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.”

In 2006 I was–among other things–a vegetable farmer. In New Haven, Connecticut, using Ivy League labor, we grew and sold over 300 varieties of vegetables. Today I am struck with memories of one in particular: a gorgeous crop of spinach we couldn’t sell.

During the summer of 2006, an intelligent, concerned citizen stood across from me at our table at the farmers market and proclaimed, “You are not supposed to be selling that.” She was a regular customer. I looked at her, confused: “Selling what?”

“Spinach. Haven’t you heard, there’s a spinach scare?” She continued in a patient tone and explained that there was an E. coli outbreak, it was in multiple states, that the FDA had linked it to spinach, and that people were advised not to eat it.

Small, local farms, of course, are good for food security and food safety, not bad. The 5,000 people who die every year of food-borne illness aren’t dying from my spinach.

I was stunned. I wasn’t stunned because of her news about the spinach scare. Everyone knew about the spinach scare. I was stunned because here was a person, likely with several advanced degrees, a regular customer at a farmer’s market, who had no understanding of the way things work when it comes to food.

I tried to explain that the spinach, which ultimately poisoned over 200 people in 26 states and killed five, came from the Salinas Valley in California, likely from one farm, and that the contamination was probably caused by human or cow feces brought into the field by dirty floodwater. I also explained that our garden was one mile away from where we were standing, 3,000 miles away from Salinas, and that it had no relation to the spinach or the contaminated water that caused the outbreak.

She listened to me with a suspicious, sideways glance, like I was trying too hard to convince her. Maybe I was trying to get away with something. Her response: “This week, I’ll take the arugula.”

So why am I thinking about spinach today? Just before summer recess, the House of Representatives approved a bill that will lead to major food safety reform in the U.S.–a country that badly needs it, where 5,000 people die annually because of food-borne illness. And one week later, as though to confirm that such a bill was needed, Cargill had to recall nearly 900,000 pounds of beef because of a salmonella outbreak and over 40 people in at least nine states are ill from it.

This current beef recall deals with contaminated beef from Cargill; the spinach scare was traced to 42,000 bags of Dole Baby Spinach processed during a single shift in one plant. A highly centralized food and agriculture system makes an incidence of contamination a big deal. If something bad happens in one central place, it can make people sick simultaneously, all over the country.

This is a national security issue too: When Tommy Thompson, Ex-Secretary of Health and Human Services, was asked what worried him most on the eve of his resignation, he responded, “I, for the life of me, cannot understand why the terrorists have not attacked our food supply because it is so easy to do.” We need a diversified, local food system. That way, when contamination happens in one place, it doesn’t make people sick in 26 states.

A battle raged around the new bill because it threatened to allow the FDA to regulate small farmers as though they were major agribusiness corporations. This bill, detractors feared, would treat small, independent farmers with direct links to consumers as though they were Cargill or Dole. Regulators would be guided by the same false assumptions as my friend at the farmers’ market: “Small local farm, big corporation… whatever. Quit selling spinach.”

Small, local farms, of course, are good for food security and food safety, not bad. The 5,000 people who die every year of food-borne illness aren’t dying from my spinach, they are dying from Dole’s spinach. Regulate small farmers the same way you regulate Dole, and we might disappear. And when it comes to food safety and security, you want more of us, not less. The big guys need to be watched much more closely. The little guys need to be encouraged to flourish.

Historically, the opposite has occurred: food safety regulations have served to consolidate production and drive small and mid-sized farmers out of business. Mandating new methods and technologies drove small dairy farmers out of business in Vermont in the early 1960s, just as new “leafy greens” laws threatened to shut down small and mid-sized organic salad growers in the aftermath of the spinach scare in 2006. Is this tendency the product of well-meaning, poorly thought through legislation, or is it a conspiratorial “let no good crises go to waste” corporate opportunism? Responses vary depending on which struggling farmer you ask.

It isn’t yet clear just how the new bill will impact small farmers. I’ve heard that it won’t be as bad as some fear. But the idea that we will treat small, local farms as though they are big factories is something to be overcome.

I suffered a similarly ill-conceived false premise just as the bill was being debated, when I returned from Washington to New York on a Bolt Bus.

I got on the bus, sat in an empty seat, took off my shoes, and started catching up on email. A man boarded the bus with a bag from Subway. He moved a few rows behind me, and after a minute of loud paper crinkling, strong smells started telling all the passengers about this man’s sandwich. I can’t name every ingredient, but there was absolutely bacon (unmistakable), a distinctly scented deli meat (maybe sliced turkey), and an assault of raw onions. It was bad. It was industrial food, it smelled the part, and we were stuck with it.

I explained that I was almost sure that the strong smell of onions, turkey, and bacon we were being forced to suffer emanated not from my feet but from the Subway sandwich a few rows back.

You can imagine the embarrassment and confusion that swept over me when another man–on the other side of the aisle, two rows ahead–turned back to me, looked at my socked feet, and asked me to put my shoes back on. I explained that I was almost sure that the strong smell of onions, turkey, and bacon we were collectively being forced to suffer emanated not from my feet but from the Subway sandwich the guy was eating a few rows back. His response, like a preschool teacher being patient with a student making excuses, was, “Well, that might be, but could you put your shoes on for now, and we can have an experiment.” Sure. I put them on.

The man finished eating half of his sandwich, and the paper crinkling resumed as he put the remainder away. Finally, the smell dissipated. We all breathed a sigh of relief. A half hour later, without my plaintiff noticing, I took off my shoes, and there was no smell. Vindicated. Case closed.

Much to my horror, not long after taking off my shoes the paper crinkling resumed, and the smells–bacon, turkey, onions–returned. I wanted to stand up, point at the sandwich eater and announce, “That smell: It is NOT my feet! It is that man’s sandwich.” Instead, I hurriedly attempted to return my shoes to my feet before my plaintiff noticed. But he turned, took in the sight of me in my flustered, embarrassed, almost frantic attempt to put my shoes on, and gave me a look. The look said, “I am disappointed in you, Josh. I know and you know that the smell is from your feet. You tried to convince me otherwise, but now we both know. Please keep your stinky feet in their shoes.”

I thought about my first philosophy course in college. We read David Hume, and he showed that constant correlation does not imply causation. I wanted to tell him about it. I wanted to tell him that this was like a Seinfeld episode, to tell him that it wasn’t my fault. Instead I shrugged, finished putting on my shoes, and kept them on for the rest of the ride. Busted, but innocent.

It brought me back to 2006 when I stood at a table full of gorgeous spinach, unable to sell a leaf, and people looked askance at me, all because Cargill’s cows pooped in Dole’s lettuce. It didn’t seem right then. It doesn’t now.

There is, of course, a right way to regulate food safety: The law should be appropriate to the scale and to the operating principle of the producer; it should encourage diverse, decentralized, local farming; it should be thorough, it should have teeth. It should put the bulk of its resources into regulating the centralized, large-scale, industrial operations that are responsible for most outbreaks of food born illness. In this last round, and before, we fought for these things. One day, we’ll get them.

In the meantime, please tell people that this other food we’ve got–the food from the farmers market, or the CSA, or your backyard, or your window-box–has about as much to do with the latest food scare as my socked feet have to do with a Subway sandwich.

YAMHILL, Ore. — On a summer visit back to the farm here where I grew up, I think I figured out the central problem with modern industrial agriculture. It’s not just that it produces unhealthy food,mishandles waste and overuses antibiotics in ways that harm us all.

More fundamentally, it has no soul.

The family farm traditionally was the most soulful place imaginable, and that was the case with our own farm on the edge of the Willamette Valley. I can’t say we were efficient: for a time we thought about calling ourselves “Wandering Livestock Ranch,” after our Angus cattle escaped in one direction and our Duroc hogs in another.

When coyotes threatened our sheep operation, we spent $300 on a Kuvasz, a breed of guard dog that is said to excel in protecting sheep. Alas, our fancy-pants new sheep dog began her duties by dining on lamb.

It’s always said that if a dog kills one lamb, it will never stop, and so the local rule was that if your dog killed one sheep you had to shoot it. Instead we engaged in a successful cover-up. It worked, for the dog never touched a lamb again and for the rest of her long life fended off coyotes heroically.

That kind of diverse, chaotic family farm is now disappearing, replaced by insipid food assembly lines.

The result is food that also lacks soul — but may contain pathogens. In the last two months, there have been two major recalls of ground beef because of possible contamination with drug-resistant salmonella. When factory farms routinely fill animals with antibiotics, the result is superbugs that resist antibiotics.

Michael Pollan, the food writer, notes that monocultures in the field result in monocultures in our diets. Two-thirds of our calories, he says, now come from just four crops: rice, soy, wheat and corn. Fast-food culture and obesity are linked, he argues, to the transformation from family farms to industrial farming.

In fairness, industrial farming is extraordinarily efficient, and smaller diverse family farms would mean more expensive food. So is this all inevitable? Is my nostalgia like the blacksmith’s grief over Henry Ford’s assembly lines superseding a more primitive technology? Perhaps, but I’m reassured by one of my old high school buddies here in Yamhill, Bob Bansen. He runs a family dairy of 225 Jersey cows so efficiently that it can still compete with giant factory dairies of 20,000 cows.

Bob names all his cows, and can tell them apart in an instant. He can tell you each cow’s quirks and parentage. They are family friends as well as economic assets.

“With these big dairies, a cow means nothing to them,” Bob said. “When I lose a cow, it bothers me. I kick myself.” That might seem like sentimentality, but it’s also good business and preserves his assets.

American agriculture policy and subsidies have favored industrialization and consolidation, but there are signs that the Obama administration Agriculture Department under Secretary Tom Vilsack is becoming more friendly to small producers. I hope that’s right.

One of my childhood memories is of placing a chicken egg in a goose nest when I was about 10 (my young scientist phase). That mother goose was thrilled when her eggs hatched, and maternal love is such that she never seemed to notice that one of her babies was a neckless midget.

As for the chick, she never doubted her goosiness. At night, our chickens would roost high up in the barn, while the geese would sleep on the floor, with their heads tucked under their wings. This chick slept with the goslings, and she tried mightily to stretch her neck under her wing. No doubt she had a permanent crick in her neck.

Then the fateful day came when the mother goose took her brood to the water for the first time. She jumped in, and the goslings leaped in after her. The chick stood on the bank, aghast.

For the next few days, mother and daughter tried to reason it out, each deeply upset by the other’s intransigence. After several days of barnyard trauma, the chick underwent an identity crisis, nature triumphed over nurture, and she redefined herself as a hen.

She moved across the barn to hang out with the chickens. At first she still slept goose-like, and visited her “mother” and fellow goslings each day, but within two months she no longer even acknowledged her stepmother and stepsiblings and behaved just like other chickens.

Recollections like that make me wistful for a healthy rural America composed of diverse family farms, which also offer decent and varied lives for the animals themselves (at least when farm boys aren’t conducting “scientific” experiments). In contrast, a modern industrialized operation is a different world: more than 100,000 hens in cages, their beaks removed, without a rooster, without geese or other animals, spewing out pollution and ending up as so-called food — a calorie factory, without any soul.

Scientific American
By The Editors

Advances in agricultural technology, including, but not limited to, the genetic modification of food crops, have made fields more productive than ever. Farmers grow more crops and feed more people using less land. They are able to use fewer pesticides and to reduce the amount of tilling that leads to erosion. And within the next two years, agritech companies plan to introduce advanced crops that are designed to survive heat waves and droughts, resilient characteristics that will become increasingly important in a world marked by a changing climate.

Unfortunately, it is impossible to verify that genetically modified crops perform as advertised. That is because agritech companies have given themselves veto power over the work of independent researchers.

To purchase genetically modified seeds, a customer must sign an agreement that limits what can be done with them. (If you have installed software recently, you will recognize the concept of the end-user agreement.) Agreements are considered necessary to protect a company’s intellectual property, and they justifiably preclude the replication of the genetic enhancements that make the seeds unique. But agritech companies such as Monsanto, Pioneer and Syngenta go further. For a decade their user agreements have explicitly forbidden the use of the seeds for any independent research. Under the threat of litigation, scientists cannot test a seed to explore the different conditions under which it thrives or fails. They cannot compare seeds from one company against those from another company. And perhaps most important, they cannot examine whether the genetically modified crops lead to unintended environmental side effects.

Research on genetically modified seeds is still published, of course. But only studies that the seed companies have approved ever see the light of a peer-reviewed journal. In a number of cases, experiments that had the
implicit go-ahead from the seed company were later blocked from publication because the results were not flattering. “It is important to understand that it is not always simply a matter of blanket denial of all research requests, which is bad enough,” wrote Elson J. Shields, an entomologist at Cornell University, in a letter to an official at the Environmental Protection Agency (the body tasked with regulating the environmental consequences of genetically modified crops), “but selective denials and permissions based on industry perceptions of how ‘friendly’ or ‘hostile’ a particular scientist may be toward [seed-enhancement] technology.”

Shields is the spokesperson for a group of 24 corn insect scientists that opposes these practices. Because the scientists rely on the cooperation of the companies for their research, they must, after all, gain access to the seeds for studies, most have chosen to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals. The group has submitted a statement to the EPA protesting that “as a result of restricted access, no truly independent research can be legally conducted on many critical questions regarding the technology.”

It would be chilling enough if any other type of company were able to prevent independent researchers from testing its wares and reporting what they find — imagine car companies trying to quash head-to-head model
comparisons done by Consumer Reports, for example. But when scientists are prevented from examining the raw ingredients in our nation’s food supply or from testing the plant material that covers a large portion of the country’s agricultural land, the restrictions on free inquiry become dangerous.

Although we appreciate the need to protect the intellectual property rights that have spurred the investments into research and development that have led to agritech’s successes, we also believe food safety and environmental protection depend on making plant products available to regular scientific
scrutiny. Agricultural technology companies should therefore immediately remove the restriction on research from their end-user agreements. Going forward, the EPA should also require, as a condition of approving the sale of new seeds, that independent researchers have unfettered access to all products currently on the market. The agricultural revolution is too important to keep locked behind closed doors.

If your widget factory produces too many widgets, you will be stuck with extra inventory, affecting your bottom line.

In contrast, if your factory farm contributes to excess production of pork, high-level elected officials will ask the federal government to bail you out. I learned from Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement today that last week nine governors, including Iowa’s Chet Culver,

requested $50 million of taxpayer money from the U.S Department of Agriculture (USDA) to buy over-produced pork off the market. This follows similar requests made by the National Pork Producers Council in early May and Iowa Secretary of Ag Bill Northey in June.The hog factory industry, though, has received two recent taxpayer-funded bailouts from USDA — one for $25 million in March 2009 and the other for $50 million in April 2008 — to buy over-produced pork off the market. [...]

Ag economists have warned for months that the pork industry must stabilize prices by trimming the fat and reducing the herd size. But the pork industry has ignored basic economic rules and continues to increase supply as demand goes down. This is the result of continuous government subsidies and bailouts to the factory farm industry.

“Corporate ag receives government subsidies and guaranteed loans that promote the expansion of factory farms on the front end,” said CCI member Lori Nelson of Bayard. “And then, when they produce too much pork, they ask the government — that’s us — to bail them out with huge amounts of taxpayer dollars. The factory farm industry is a house of cards that would crumble as soon as you take away taxpayers propping them up.”

The governors of Nebraska, Colorado, Michigan, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Kentucky, Illinois and Oklahoma joined Culver in signing the appeal for federal aid. According to DTN/The Progressive Farmer, “Representatives from the Iowa and the National Pork Producers Councils, Tyson Fresh Foods, Hormel Foods and Paragon Economics support the letter’s three proposals for aid.”

I’ve posted the full text of Iowa CCI’s press release after the jump. There’s no reason to exempt corporate agriculture from basic laws of supply and demand. Taxpayers already pay too much to subsidize factory hog farms, not to mention the hidden environmental costs of air and water pollution.

Iowa CCI Members Blast Governor Culver for Factory Farm Bailout Request
Group says Culver is pandering to corporate ag interestsMONDAY, AUGUST 10, 2009, DES MOINES, IOWA — Members of Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement today blasted Iowa Governor Chet Culver for requesting a $50 million, taxpayer-funded bailout of the factory farm industry last week. CCI leaders said Culver’s request is nothing more than pandering to well-financed corporate ag groups at the expense of everyday people and our environment.

In a letter last Thursday to President Barack Obama, Culver and eight other Governors requested $50 million of taxpayer money from the U.S Department of Agriculture (USDA) to buy over-produced pork off the market. This follows similar requests made by the National Pork Producers Council in early May and Iowa Secretary of Ag Bill Northey in June.

The hog factory industry, though, has received two recent taxpayer-funded bailouts from USDA — one for $25 million in March 2009 and the other for $50 million in April 2008 — to buy over-produced pork off the market.

CCI president Barb Kalbach, a family farmer from Adair County, said “We are fed up with bailing out this industry that pollutes our air and water and drives family farmers out of business. Pres. Obama should deny Culver’s request immediately. Our public officials should stand up for the common good and the interests of all taxpayers, not for the big-money, special interests of corporate ag.”

Ag economists have warned for months that the pork industry must stabilize prices by trimming the fat and reducing the herd size. But the pork industry has ignored basic economic rules and continues to increase supply as demand goes down. This is the result of continuous government subsidies and bailouts to the factory farm industry.

“Corporate ag receives government subsidies and guaranteed loans that promote the expansion of factory farms on the front end,” said CCI member Lori Nelson of Bayard. “And then, when they produce too much pork, they ask the government — that’s us — to bail them out with huge amounts of taxpayer dollars. The factory farm industry is a house of cards that would crumble as soon as you take away taxpayers propping them up.”

To learn more about what we can do to stand up for the common good and stop taxpayer-support for factory farms, contact Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement at 515-282-0484 or visit iowacci.org for more information.

Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement is a group of everyday people who talk, act and get things done on issues that matter most. With thousands of members from all walks of life — urban and rural, black and white, immigrants and lifelong Iowans — CCI has been tackling tough issues and getting things done for more than 30 years.