Civil Eats

Farm subsidies are complicated, making them the central front of a heated debate between farmers, politicians and consumers. Farmers don’t like to be dependent on them, but most large-scale producers cannot live without them. Politicians see opportunities for making budget cuts ($245.2 billion was spent on farm payments from 1995-2009 alone, and after all, when subsidies were created during the Great Depression, they were meant to be temporary) and yet these payments are now providing cheap raw materials to the ADMs, Cargills and Monsantos of the world, who give major campaign contributions. Consumers see that the most heavily subsidized crops (corn, soybeans, cotton, wheat, and rice) are producing a lot of things that they no longer want to eat (high fructose corn syrup, processed foods and feedlot meat), but they often misunderstand what is actually needed to transition away from the subsidy system.

Will transparency help to build a more nuanced discussion around changing our farm subsidy system? Today, the Environmental Working Group (EWG) released the latest version of their widely referenced Farm Subsidy Database, with more detailed information on farm payments by individual, county, state and congressional district and including a national summary. In looking at the numbers closely, it becomes apparent that still, the wealthiest farms are receiving the most subsidies. With populist anger over federal spending spilling over, the government searching to get out of debt, and 74% of earnings having gone to the top 10% of farmers from 1995-2009, will farm subsidies finally come under the knife in the 2012 Farm Bill? Read More

Two weeks ago, I noticed that two of my tomato plants had late blight. I was up on the roof, weeding, pulling off yellowing leaves from all the excess rain, and harvesting some early tomatoes when I noticed leaves with yellow and brown spots on them. I’d read the article in the New York Times about the blight, and so I sent out the photo on the left to Twitter, asking my followers, “is this the blight?” The answer, sadly, was yes. So I pulled one plant up, before it could spread to the others, and took all the leaves off the other plant which was confined to a corner, hoping to let it’s three giant tomatoes ripen.

Unfortunately, rooftops are not immune from the soil disease that ravages spuds and tomatoes — I bought my seedlings from two small nurseries upstate, which had grown them locally. But it is possible that contamination had already spread to my tomatoes from the nurseries’ neighbors who bought their plants at big box stores like Lowe’s and Wal-Mart, which sold plants in soil from an Alabama facility that carried the blight. Ironically, it is new growers’ enthusiasm that might have exacerbated the disease through increased consumer demand. And while a record number of people are growing some of their own produce this year, excess rain in the northeast has created the perfect conditions for the blight to flourish — but it is small organic farmers that are taking a punch. Read More