seattle, and after checking in at the press room, I rode the escalator upstairs and headed outdoors where a group of people — many of them in costumes depicting fish, tomatoes, carrots and other food items — were ardently protesting the conference. They told me that biotechnology wasn’t a proven science and that humans shouldn’t be used as guinea pigs to test out this new technology.

When I went back downstairs, I asked a scientist who was preparing her presentation if she had gone out to listen to what the protesters were saying.

“What do they know,” she said with a scornful chuckle. “We’re the scientists.”

Years later, when one dairy cooperative after another began prohibiting their members from treating their cows with Monsanto’s genetically engineered growth hormone rbST, I recalled that scientist’s words.

It made me realize that farmers need to keep their eyes on the weather vane of marketplace realties and be proactive in dealing with them. There’s no “hunkering down in the bunkers” once consumers decide that they care about such things as land stewardship, animal husbandry, and food safety.

From watching the news unfold over the years, I’ve come to learn that it’s important for farmers to remember that whether consumers’ concerns are based on science, pseudo-science, gut instincts, or misinformation, they have more power than lobbyists or scientists in the “pocketbook votes” they cast every time they shop for food.

As for me, I’ve come to appreciate the need to buy as much of my food as possible from local and regional farmers. Besides helping to keep farms of all sizes in business, shopping locally also helps keep farmland from being developed while injecting local dollars into the local economy.

Of course, agriculture is much bigger than that, but for many consumers, buying locally is a good way to help preserve the family farmer. I’ll vote for that any time.

Cookson can be reached at: at 360-856-2265 or cooksonb@sos.net.

Although major food buyers, including national chain restaurants, have stopped buying meat from farms where antibiotics are routinely used or asked such farms to reduce their use, the routine administration of these drugs remains too widespread. Rather than leaving it up to individual companies, Congress should adopt a national policy to limit antibiotic use.

The Union of Concerned Scientists estimates that as much as 70 percent of antibiotics used annually on livestock is not for medical treatment. Instead, the drugs are used to promote growth and to combat the effects of cramped, dirty conditions at some farms.

The problem is that such routine use of antibiotics in animals can lead to the natural development and spread of drug-resistant bacteria, which can harm humans and animals.

Last year, a new strain of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, also known as flesh-eating bacteria, was discovered in the United States. A University of Iowa researcher studied two large hog farms in that state and found the bacteria in nearly half the pigs and 45 percent of the farmers there. This showed a close link between animal and human health.

Others studies in the U.S. and other countries found MRSA in pork and beef headed for consumers.

Denmark is one of the countries that has banned the use of antibiotics on animals that are not sick. This has reduced antibiotic resistance in pigs and chickens by more than 90 percent, according to a report by the World Health Organization.

This summer, for the first time, the Food and Drug Administration said it would move to ban the use of antibiotics in farm animals.

A way to do this already is before Congress. For years, the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act has languished. The bill, co-sponsored by Olympia Snowe in the Senate, would require the FDA to withdraw the approval of nontherapeutic use of seven classes of antibiotics within two years. It would also require the manufacturers of animal drugs and medicated feed to make their records available to the CDC so it will be better able to track use and resistance trends. The bill also authorizes the secretary of agriculture to make payments to defray the costs of farms transitioning away from the medicines with a priority given to small and family farms.

The House, this summer, held a hearing on the bill. The use of antibiotics for “purposes other than for the advancement of animal or human health” is not “judicious,” Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, principal deputy commissioner for food and drugs at the FDA, said in written testimony. “Eliminating these uses will not compromise the safety of food,” he added.

The routine use of antibiotics in livestock is unnecessary and potentially harmful to the animals and the humans who work with and eat them. The practice is slowly being phased out by market demand and government action. Federal legislation would accomplish this even more quickly.

My wife and I own and operate a 75-acre, certified organic truck farm just outside of Madera in the central San Joaquin Valley. We grow over fifty vegetable crops, including many in the leafy green category, farming the year round to supply West Coast specialty retailers, restaurants and our own local subscriber network of 800 families who are members of T & D Willey Farms CSA.

I’ve spent most of our farm’s near 30-year history pursuing the knowledge and art of biologically intensive soil management in an effort to gain a reputation for the most tasteful and nutritious produce in the marketplace. I am proud to boast a handful of my soil harbors nearly six billion living microbial organisms of vast diversity, equal to the number of human beings inhabiting earth, which generously power the fertility cycle upon which we all depend for our very lives.

Eschewing toxic inputs while relying only on biological processes to grow high quality, high yield vegetable crops is a stimulating intellectual and scientific challenge for which I and my customers have been well rewarded.

I’m afraid some significant problems in food safety and misguided approaches to their solution, like NLGMA, could derail achievements in biological agriculture and a greater promise of food made safe through respect for and cooperation with the microbial community which owns and operates this planet upon which we are merely guests.

The antibiotic resistant and increasingly virulent organisms contaminating our produce from time to time are mutant creatures introduced into the larger environment from confined industrial animal operations across the American countryside.

CAFO’s using as much as 70% of the nation’s annual antibiotic supply in subtheraputic feeding regimes to mitigate crowding, stress and unnatural diets have been documented by the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production to have created at least several of the very dangerous pathogens which episodically threaten today’s produce supply.

This commission’s membership includes such environmental wackos as Dan Glickman, former USDA Secretary of Agriculture and John Curlin, former Kansas Governor.

Why our vegetable industry refuses to throw rocks at the glass house of industrial animal production is beyond me to comprehend. Instead we pretend it is possible to superimpose a paradigm of sterility over vegetable farms by implementing the more extreme practices suggested by LGMA or rogue buyers and processors to mollify an ignorant and nervous public.

If animal manures were an inherently dangerous agricultural input, the human race would have long since become extinct; instead its judicious use has remained a hallmark of good fertility management for centuries if not millennia. If manure is now uniquely dangerous, we must investigate why and rectify it or prepare to pack animal waste into space capsules for rocketing to the moon.

The cornerstone of my farm’s fertility program is thermophilically digested composts from both dairy cows and urban green materials. These are produced to rigorous NOP standards and regularly tested for the absence of human pathogens. Robust and diverse soil microbial communities, enhanced by additions of quality composts, have been demonstrated to be less friendly environments for human pathogens by excluding or more quickly eliminating them.

There is no recognition given this proven strategy in LGMA metrics, on the contrary a great pall is cast over the use of manure or compost that would frighten your average grower to death.

We test our water for human pathogens and impose worker sanitation protocols but I refuse to soak my produce in chlorine or ozone baths out of respect for a healthy association people require with soil life for digestion, nutrient absorption and healthy immune function. Besides, disrupted microbial ecologies, even on leaf surfaces, offer greater colonization opportunity for pathogens, also completely unrecognized in LGMA metrics.

So in short, I do not wish to join the club, which I’m told is my sole prerogative.

But LGMA competitors, pursuing sterility, will sport a USDA approved seal suggesting their produce is safer than mine when the opposite could very well be true.

I’ve already lost my Canadian accounts as that nation’s government, in ignorance, prohibits imports of leafy produce not signatory to the current LGMA.

The alternative potential of unleashing moon-suited FDA squads over vegetable farms may be less palatable than a privately regulated LGMA under Department of Agriculture authority. However, I cannot personally endorse an approach to produce safety which is essentially a marketing gimmick, as is the LGMA scheme.

Our entire society must take more responsibility for the quality and safety of the food we eat. Much more publicly funded research and education will be required to forward greater food safety in our over-industrialized cheap-food system.

Fortunately the National Institutes of Health has recently launched a five-year research initiative, the Human Microbiome Project, to uncover the complex relationships our species enjoys with cohabiting microbes enhancing human health. On and within the body of a healthy adult, living microbial cells outnumber human cells by a factor of ten to one.

The human body is more properly described as an ecosystem, hosting trillions of microbial hitchhikers in elegant symbiosis.

I’ve dedicated my farming career to the enhancement of these interspecies relationships through the food I grow for my customers. Misguided approaches to food safety arising from an atmosphere of hysteria and ignorance threaten to disrupt the genuine advances this nation requires to improve its food and our citizens’ health.

Tom Willey’s testimony was presented at the first USDA hearing considering a national marketing agreement proposed by large agribusiness interests in the vegetable industry. There is wide concerned that this will competitively injure family-scale, local and organic fresh market vegetable producers. Please learn more about this issue and get involved by reviewing Cornucopia’s action alert.

Tom Willey, serves on the Policy Advisory Panel at The Cornucopia Institute.

The compelling humanitarian goals expressed today at the corporately sponsored Global Harvest Initiative symposium were laudable, as were some of the hunger-relief projects cited. Missing, however, was an honest assessment of the limits of dead-end chemical agriculture to play a leading role in actually feeding people.

Also absent from the high-powered forum was a prominent role for what organic agriculture is already doing to meet the most important goals on the food-hunger-nutrition side of the problem.

The event, despite all the good people presenting and all the calls for curbing the environmental harm of chemical ag, amounted to glitzy green packaging for the same unnecessary gift of chemical dependence for the world’s farmers. GHI is sponsored by ADM, DuPont, John Deere and Monsanto. (Yes, the same Monsanto which has promised to double its profits by 2012 with continuing introductions of “high impact technology” seeds.)

In his opening remarks, GHI executive director William Lesher placed the focus firmly on the need for more food, highlighting a projected “productivity gap” that will require a doubling of current world food output by 2050. This thinking follows the outlines of a white paper by GHI in April: “Accelerating Productivity Growth: The 21st Century Global Agriculture Challenge: A White Paper on Agricultural Policy.” Yet more food alone won’t help starving people until the global agricultural system radically shifts its focus to address the barriers of poverty (the inability to buy food) and distribution (getting food people want to where they are).

By framing global food security in terms of “not enough food,” the Global Harvest Initiative seems stuck on doing the same old thing harder and faster. It backers still push expensive seeds and continued dependence on climate-damaging inputs. Organic and near-organic techniques offer robust, biodiverse, productive and regenerative systems that can out-produce chemical approaches in drier and wetter seasons.

The symposium’s highlighting of groups seeking environmental and social benefits may do some good — if the groups can break industrial ag’s profit-driven willingness to sacrifice soil vitality, agricultural biodiversity, human endocrine and neurological health, farmer control of seeds and a nation’s nutritional well-being. Or it may just be the best agri-greenwashing money can buy.

This event kicked off a campaign by these corporate leaders to claim the moral high ground in addressing world hunger, which already impacts 1 billion people, according to the UN. While nutrition received prominence at the event, the top three agenda items listed at the GHI website are seeking new funds for research, liberalized ag trade, conservation.

The GHI overture appears to be geared to grab even more money, attention, research, trade and policy support for high-input dependent systems. This mission runs counter to calls from several world food study groups (here and here) who say organic and ecological production systems are the best hope for transforming the “feeding the world” challenge from simply producing more corn and soybeans on industrial farms toward growing more diverse and nutritive crops, better suited to feed the hungry poor, produced in more ecologically sound ways based on locally-available, biologically renewable resources.

Food-focused farmers already know how well biology works. Without further research, organic farms in widely varied climates and sizes are already producing highly nutritious food in sustainable ways that are reducing greenhouse gases, increasing resilience in the face of changing climatic conditions, and providing greater economic opportunity.

With a fraction of the hundreds of millions of research dollars already spent to overcome chemical agriculture’s failures, agricultural researchers around the world could work on organic farming advances relevant to their bioregions. NGOs dedicated to exploring ecologically sound ways to optimize hunger-relieving livestock and crop production could adopt and teach organic techniques to help bring degraded soils into production — a goal of the GHI’s white paper — while improving nutrition through complex crop mixes that are impossible when pesticides are used.

“Conservation” in today’s symposium too seemed to be crafty balancing of “agricultural sacrifice zones” (where pesticides and fertilizers protect commodity monocrops) with non-farmed wild areas. Mitigation is good, but organic systems done well actually increase biodiversity throughout farmed land: in the soil, as fungi and other microorganisms build up to support crop productivity over time; in the fields as crops are protected by health soil and beneficial insects; around the fields through hedgerows and scattered bio-habitat plantings.

And how telling about GHI means and ends is this quote from its white paper:

While the technological advances brought by the Green Revolution have been fully exploited by now, a new frontier — biotechnology — has emerged with the capacity to provide important new benefits for both developed and developing countries, and even to target new technologies specifically to local needs and conditions, including those in developing countries.

I want hungry people to be fed, farmers to prosper, ecosystems to thrive while farming improves, wildlife to flourish and whole bio-regions to develop sustainable economies. That’s why I demand organic agriculture be front and center on the global food agenda.

Rodale Institute is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit engaged in research and advocacy for “Healthy Soil, Healthy Food, Healthy People, Healthy Planet.” We were founded in Kutztown, Pennsylvania, in 1947 by organic pioneer J.I. Rodale.

Our research findings are clear: A global organic transformation will mitigate greenhouse gas emissions in our atmosphere and restore soil fertility. Our mission: We improve the health and well-being of people and the planet.

Berkeley, Calif. — To listen to President Obama’s speech on Wednesday night, or to just about anyone else in the health care debate, you would think that the biggest problem with health care in America is the system itself — perverse incentives, inefficiencies, unnecessary tests and procedures, lack of competition, and greed.

No one disputes that the $2.3 trillion we devote to the health care industry is often spent unwisely, but the fact that the United States spends twice as much per person as most European countries on health care can be substantially explained, as a study released last month says, by our being fatter. Even the most efficient health care system that the administration could hope to devise would still confront a rising tide of chronic disease linked to diet.

That’s why our success in bringing health care costs under control ultimately depends on whether Washington can summon the political will to take on and reform a second, even more powerful industry: the food industry.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, three-quarters of health care spending now goes to treat “preventable chronic diseases.” Not all of these diseases are linked to diet — there’s smoking, for instance — but many, if not most, of them are.

We’re spending $147 billion to treat obesity, $116 billion to treat diabetes, and hundreds of billions more to treat cardiovascular disease and the many types of cancer that have been linked to the so-called Western diet. One recent study estimated that 30 percent of the increase in health care spending over the past 20 years could be attributed to the soaring rate of obesity, a condition that now accounts for nearly a tenth of all spending on health care.

The American way of eating has become the elephant in the room in the debate over health care. The president has made a few notable allusions to it, and, by planting her vegetable garden on the South Lawn, Michelle Obama has tried to focus our attention on it. Just last month, Mr. Obama talked about putting a farmers’ market in front of the White House, and building new distribution networks to connect local farmers to public schools so that student lunches might offer more fresh produce and fewer Tater Tots. He’s even floated the idea of taxing soda.

But so far, food system reform has not figured in the national conversation about health care reform. And so the government is poised to go on encouraging America’s fast-food diet with its farm policies even as it takes on added responsibilities for covering the medical costs of that diet. To put it more bluntly, the government is putting itself in the uncomfortable position of subsidizing both the costs of treating Type 2 diabetes and the consumption of high-fructose corn syrup.

Why the disconnect? Probably because reforming the food system is politically even more difficult than reforming the health care system. At least in the health care battle, the administration can count some powerful corporate interests on its side — like the large segment of the Fortune 500 that has concluded the current system is unsustainable.

That is hardly the case when it comes to challenging agribusiness. Cheap food is going to be popular as long as the social and environmental costs of that food are charged to the future. There’s lots of money to be made selling fast food and then treating the diseases that fast food causes. One of the leading products of the American food industry has become patients for the American health care industry.

The market for prescription drugs and medical devices to manage Type 2 diabetes, which the Centers for Disease Control estimates will afflict one in three Americans born after 2000, is one of the brighter spots in the American economy. As things stand, the health care industry finds it more profitable to treat chronic diseases than to prevent them. There’s more money in amputating the limbs of diabetics than in counseling them on diet and exercise.

As for the insurers, you would think preventing chronic diseases would be good business, but, at least under the current rules, it’s much better business simply to keep patients at risk for chronic disease out of your pool of customers, whether through lifetime caps on coverage or rules against pre-existing conditions or by figuring out ways to toss patients overboard when they become ill.

But these rules may well be about to change — and, when it comes to reforming the American diet and food system, that step alone could be a game changer. Even under the weaker versions of health care reform now on offer, health insurers would be required to take everyone at the same rates, provide a standard level of coverage and keep people on their rolls regardless of their health. Terms like “pre-existing conditions” and “underwriting” would vanish from the health insurance rulebook — and, when they do, the relationship between the health insurance industry and the food industry will undergo a sea change.

The moment these new rules take effect, health insurance companies will promptly discover they have a powerful interest in reducing rates of obesity and chronic diseases linked to diet. A patient with Type 2 diabetes incurs additional health care costs of more than $6,600 a year; over a lifetime, that can come to more than $400,000. Insurers will quickly figure out that every case of Type 2 diabetes they can prevent adds $400,000 to their bottom line. Suddenly, every can of soda or Happy Meal or chicken nugget on a school lunch menu will look like a threat to future profits.

When health insurers can no longer evade much of the cost of treating the collateral damage of the American diet, the movement to reform the food system — everything from farm policy to food marketing and school lunches — will acquire a powerful and wealthy ally, something it hasn’t really ever had before.

AGRIBUSINESS dominates the agriculture committees of Congress, and has swatted away most efforts at reform. But what happens when the health insurance industry realizes that our system of farm subsidies makes junk food cheap, and fresh produce dear, and thus contributes to obesity and Type 2 diabetes? It will promptly get involved in the fight over the farm bill — which is to say, the industry will begin buying seats on those agriculture committees and demanding that the next bill be written with the interests of the public health more firmly in mind.

In the same way much of the health insurance industry threw its weight behind the campaign against smoking, we can expect it to support, and perhaps even help pay for, public education efforts like New York City’s bold new ad campaign against drinking soda. At the moment, a federal campaign to discourage the consumption of sweetened soft drinks is a political nonstarter, but few things could do more to slow the rise of Type 2 diabetes among adolescents than to reduce their soda consumption, which represents 15 percent of their caloric intake.

That’s why it’s easy to imagine the industry throwing its weight behind a soda tax. School lunch reform would become its cause, too, and in time the industry would come to see that the development of regional food systems, which make fresh produce more available and reduce dependence on heavily processed food from far away, could help prevent chronic disease and reduce their costs.

Recently a team of designers from M.I.T. and Columbia was asked by the foundation of the insurer UnitedHealthcare to develop an innovative systems approach to tackling childhood obesity in America. Their conclusion surprised the designers as much as their sponsor: they determined that promoting the concept of a “foodshed” — a diversified, regional food economy — could be the key to improving the American diet.

All of which suggests that passing a health care reform bill, no matter how ambitious, is only the first step in solving our health care crisis. To keep from bankrupting ourselves, we will then have to get to work on improving our health — which means going to work on the American way of eating.

But even if we get a health care bill that does little more than require insurers to cover everyone on the same basis, it could put us on that course.

For it will force the industry, and the government, to take a good hard look at the elephant in the room and galvanize a movement to slim it down.

Michael Pollan, a contributing writer for The Times Magazine and a professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto.”