the death o da family farm

[Guest guest]

December 12, 2006

 

Where Christmas Comes Every Five Years

Our Perverse Farm Plan

By GEORGE PYLE

 

In farm country, Christmas comes about every five years.

 

The next visit of Santa Claus -- or in this case, Uncle Sam -- is due

in 2007. The wish list of American agribusiness giants and their

vassals at the U.S. Department of Agriculture is the same as always:

many billions of federal dollars propping up an unnatural,

anti-competitive, security-undermining, environment-destroying system

that gluts the world with cheap grain and pig manure.

 

And any warm feeling taxpayers might get for thinking their money goes

to support the traditional family farm springs from about as much

reality as flying reindeer.

 

After 52 public forums from Florida to Alaska, many presided over

personally by Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns, and more than 4,000

public comments, the USDA clings to its willful misreading of the

situation, promoting policies that endanger the planet and destroy

farmsteads from Nebraska to Niger.

 

Some hold out hope that Congress, after decades of agreeing that the

solution to every farm problem is larger production subsidies, might

take another course. The ascension of the Democrats, specifically the

fact that conservation-friendly Tom Harkin of Iowa will be chairman of

the Senate Agriculture Committee, provides some encouragement.

 

But the USDA's own summary of the issues facing American agriculture --

" Strengthening the Foundation for Future Growth in U.S. Agriculture " --

still views farming as an industrial process needing to ramp up

production and increase exports.

 

It's a sad missive that refers to the dependency of livestock and

vegetable producers on straightjacketing production contracts with

giant processors as " opportunities, " and calls the need for farm

families to balance their budgets with off-farm jobs a " choice. "

 

It's a business plan that assumes poor nations whose agricultural base

is destroyed by America's market-glutting production will magically

start having the kind of disposable income necessary to buy our grain

and meat. Our government's refusal to deviate from this view was the

key reason why the last round of World Trade Organization talks, once

seen as a chance to bring poor nations into the fold, collapsed in

July.

 

It's a blueprint for yet another round of taxpayer subsidies for the

so-called " program crops " -- generally wheat, corn, rice, soybeans and

cotton -- that push farmers to max out their production using all the

fertilizer and pesticides they can afford.

 

The government dropped nearly $144 billion on farm subsidies between

1995 and 2004, according to calculations by the Environmental Working

Group. The bulk of that money went to an ever-shrinking number of giant

companies and cooperatives that continue to soak up both the taxpayers'

money and their neighbors' land.

 

The resulting cut-rate price of corn further encourages feedlot

fattening of cattle, hogs and poultry rather than the more natural

grazing. The nitrogen-heavy runoff from those massive feeding

operations, combined with all the fertilizer that flows from wheat and

corn fields in the Plains and upper Midwest, endangers municipal water

supplies and once-teeming sealife downstream in the Gulf of Mexico.

 

Soil conservation is always a part of farm legislation, but a small

part. In Kansas, for example, federal farm payments over the decade

ending in 2004 totaled $6.2 billion for production subsidies and $1

billion for conservation. When budget hawks start looking for savings,

it is the conservation plans, not the subsidies, that are on the

chopping block.

 

True conservation farming, where land is lovingly husbanded everywhere,

not hyper-farmed here and left fallow there, is the key to sustainable,

affordable food production. And we can have it for a fraction of what

we now spend on production subsidies.

 

If we tell Congress that is what we want.

 

George Pyle, an editorial writer for the Salt Lake Tribune, is author

of " Raising Less Corn, More Hell: The Case for the Independent Farmer

and Against Industrial Food. " He wrote this comment for the Land

Institute's Prairie Writers Circle, Salina, Kan.

 

 

History repeats itself

and each time the price gets higher