There are people who really, honestly do not care if a small farm fails. In their belief system industrial ag fills the grocery stores where they get their food. It's a moot point with them.
They cite the 1930s lack of food, pre-industrial ag's diversified food system, as an example of what we would have without industrial ag. We would be reverting to food scarcity, they say. They remain in their belief, industrial ag is superior. Convinced that the small farms cannot feed today's population ends the conversation.
It's a misguided defense of industrial ag and it's an inaccurate portrayal of today's farmers.
There's a disconnect between community building and what is the reality behind an extractive industrial food system. Industrial ag takes money out of communities and leaves behind a malnourished population in need of medical care which far outweighs any savings from cheap food. That's the reality of their industrial ag feeding the world cheaply and abundantly.
The good news for small farm spokespeople is that the big ag apologists do not have answers when given the evidence that they are on the wrong end of a lot of things. In the best case scenario the conversation turns to real solutions about dismantling the factory farms, eventually. They fear famine if industrial ag collapses suddenly. Expanding small farms has more urgency when contemplating the destructive pattern of industrial ag and it’s legacy of destruction. It has not been the answer to ending hunger in the world. It has been a contributor to disease and death of many. Big ag apologists will ignore evidence of malnourishment in children who are fed only on an industrial food diet.
We have more malnourishment and morbid obesity than probably ever before. Malnourishment used to be a Third World disease, but now it’s a First World one. There’s something obscene about that. How could these polar opposites co-exist? How could we worship the cult of thin and starve ourselves at one end of the scale, while at the other, ignorance, poverty, bloody-mindedness, junk-food, fast food and ready-made dinners have turned a huge section of the population into fat people? Fat, malnourished people.
The alternative food infastructure that we know today started in California in the 1960s. Alice Waters started it and she's the poster child for "organic's" uppityness. Fortunately, with the rise in urban farming in the past years the movement is building a diverse, multi-racial, multi-ethnic face.
Small farmers are facing the possibility of a costly program that if implemented will affect their continued growth. It’s a federal program aimed at expanding markets for factory farms but under its wide canopy it casts a very big shadow looming over the small herds and flocks which are never intended for food.
The small farm and ranch community is partly to blame for the liberal community’s lack of awareness on this issue. The urban farmer has not risen to the occasion as expected, or as we would have hoped. In opposing the USDA proposal known as the National Animal Identification System (NAIS) small farmers are finding that people are quick to side with industrial ag.
Think of it this way. How many of us understand the connection between NAIS and the cheap foods we buy? How many of us are connected to the alternative food infrastructure? How many of us have heard the holier-than-thou snarky comments about how stupid city people are and how superior we "small farm, country" folk are? How many of us lump all Texas and Oklahoma small farmers and ranchers in with the teabaggers and wingers and assume we are all racially white and ethnically the same? Those emotional responses keep us from paying attention to what’s going on with your food and what’s wrong with the NAIS.
Urbanites have been slow to come aboard understanding the problems with the NAIS and it's partly our fault. I read some of the stupidest, right wing partisan letters opposing NAIS that I simply can't pass them along to you, to anyone. Some of it, frankly is downright tinfoily.
They don't help. There is a "who cares" attitude regarding any small farm's survival anyhow. Every time a story comes up on Daily Kos about the NAIS there will be a heated head-to-head debate over industrial ag versus diversified "small" farming. There is a constituency of Americans who do not want industrial ag to down-scale their operations. They believe the alternative food infrastructure is for rich mostly white people or for the middle-class. Even when successful inner city urban farms by African American farmers (yes, I did say farms in the same sentence as urban) prove that it is the better way to get food to everyone, they still shriek the mantra of "industrial farms feed the world." End of conversation. Small farms are a backward nostalgic nonsense they say.
DeLauro is an example of someone who is not listening. Now we have Vilsack touring the country supposedly conducting listening sessions. I cringe at the thought of how some wingers who will attend these meetings will inevitably yell how the NAIS will infringe on their "property rights." Theoretically, yes. But it misses the point. Completely. Nobody cares. Noboby who lives in an 800 sq. ft. city apartment and is completely disconnected to who grows their damn food cares one bit about this individual’s property rights!
Small farms get a bad rep that way and when we distance ourselves from our cities. I have a winger friend who believes there will be chaos very soon from a coming economic collapse. I accused her plagiarizing Fidel Castro’s blog
. She has a small diverse farm. She insulates herself and shares nothing. She believes building up arms and ammo is better than finding ways to help city neighbors get out from under industrial ag's grip. She thinks city people will come to harm her because she will have food after transportation is disrupted by Obama's coming "socialist" take-over of America. Therefore, she's immersed herself in reading "survivalist" material and basically has her fingers in her ears to anything else. Do you think her no-NAIS letters get taken seriously when she sprinkles them with the stuff she's reading and believing? I don't.
Giving small farms a bad rep is more like it. She’s the perceived image of rural America , the teabagger, a constitutionalist. The stereotypical white rural bigot. Possibly a racist but her brown-skinned winger husband is from Uruguay and she dated an African American in high school so I’m not sure. Anyhow, I was offering her as a momentary distraction.
Do you have your fingers in your ears when small farmers and ranchers tell you something is wrong with the USDA’s NAIS and your food system?
Small farms have an urgent need for liberals to understand the real threat that NAIS is to their struggle to grow a viable food system providing healthy food for you. The face of farming will surprise you. It’s not my friend’s face at all.
Meanwhile, Americans whose health is directly harmed by the ever-expanding industrial ag will look at the USDA’s soft-sell on NAIS and give it a stamp of approval. Afterall, if fringe wingers like my friend are opposed then we definitely should be for it. We’ll be for it and for industrial ag because that’s where all my food comes from and forever will. The USDA is correct and their proposal bares no further scrutiny.
Part of your not opposing NAIS is our fault. We let the wingers dominate the conversation too early and for too long. We needed to have connected with you sooner. I hope it’s not too late.
There is a growing movement that understands who grows their food and that the NAIS is harmful to their growth. For the first time the Organic Summit is having a film trailer competition. These are documentaries about food in America. I viewed each film trailer yesterday. People are devoted to providing you with healthy food, healthy food for everyone. It doesn’t make them rich. It’s not food for the rich and middle class only, it’s good food that you deserve, not the stuff that is making you sick and is causing you to fret over where more and more and more and better health care reform come from. We need that too, I know.
Small farmers are motivated by offering you a product they know is healthly, and by personal things, it’s a labor of love. They believe everyone deserves access to healthy food. I especially like organizations like Growing Power, founded by Will Allen in Milwaukee, WI. Ironically, while he was busy farming Wisconsin became the first state to implement a mandatory NAIS. So much for the USDA’s assertion that participation is voluntary. The men and women who brought the mandatory NAIS to Wisconsin are the executive heads of industrial ag, bankers and livestock tag makers (pdf). They were the first to take cooperative agreement monies to conduct pilot programs. No one was really paying much attention. In a way, Wisconsin posed as the back door for the NAIS into the rest of the country except it hasn’t worked out as planned.
In 2006, this consortium of industrial ag executives, banking executives and livestock tag manufacturers formed a non-profit 501 (c) organization (pdf), outlined their budget of $2,355,468. Received their cooperative agreements from the federal government in the amount of $1,752,812 and made up the difference of $602,656 with in-kind contributions.
Thus was created the Wisconsin Livestock Identification Consortium (WLIC) in response to NAIS. The USDA obliged the group with federal money to proceed implementing a "voluntary" NAIS.
WLIC is a non-profit 501 (c) 3 member-based
organization, comprised of big names in agribusiness. Cargill, WI Cattleman’s Association, ABSGlobal,
Foremost Farms are some of the names. Digital Angel, YTEX Agri Sales are companies that sell tagging
equipment, including Radio Frequency ID tags (RFID) are represented, as well as the banking industry: M&I
Bank and Badgerland Farm Credit Services. WLIC maintains a database for the State of WI to the amount of
over $1 Million in grant money in 2004 and 2005 according to their 990 tax forms. The federal government
grants money to the state which in turn grants the WLIC.
Voluntary went to mandatory. One year after the WLIC was formed, on May 1 2007 Wisconsin dairy farmers were being threatened with removal of licenses by the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture Trade and Consumer Protection (DATCP) if they did not register their premises.
Please inform unregistered producers that premises registration is a condition of licensure. All milk producers, new and existing, must have a registered premises to avoid jeopardizing their milk producer’s licenses.
Farmer resistance ensued but the law mandating premise registration remains in effect until repealed.
From the Wisconsin DATCP website:
Voluntary vs. Mandatory
· The USDA is promoting voluntary premises registration.
· WLIC is currently promoting registration and registering livestock premises in Wisconsin and other states on a voluntary basis, at no cost.
· DATCP supports these voluntary efforts.
· Premises registration in now mandatory in Wisconsin (see "When to register" below). Wisconsin requires premises identification, regardless of whether the USDA or any other state requires it.
Meanwhile back in Wisconsin Will Allen is now providing workshops nationwide promoting urban farming. The information he offers helps us to speak intelligently about opposing NAIS from the perspective of building small farms. The NAIS takes money away from growth and expands factory farms, the opposite of what we really need. Yesterday I read Will’s food manifesto. I highly recommend reading it. A Good Food Manifesto for America. (pdf)
I also recommend viewing the film trailers submitted for the Organic Summit. The better informed we are on how small farms feed communities the more the NAIS really becomes redundant. When you know where your food comes from, how it is already traced to its place of origin with existing trace-back systems it becomes obvious that there is no need for creating a huge federal bureaucracy such as the NAIS at this time to track livestock. We have current working trace-back systems doing that already. We have better things to spend money on.
Unfortunately, however, it
soon became clear that the way Congress had structured the stimulus package, with funds
earmarked for only particular sectors of the economy, chiefly infrastructure, afforded
neither our Congressional representatives nor our local leaders with the discretion to
direct any significant funds to this innovative plan. It simply had not occurred to anyone
that immediate and lasting job creation was plausible in a field such as community-based
agriculture.
I am asking Congress today to rectify that oversight, whether by modifying the current
guidelines of the Recovery Act or by designating new and dedicated funds to the development of community food systems through the creation of this national Centers for
Urban Agriculture.
Will Allen
The more we now about the NAIS, the better letters, phone calls and conversations we can have about it with the industrial ag apologists. Farmers are very, very busy feeding people. If we can help oppose NAIS on their behalf and getting their supporters to do the same then we should.
I oppose the NAIS for a number of reasons and here’s one that I like to use to put things into perspective:
Do you really want to support a federal program that advertises that the reportable movements of thoroughbred race horses, alpacas and llamas will make your food safe?
Every time the alpaca owner, the horse owner or the llama owner reporting his or her animal’s movements makes you feel that the NAIS was tax dollars well spent despite the fact that diseases in this species has not been traced as the cause of tainted food? That somehow we need the NAIS to track these animals to make your food safe?
If bankers, livestock tag companies, and agri-biz factory farm executives want to increase their assets and holdings let them spend their own money promoting the safety of their products to the foreign markets they're vying for with a system they pay for.
Most of us are capable of comprehending that. Our food is the safest in the world when our food inspectors do their jobs not because we track animals, which we do, but because we quickly locate the origin of the contamination and the products. In a national data base where everything from a pet chicken to the back yard pony is traced by owners reporting movements on and off premises will we have a safer food system? Food safety begins where the tagging ends.
One more thing, we can support all the legislation in the world implementing technological fixes on problems like the E.coli O157:H7 in beef, we can implement this NAIS and track cows from birth to death, pay for the NAIS with our tax dollars, dismantle existing trace-back systems, but if the root of the problem is never addressed and corrected nothing will not stop E.coli O157:H7 from infecting your meat. That virus evolved in the gut of the feedlot cattle.
The small farmer’s grass-fed beef when processed at facilities which do not feedlot will not need the techno-fixes because it never has that virus to contend with. Remember this too, there isn’t a cow at the feedlot or processor which doesn’t have a name and number tracing it back to the he or the she who put it there. And pretty much to the place of its birth. It hasn’t stopped a E.coli from contaminating meat.
To take action on this, it’s best to call or fax Rosa DeLauro at this time. E-mails from outside her state will be deleted.
DeLauro:
Phone: 202-225-3661
Fax: 202-225-4890
I have to be out for the evening. My diaries never really get read. In case this one gets comments I'll be back later, thanks, if you read this much, I appreciate it.