Meanwhile, only meager public resources have been invested smartly to build the kind of dynamic local food economies that support agricultural diversification and help link small- and mid-sized family farms to local and regional markets.

With the 2012 Farm Bill fast upon us, Congress has an opportunity to make smart, timely changes to help  fix our broken food and farm system by embracing a package of policy reforms outlined in the Local Farms, Food and Jobs bill. This legislation was recently introduced by Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-Maine) and Senator Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and is co-sponsored by 63 representatives in the House and 9 in the Senate.

The Pingree-Brown bill includes a comprehensive package of cost-effective policy reforms that would boost farmers’ and ranchers’ incomes by helping them meet the growing demand for local and regional food.  The legislation also aims to make fresh, healthy and affordable food-especially fruits and vegetables- more accessible to consumers.  Given our nation’s costly epidemic of diet-related disease, small investments now that increase access and affordability of healthier food will save us billions of health-related dollars down the road.

Trends show people want fresh, healthy, local food

Demand for locally grown, sustainable food is growing in every corner of the country, with more than 100,000 growers now serving more than 160,000 outlets (pdf):

• In 2011, 7,175 farmers markets were open for business, more than double the number in 2002.
• An estimated 6000 Community Supported Agriculture programs are delivering food directly from the farm to consumers.
• More than 2,000 farm-to-school programs are up and running, a five-fold increase since 2004.
• More than 300 universities are involved with the Real Food Challenge and sourcing sustainable food locally.
• More than 360 hospitals have committed to sourcing more nutritious, locally grown food through the Healthy Food in Health Care pledge.
• The number of restaurants purchasing locally-grown food has skyrocketed; For the fourth year in a row, locally sourced food is the top restaurant food trend in 2012.
• More grocery stores are carrying food produced locally or from farms within the state–and labeling it for customers!

In 2008, the USDA valued this expanding market for local and regional foods at nearly $5 billion. The total will likely surpass $7 billion by the end of 2012, when the current farm bill expires.

This growth is particularly remarkable considering the tiny amounts of federal funding that have been invested in local and regional food system projects. Since 2008, funding has almost doubled but EWG estimates that still just a measly $100 million dollars of taxpayer money a year is being channeled to projects supporting increased local food production, distribution and consumption.

Compare that to roughly $12 billion in subsidies annually that go to industrial-scale growers of commodity crops who are enjoying record income year after year.

Farm Bill must help scale up local and regional food systems

While the recent expansion is impressive, local and regional food markets represented a mere two percent of gross farm sales in 2008. We desperately need the new investments and policy reforms outlined in the Pingree-Brown bill to help this burgeoning market grow and remove the many barriers farmers face in meeting existing demand from grocery stores, restaurants, schools, universities, hospitals and consumers. The Local Food bill has a  $100 million a year price tag, a small sum compared to its potential benefits.

The Local Farms, Food and Jobs bill will improve our broken food system by:

• Increasing support for local aggregation, processing and distribution so that farmers can more easily sell healthy food, including locally raised and processed meat, directly to schools, hospitals, stores and restaurants.

• Enabling schools to use more of their federal food funding to buy fresh, local foods. Public schools could opt to use up to 15 percent of their school lunch commodity dollars for buying foods from local farmers and ranchers, instead of through the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s nationalized commodity food program.

• Improving the diets of food stamp recipients and low-income seniors by making it easier for them to purchase fresh fruits and vegetables at farmers markets, community supported agriculture programs, and other direct food marketing services, putting more money in the pockets of local farmers and generating additional economic activity in nearby business districts.

• Diversifying and increasing the production of healthy and sustainable food by increasing funding for the Specialty Crop Block Grant program and increasing access to credit, crop insurance, and other support for organic producers, diversified operations, smaller-scale and beginning farmers.

Together, these modest but effective investments will yield important, much-needed economic benefits. Farms that sell locally through shorter supply chains often keep a higher portion of the retail dollar, increasing profitability and potential for expansion and job creation.

According to a recent USDA analysis, farmers producing for local markets generally provide 1.3 full time jobs compared to 0.9 for farmers who sell through traditional wholesale markets.  And local food farmers grow higher value crops that generate greater sales per acre—$590 per acre versus $304 for the average farm. Local food markets also provide a critical pathway for new businesses, with beginning farmers accounting for 48% of local West Coast food producers.

Tough road ahead

Despite proven economic and public health benefits, getting this bill through the House agriculture committee may be challenging, given the panel’s hostility to the “Know Your Farmer” Program, the USDA’s comprehensive local and regional food initiative.

Pingree’s bill presents both a major opportunity and challenge for the highly decentralized local food and farming movement to work together in a unified, focused way to transform its considerable success at the local level into the political power needed to win support in the House and Senate agriculture committees.

With the stakes as high as they are, we believe that local farmers and the more than 180 hundred organizations that have endorsed the bill are up to the challenge.

Originally published on EWG

Rebecca Klein wasn’t expecting a lot when she signed up to attend last week’s Farm Bill Hackathon. This public health expert from the Center for a Livable Future at Johns Hopkins University had never heard of a hackathon–a gathering of computer programmers who lock themselves in a room to tackle epic projects with unrestricted creativity–until around two weeks before the event. While the idea of bringing together other sustainable food advocates with computer programmers interested in helping them build tools appealed to her, it also seemed a little ambitious.

The event, which took place last Saturday, was designed to encourage multiple teams of participants to take a project (infographics and online tools) from concept to execution in a single day. “It just seemed like too little time,” says Klein. “I’d never been to an event to tackle an issue where the attendees weren’t hand-selected in advance.” The results–an array of infographics, apps, and other tools made by over 120 people who attended either in person or via the web–surprised her. “The energy in the room was palpable and the power of bringing such diverse expertise into one room was inspiring. This one day planted a whole bunch of seeds for projects and ideas that would have never existed without coming together in that room (and via the web) for that concentrated time,” she says.

Hackathons have been taking place for years, and contrary to how the word might sound, they don’t only involve getting together to wrangle secret information or shut down corporations (although there’s no doubt those things have been tried). At the core, Hackathons are about collaboration; from the beginning they’ve been a way to build programs and applications using the hive mind.

The second-place project.

The Farm Bill–that beast of a piece of legislation that comes up for authorization every five years and shapes our food and farming landscape–is complex to the point of opacity for many Americans. So, thought the minds behind media company Food and Tech Connect, why not host a hackathon in hopes of making the bill more accessible through technology?

The mood

“This is perhaps the first hackathon that addressed a piece of legislation,” says Food and Tech Connect’s Beth Hoffman, co-organizer of the event. “It brought together data people from the U.N., food policy experts, hard-core designers, etc.” And while participants like Klein may already be eating, sleeping, and breathing farm subsidies and other details of the legislation, Hoffman stressed that many came who “knew nothing about either the Farm Bill nor about tech design. There is a huge populace of people looking for ways to be involved with the Farm Bill discussion.”

The third-place project.

Throughout the day, food policy and technology experts–such as Food & Water Watch,WhyHunger, the New York Times R&D Lab–also spoke to the hackathon participants.

The event was sponsored by GRACE Communications Foundation (the organization behind Sustainable Table, Ecocentric, and The Meatrix). GRACE’s Destin Joy Layne says she saw the event as a unique educational opportunity. “It was thrilling to experience a new convergence in food consciousness.” And a way to “start to uncover the hidden truth of our conventional food system.”

The outcome

The first-place prize went to “FARM BILL of Health,” a series of visualizations about the difference in support for fruit and vegetable crops versus commodities in the bill.

Second place went to Meatlessly, a mobile app to promote Meatless Monday by allowing people to find, share, and submit recipes, places, and feedback about their progress.

Third prize was awarded to a work in progress looking at the international implications of the Farm Bill and the idea that crop subsidies in the U.S. drive further hunger and poverty in foreign nations.

The map that took fourth-place.

Fourth place went to ongoing work to map the congressional districts of the Agricultural Committee members. The maps will allow users to see who is on the committees, where they are from, their website and contact information, and other pertinent information like who is supporting them financially and what is grown in their region.

Read more about the winners on Food and Tech Connect.

More cool projects

This runner-up graphic sought to illuminate meat production and industry consolidation:

Given this backdrop, you’d think the Congressional agriculture committees would have understood that writing a secret farm bill tailor-made for their friendly agri-lobbyists and tacking it on to the super committee recommendations would only add to the toxic atmosphere permeating Washington. Since they didn’t, here are five lessons to be re-learned before the 2012 farm bill debate.

1. Secrecy makes for bad politics, bad PR, and bad policy.

Call us old-fashioned, but at the Environmental Work Group (EWG), we believe that new legislation needs to happen in the open, with full hearings and a mark-up in committee, and with debate and amendments on the House and Senate floors. This is especially true for legislation that covers food and farm policy affecting all Americans and that spends nearly $400 billion of taxpayer money. It wasn’t until after the super committee negotiations collapsed that the parade of defenders of status quo farm policy emerged, claiming a secret farm bill was a bad idea. These profiles in courage didn’t utter a peep of opposition during the profoundly undemocratic process. The man at the front of this pack is none other than Senate ag committee ranking Republican Pat Roberts of Kansas.

The secret farm bill was roundly thumped in the media, especially from editorial pages from Corn country to California. One-thing food reformers have learned (and the industrial ag lobby seems to have forgotten (see point 2) is that strong coalitions make a big difference. EWG joined Oxfam, Defenders of Wildlife, Taxpayers for Common Sense, and Americans for Tax Reform in opposition to the drafting of a farm bill through the Super Committee for fiscal, environmental, food security, and transparency issues. EWG either alone or with our coalition partners met with many congressional offices, including leadership from both parties and nearly every member of the Super Committee.

EWG also urged our dedicated supporters to get involved. They generated nearly 30,000 emails to members of the Super Committee and Republican and Democratic leadership to ensure that a secret farm bill wasn’t attached to the super committee proposal. Representatives Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) and Ron Kind (D-Wisc) held a briefing about EWG’s analysis of the revenue income guarantee proposal. Ironically this was the first congressional briefing for media on the secret farm bill. Congressman Kind and 26 of his colleagues also officially demanded an open and transparent process. And Rep. Earl Bluemenauer (D-Ore.) was an early critic of the covert ag committee process.

Also, our fearless friends at Food Democracy Now stepped into the fray and, according to their Tweets shut down the switchboard to the Ag Committee leadership offices. They are now offering a $500 shopping card to anyone who can produce a copy of the final version of the ag committee deal. EWG followed their action with a 30-second spot on CNN and Des Moines’ television, encouraging taxpayers to join the fight against the secret farm bill.

2. Subsidy lobby in disarray.

Any hope for serious reform in the secret farm bill was lost in the unseemly competition among the subsidy lobby to divide up the spoils from finally eliminating the utterly discredited direct payments. The result was a subsidy buffet designed to satisfy the demands of agribusiness lobbyists for corn, cotton, soybeans, wheat, and rice growers that ate up most of the savings from ending direct payments.

One of the prime subsidy buffet offerings was an entirely new entitlement designed to guarantee agricultural business income. Marketed as a safety net, in reality the so-called “shallow loss” program – stacked on top of already heavily subsidized crop revenue insurance – would mostly benefit the highly profitable mega-farms that harvested most of the direct payments the shallow loss program was supposed to replace.

EWG commissioned a study by Iowa State University economics professor Bruce Babcock that shows how current revenue insurance program costs have increased dramatically – tripling to $8 billion since 2000. Montana State University agriculture economist Vincent Smith wrote in Roll Call that “Any shallow-loss program can only be viewed as a transparent money grab by the rest of us, legislators and voters, unless we can be persuaded that farmers are stupid when it comes to managing their business.”

And the disarray doesn’t end there. Add into the mix the American Farm Bureau Federation, which opposed the shallow-loss revenue scheme, a move that severely complicated the process for ag committee leaders accustomed to a unified farm lobby adamantly defending farm subsidies. Competing commodity trade groups further burdened the secret process by throwing sharp elbows at their fellow groups so they could shove their own snouts deeper into the public trough. Even Iowa Governor Terry Branstad conceded, “big ag subsidies aren’t nearly as important to Iowa as they used to be.” This despite that state’s haul of $22.3 billion in subsidies since 1995.

The secret farm bill finally bogged down when, according to reports from Politico’s David Rogers, the Congressional Budget Office concluded the subsidy buffet was a budget buster that cost too much.

3. Fear secrecy, not open debate.

Proponents of the secret farm bill repeatedly warned reformers that we should fear an open debate on the farm bill. Believers in the covert process asserted that nutrition, good food reforms, and conservation programs would fare far worse in open debate.

Defending nutrition assistance to the neediest is a top priority for EWG in farm bill deliberations, so it’s a concern that open floor action could lead to substantial nutrition cuts, even as more Americans than ever enroll in food assistance programs. But take one look at an amendment to the ag spending bill for the current year offered by Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala,), which would have eliminated the automatic qualification for food stamps for individuals who receive certain other benefits or assistance from federal programs. The Senate soundly defeated the potentially harmful Sessions amendment, 58 to 41, with Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Thad Cochran (R-Miss.), and Dan Coats (R-Ind.) voting against it. Those senators are anything but your usual liberals. This indicates that nutrition cuts won’t necessarily earn conservative votes in the House.

Farm politics are changing. The deck is still stacked by agribiz lobbyists flush with cash, but the five-year farm bill is no longer an insiders-only game. With record numbers of Americans on food and nutrition programs, rising food prices, increasing health care costs, and appalling school lunch, the well-heeled ag lobbyists have become the new beltway bandits, a moniker often reserved for government contractors. But the industrial agriculture establishment has had to endure close or losing votes on many issues in the past year, including crop subsidy limits and corn ethanol policy.

Commodity programs have long had a target on their backs by Tea Party types in the House, and it was that hostile environment that frightened ag lobbyists into embracing a secret farm bill in the first place. A floor fight will make the sparks fly, but it is the only way to achieve fundamental reform of food and farm policy.

4. Restart the 2012 farm bill.

Clearly, it’s time to restart the 2012 farm bill reauthorization in an open and democratic process. The general public has yet to see the legislation or learn its price tag. As EWG’s Ken Cook pointed out last week, if the secret deal is supposed to be the starting point for the 2012 farm bill fight, then the committees should release the proposal and discuss it out in the open. Our proposal for a real safety net for working farm families can be found here.

When we released a summary of the secret farm bill proposal leaked to us, it became apparent that commodity groups for wheat, corn, cotton and rice are still the darlings of the agriculture committees. Meanwhile critical conservation programs were slated for yet another huge cut.

We were pleased that the leaked proposal did include some elements of a local food reform bill, offered by Rep. Pingree (D-Maine), but that is just the start of the national conversation about the best way to use tax dollars to fix our badly broken food and farm system. We need to invest in conservation and in a true safety net for working farm families — not more handouts to highly profitable mega-farms and city-dwelling absentee landlords.

The news that a lottery winner in Michigan continues to use his food stamp card because his lottery windfall didn’t count as “gross income” is troubling. What’s more appalling is that the leaked secret farm bill proposal aimed to end farm payments to single farmers with an adjusted gross income of more than $950,000 a year. This “limit” is particularly egregious, considering that farmers’ wealth is also expected to jump again this year. USDA announced Nov 29, that “net farm income will be up 28 percent this year and reach $100.9 billion, which would mark the first time that measure of agricultural profitability has ever exceeded $100 billion.”

5. Where’s there’s a deal there’s a way.

We have to be vigilant against another move to attach a farm bill to any moving piece of legislation (namely, the must-pass annual spending bill) this year. If the super committee was this close to a deal, the agriculture committees will keep trying to get something through without public scrutiny. Why? Because, as we’ve seen during the current Congress, passing legislation is hard. Democracy is hard. Compromise is hard — especially in this stark budget climate. But when the future of American food and farm policy is at stake, the hard fight is the right fight.

Given the political discontent evidenced by the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street phenomena, the 24-7 social media world and the growing good-food movement, more and more real Americans will be watching.

The 2008 Farm Bill included reforms to protect small and medium-sized farmers who raise cattle, hogs, and chickens from unfair treatment at the hands of meatpackers and poultry companies. In 2010, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Grain Inspection, Packers and Stockyard Administration proposed rules (known as the GIPSA Rule, after the agency) to protect poultry and hog farmers from unfair contract terms–like retaliating against poultry and hog growers who speak out about abuses–and ensured that cattle and hog producers could get a fair price from meatpackers for their livestock.

Nearly three years later, the fair livestock rules have been shredded and there is plenty of blame and shame to go around. The Obama administration failed to show leadership on this issue and reneged on President Obama’s campaign pledge to “fight to ensure family and independent farmers have fair access to markets, control over their production decisions, and transparency in prices.”

Agriculture Secretary Vilsack caved to meatpacker money and power by issuing significantly watered down rules–after nearly 18 months of foot dragging to issue the final rules at all. USDA’s final proposal indefinitely postponed any efforts to protect independent cattle and hog farmers and issued a much weaker set of protections for contract chicken and hog farmers. Many Democratic Senators on the Agriculture Committee–including Chairman Debbie Stabenow from Michigan–stood on the sidelines and refused to stand up for livestock producers in their states.

But the final attack came from the duplicitous House Republicans who included sneaky language in the agriculture appropriations bill that prevents USDA from finalizing or developing any rules on livestock markets and only allows the pending rules to address a few of the crucial reforms to poultry contracts. This essentially means that House Republicans, who claim to believe in a “free-market,” have empowered the meat industry to rig a competitive market through unfair and anti-competitive practices that are widespread in the livestock industry. While they mouth support for family values, small businesses, and the family farmer, their failure to allow the fair livestock rules to be implemented is two-faced and un-American. The policies they have supported by doing so will drive even more small and midsized independent producers out of business and increase the monopoly power of the meatpackers.

By prohibiting USDA from finalizing the fair livestock rules, House Republicans didn’t just vote against a new regulation that would have prohibited commonplace abuses in the meat industry. They voted against the family livestock producer by signing off on:
• Unfair and deceptive practices
• Abusive contracts
• Retaliation against farmers who speak out about abuses
• Sweetheart deals for factory farms that receive higher prices for livestock than independent farmers
• Secrecy so diabolical that it forbids the USDA from providing farmers with sample contracts that have fair terms and pricing.

Farmer and consumer advocates will not give up the battle to prevent the rapacious meat industry from destroying family farms and the future for a sustainable food system. The next farm bill must ensure that farmers are paid fairly and prevent meatpacking and food processing companies from running roughshod over farmers and consumers. It’s time for those who talk about the market with reverence, but who support non-competitive practices, to stop being hypocrites. Our coalition is hopping mad and don’t think for a minute we are going to let Big Meat and complicit politicians get away with this outrage.

The potential to improve our current food policy is currently being challenged by a select group of Senate and House agriculture committees who propose $23 billion in cuts to federal spending on some of the most important programs related to nutrition and the future of small-scale, local, and organic farming. The 2012 Farm Bill could be rewritten as early as November 23. It’s vital that these issues be debated in a public forum, not behind closed doors.

Take Action Today
There is still time to participate in the fight for reform that supports new farmers, provides infrastructure for regional and local food development, and protects our health and precious land.

Here are some ways you can get involved in influencing the 2012 Farm Bill:

Call. Take 30 seconds to call leaders of the House and Senate ag committees and say NO to the “Secret Farm Bill.” Over 27,000 people have done so already using the Food Democracy Now call script. You can also support the development of local and regional farms, farmers, and retail markets by asking your two senators and your representative to co-sponsor the Local Farms, Food, and Jobs Act.
Meet. To date, there are over 7,000 farmers markets nationwide. Get to know your local farmers. Listen to their stories. Ask them questions about the Farm Bill. The more you understand about the challenges that small-scale farmers face, the larger your role can be in supporting their farms and marketplaces.

Explore. Find out about programs intended for inclusion in the 2012 Farm Bill. Learn about the new Beginning Farmer and Rancher Opportunity Act, which supports novice farmers by creating jobs, affordable farmland, and farmer training programs. Or read about the pre-existing Wetlands Reserve Program, which has improved watershed health and secured protection and restoration for 11,000 private landowners on 2.3 million acres of land over the past 20 years.

Review. Learn a brief history of the Farm Bill to understand key programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which currently represents more than two-thirds of the Farm Bill funding and faces multibillion-dollar cuts.

Originally published on Nourish

But now is a critical time to start asking questions about what the consequences would be–intended or otherwise–if subsidies go away. This week, Congressional agriculture committees proposed cutting $23 billion out of Farm Bill programs over the next 10 years, and by most reports, one type of farm subsidies called direct payments are the first thing on the chopping block. Even the corn and soybean lobbies seem resigned to the end of direct payments to growers of commodity crops.

So if the most often-cited example of farm subsidies is about to end, does that mean we’re on our way to a food system that makes broccoli more affordable than fast food burgers? It’s not quite that simple. As we describe in a new report, released this week with the Public Health Institute, subsidies are not making junk food cheaper and more abundant than healthy food –the real culprit is the deregulation of agriculture markets, the failure to enforce anti-trust law and the millions spent on marketing junk food.In a market controlled by just a few buyers of crops like corn, wheat and soybeans, and no mechanisms to manage overproduction that causes prices to collapse, subsidies have served as the bandage that partially stops the bleeding of farmers who often cannot stay in business any other way. Pulling the subsidy rug out from under the small and midsized farmers who depend on this support to keep farming in lean years could result in even fewer independent family farmers and even larger mono-cropping behemoths who buy up that land and keep using it to produce crops like corn and soybeans.

Commodity crop overproduction has been around long before the current subsidy program existed. During the New Deal, farm policies encouraged farmers to idle some of their land so they wouldn’t overproduce and established a national grain reserve, much like the Strategic Petroleum Reserve we have today. It prevented crop prices from skyrocketing during times of drought or falling too low during times of surplus. Overproduction was kept in check, and the stable commodity prices functioned like a minimum wage for farmers.

Beginning in 1985, food processors, grain traders, meat companies and marketers mounted a strong and successful lobbying effort against these policies. In 1996, crop prices were high and budgets were tight – much like they are today – and the agribusiness lobby called for policies that would, as they put it, give farmers “the freedom to farm.” That Farm Bill eliminated land-idling programs, letting farmers plant as much as they wanted, and production increased over the next few years. That, along with the elimination of grain reserves earlier, resulted in farmers overproducing themselves into bankruptcy, and the subsidy system we know today was born.

While simply doing away with payments to commodity farmers may help deficit hawks reduce the federal budget for the short term, the longer-term impacts may land us with a food system that’s even more consolidated and gives even more control to the cabal of agribusinesses we’re fighting to diffuse.

What, then, would effective food and farm policy reforms look like if we want to promote healthy foods and reduce obesity? Rather than just ending subsidy programs, we should develop responsible federal supply management programs that reduce overproduction and stabilize price and supply, undoing the damaging deregulation that took place in the 1980s and ‘90s.

While the idea of simply moving the dollars used to subsidize corn and soybeans over to apples and spinach is obviously appealing, it won’t solve the problem. A rural farmer with a few thousand acres of wheat can’t suddenly switch to growing tomatoes to sell directly to consumers at the farmers market. The demand and infrastructure needed to sustain this type of transition away from intensive commodity crop production no longer exist. Ending subsidies won’t change this. Doing the hard work of reforming the commodity policies in the Farm Bill could, along with enforcing anti-trust law and regulating the marketing to children of junk food.

Read more at Food & Water Watch’s Web site.

The popularity of Oscar-nominated Food, Inc. and writers Michael Pollan and Mark Bittman make it clear that consumer interest in food and farming issues is now deeply embedded in the cultural mainstream.

And that’s not just my personal impression. Two brand new polls show a surprising degree of agreement on consumers’ concerns about the quality of food and how it’s produced, considering that one was commissioned by an environmentally-oriented foundation and the other by an organization that’s out to advance the interests of large scale agribusiness. I’ll come back to those results in a minute.

Shoppers’ buying habits reflect their growing interest in food quality and where it comes from. Healthy food-oriented chains such as Whole Foods are thriving, farmers’ markets are more prevalent than ever, and organically grown food is the fastest growing segment of the agriculture sector. Before long, it’s inevitable that consumers’ growing interest in food issues will start to affect their behavior in the voting booth as well.

Industrial agriculture has taken notice, as evidenced by the “Food Dialogues,” a series of panel discussions convened last week (Sept. 22) in four cities as part of a $30 million public relations campaign mounted by big agricultural interests. Billed as an effort to connect consumers with farmers and ranchers, the event was created by the U.S. Farmers and Ranchers Alliance, whose membership list is a who’s who of major industrial agriculture organizations across the country.

While the panelists were mostly sympathetic to industry, they included World Wildlife Fund’s Jason Clay and Roots of Change President Michael Dimock, who said many smart things about the sustainability of modern agriculture. The event triggered comprehensive reactions by rancher Jeff Fowle and author Anna Lappé, and a story in yesterday’s (Sept 28) New York Times.

The Alliance set limits on the scope of the “Dialogues,” keeping potentially divisive issues like the farm bill or the corn ethanol debacle off the agenda and thereby skirting the touchy topic of how government policies affect what we eat. That’s too bad, because the farm bill is especially relevant right now as the Super Committee budget cutters in Congress tasked with reigning in federal spending take a hard look at what farm programs to cut. Many informed observers believe the committee will effectively re-write the farm bill this fall, a full year ahead of schedule. (For a little context, check out Why the Farm Bill Matters.)

President Obama, farm state senators and commodity groups have already weighed in, underscoring the likely impact of the Super Committee’s work on the future of US food and farm policy. We at Environmental Working Group have also issued several of our own analyses of how the Super Committee could, and should, reform farm policy. And today, 56 conservation-oriented groups, including EWG, have come together to lay out a set of principles that should guide the panel’s deliberations.

That’s why the polling information I can tell you about here is important, because it’s a unique window into what American consumers are really thinking, not just what big agribusiness wants you to believe.

In July, the David & Lucile Packard Foundation commissioned the Benenson Strategy Group and Voter Consumer Research to conduct a survey of American attitudes on issues related to agriculture, the environment, and the federal budget. Here–for the first time anywhere–are some highlights of the findings, based on 1,200 telephone interviews conducted nationally. (The poll had an overall margin of error ±2.83 percent.)

• 78 percent said making nutritious and healthy foods more affordable and more accessible should be a top priority in the next farm bill.
• Americans value conservation programs with environmental benefits more than programs with economic benefits such as job creation or recreation dollars.
• 69 percent said reducing the use of chemicals that contribute to water pollution should also be a top priority.
• 52 percent said subsidies for crops such as corn and soybeans should top the list of programs to be cut, and 49 percent named crop insurance as the next target. Only 31 percent ranked conservation programs as top targets for cuts and just 23 percent wanted to chop food aid for low income Americans.
• 57 percent did not agree with cutting funding for farm conservation programs, saying they save money by preventing pollution.
• 38 percent said protecting soil and farmland to ensure future food security should be the top priority of conservation initiatives, while 34 percent put protecting water quality at the top.
• 60 percent said farmers should be required to meet environmental standards such as protecting water quality or soil health as a condition of receiving subsidy payments and subsidized crop insurance. That number jumped to 65 percent in the six biggest ethanol-producing states.
• 75 percent said helping family farmers stay in business should be a top or high priority in agriculture policy and 31 percent would make it the top goal of subsidy programs.

The Alliance’s two polls, conducted in August by Ketchum Global Research Network and Braun Research, sampled an even larger number of consumers (a total of 2,417) and, separately, 1,002 farmer and ranchers. The polling was part of the preparation for the “Food Dialogues.” Their website offers only a limited sampling of the results, but in some ways the USFRA’s poll findings were consistent with what the Packard survey found:

• 79 percent of consumers said “producing healthy choices… is very important for farmers and ranchers to consider when planning farming and ranching practices.”
• 70 percent said their shopping decisions are affected by how food is grown and raised, although 72 percent said they “know nothing or very little” about it.
• 73 percent of consumers were satisfied with the availability of healthy foods and 66 percent are satisfied with food safety standards, but, 42 percent said the U.S. is “off on the wrong track in the way we produce food,” as against 39 percent who said it’s “heading in the right direction.”
• the five top topics consumers wanted more information about are, in order: how chemicals are used; how pesticides are used; food safety standards; effect of government regulations, and; how antibiotics are used/genetic engineering in crops.
• according to an account in the online Hagstrom report, 42 percent of the consumers polled said the way food is produced has improved in the last 10 years, but 37 percent said it has worsened.
• of those who said it has worsened, 1-in-5 cited its “environmental impact.”

If you want to influence how the next five years of farm policy are written, arm yourself with the Packard Poll results and head on over to EWG’s food and farm bill action center, where you can tell Congress that you won’t stand for industrial agriculture’s hold on the food system anymore.

Originally published on Environmental Working Group

I wonder what was on the minds of the first 13 young Freedom Riders–six white and seven black–the day before they got on a Greyhound bus in D.C., headed to the South 50 years ago in spring 1961.  Were they nervous, for themselves and their future, that the law to desegregate interstate commerce wouldn’t uphold in a still-segregated South?  Did they feel any pride for their anticipated acts of non-violence, soon capturing the attention of the world and cementing themselves in the history of racial equality?

I’ll soon find out.  It’s the day before I get on a bus in Birmingham, Alabama with 12 other young folk from across the country of all different backgrounds to seek another form of Civil Rights.  The Freedom Riders sought racial justice.  We are seeking real food justice. We’re changing the food system in our own communities and meeting others who are doing the same, whether it’s increasing access to affordable healthy food for low-income communities, getting better conditions for food chain workers, or reclaiming traditional food cultures.

The first 12-day Food and Freedom Ride starts in the South in Alabama and Mississippi, heads into the Midwest in Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, and Iowa, and ends in Michigan.  The second ride, one week later, will go through America’s salad bowl–California.

I’m nervous and I’m proud.  I’m nervous because freedom for real food away from the industrial food system is at an all-time high, whether it’s a massive recall on turkey, raid on raw foods and needs for retail permits, or getting supermarket chains to sign onto fair farmworker rights.  I’m proud because I’m excited to meet and share the stories of youth, food producers, and community leaders who understand the problems and are manifesting real food solutions.  The past efforts of the Freedom Riders and other social movement leaders give me hope that my nervousness will override with strength and my pride with even more so.

Our hope is that the rides will bring to light the need to change the structural systems currently in place that prohibit people hurt by the industrial food system from growing, eating, affording, and accessing this basic civil right.  On our rides, we’ll engage youth and communities on a recently drafted Youth Food Bill of Rights, sending the message to our representatives as we approach the 2012 Farm Bill that real food is a real solution and that it’s the norm, not the exception.

We’ll share stories, actions, and reflections daily on the road from different riders.  Ride for Food and Freedom with us online, on Facebook or Twitter @liverealnoworg (use the hashtag #foodandfreedom), or e-mail info@liverealnow.org to join us if you’re on route.  We’re also nearing our campaign to fund a video documentary of the rides and complementary curriculum.  Chip in $5(+) for #foodandfreedom!

Watch this video to find out why I’m riding:

Congress rewrites the Farm Bill every five years or so. It drives federal spending for farm, nutrition and conservation programs and is the only important piece of environmental legislation that Congress is almost certain to enact over the next 18 months. In just a single year–2010–Farm Bill programs spent $96.3 billion. With so much on the table, here’s the Environmental Working Group’s (EWG) list of the 10 most important things you should know about the Farm Bill:

1. The Farm Bill doles out billions of taxpayer dollars in subsidies to the largest five commodity crops: corn, cotton, rice, wheat and soybeans. Those payments go out, regardless of need, and they mostly fail to help the nation’s real working farm and ranch families. In fact, since 1995, just 10 percent of subsidized farms–the largest and wealthiest operations–have raked in 74 percent of all subsidy payments. 62 percent of farmers in the United States did not collect subsidy payments, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

2. The Obama Administration says fruits and vegetables should fill about half of our plates during meal times. Yet, only a tiny fraction of the Farm Bill funding goes to programs that support healthy fruits and vegetables, and many of these programs have no budget going into the next Farm Bill, which is up for renewal in 2012.

3. Some 90,000 checks went out to wealthy investors and absentee land owners in more than 350 American cities in 2010, despite the so-called “actively engaged” rule adopted in the 2008 Farm Bill. This rule was designed to ensure that federal payments go only to those who are truly working the land. It hasn’t worked.

4. A handful of other commodities also qualify for government support, including peanuts, sorghum and mohair. Dairy and sugar producers have separate price and market controls that are highly regulated and can be costly to the government.

5. The flawed subsidy system creates perverse incentives for farmers to grow as much industrial-scale, fertilizer- and pesticide-intensive crops as possible, with harmful effects on our environment and drinking water–and the availability of organic food in your grocery store.

6. The Farm Bill provides money for good things too. More than two-thirds of the authorized spending goes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (formerly known as the food stamp program), which helps low-income Americans purchase food.

7. Other Farm Bill dollars pay for the Senior Farmers’ Market Nutrition Program, which gives vouchers to seniors to buy food at farmer’s markets, and the Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Program, which provides nutritious produce to schools. These nutrition programs are likely to be first on the chopping block as Congress tries to reduce the federal debt, while the subsidy programs will surely be protected.

8. The government makes a lot of promises about supporting conservation programs to protect water, soil and wildlife habitat, but those promises largely go underfunded and unfulfilled. Still, the Farm Bill provided more than $4 billion this year to help farmers conserve soil, clean up the water and protect habitat for wildlife.

9. The Farm Bill should do a lot more to provide healthy food, protect the environment and help working farm and ranch families, but there are a host of well-funded and well-connected interests that benefit greatly from the status quo. The list includes politicians looking to fill campaign coffers, corporate agri-chemical giants like Monsanto and Syngenta seeking to expand their markets, and Big Ag’s public relations and lobby organizations, which cash in year after year.

10. Since only two percent of Americans directly engage in farming, the farm bill is largely crafted and debated out of the spotlight. Historically, the process of writing it embodies the worst kind of bipartisan logrolling and horse-trading.

Knowing that a lot of the money goes to nutrition programs and that the legislation has major effects on American’s food supply, we think it’s time to start calling it a Food and Farm Bill. EWG’s top priority in the next Farm Bill is to protect food assistance programs for those most in need, especially in the lingering aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. EWG also wants to shift a large chunk of the farm subsidy dollars into conservation programs and reform crop insurance–which has ballooned into another lavish subsidy for producers. Finally, EWG wants energy provisions that encourage truly sustainable biofuels and biomass energy alternatives, not heavily subsidized and inefficient corn ethanol.

A version of this article originally published by AgMag

Will the next Farm Bill, scheduled for passage in 2012, put public policy in service of a food system that works for farmers, eaters, and the environment?

Well, optimism over federal food-policy reform never runs very high in sustainable-ag circles. The agrichemical lobby is flush with cash and friends in Congress and the White House. But the current budget fight is making a bleak situation look downright disastrous. It’s looking like the looming budget deal will slash funding for the few programs that currently counteract the Big Ag policy agenda.

And while the current fight only involves fiscal 2011 funding, what emerges from it will set the “baseline” for funding in the coming Farm Bill, Ferd Hoefner, policy director for the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC), told me in a phone conversation. Many of the USDA programs heralded by the Obama administration under the “Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food” initiative, which are designed to expand access to fresh food and link farmers to local markets, are on the chopping block, Hoefner told me, as are ag conservation programs that give farmers incentives to consider other goals besides just maximizing production of a few commodities. The sustainable-food movement has put together the initiatives through decades of grassroots organizing and low-budget lobbying, and they are in danger of seeing their budgets cut for years to come.

A recent letter signed by 154 progressive ag groups, including Hoefner’s NSAC, analyzed the proposed House budget like this:

The House measure would cut a disproportionate $5.2 billion or 22 percent from the combined USDA and FDA budgets, compared to a 6 percent cut for the government overall or 14 percent for non-security spending. Even those numbers mask the size of the actual cut. The House also proposes deep cuts to mandatory conservation and renewable energy funding provided by the 2008 Farm Bill—a combined $500 million would be cut under the House bill from the Conservation Stewardship Program, the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, Wetland Reserve Program, and the Biomass Crop Assistance Program. With those cuts included, the total cut to agriculture comes to $5.7 billion or 24.5 percent.

And what about commodity payments, which go to a relatively small number of large farmers?

Despite the decision to re-open the 2008 Farm Bill and make cuts to mandatory programs in an appropriations bill, none of the cuts in the House bill are directed at the two largest federal agricultural spending items—commodity and crop insurance subsidies. In a year of relatively high farm income, the House has focused its cuts instead upon programs that protect the environment, increase economic opportunity, serve beginning and minority farmers, and ensure proper nutrition for low-income families.

Why are the conservation programs so important? For decades now, the main thrust of U.S. farm/food policy has been to push farmers to grow as much corn, soy, and a few other commodities as possible. Nixon-era USDA Secretary Earl Butz set the tone. Farmers should “get big or get out,” he famously thundered; and the surviving large operations should “plant hedgerow to hedgerow”—i.e., as much as possible, damn the environmental consequences. Butz’s agenda is tailor-made for big corn processor/meat producers like Cargill and the agrichemical giants that sell farmers inputs, like Monsanto.

The Farm Bill’s commodity programs are the most infamous example of this maximum-production-at-all-costs policy, but hardly the only one. The various federal goodies propping up corn ethanol—from tax breaks to the Renewable Fuels Standard—are probably even more important at this point. The result has been mountains of cheap food—and all manner of public-health and environmental ills, which I tried to sum up in a post last year for Grist called “Why are we propping up corn production, again?”

The conservation programs offset, however tentatively and insufficiently, this mad Butzian zeal to produce a whole lot of a very few foodstuffs—all of them easy inputs for industrial-food processors. Like the commodity programs, conservation programs are funded by the Farm Bill and even have their own Farm Bill “title,” although they draw a fraction of the funding that the commodity programs do. If the commodity programs give farmers incentives to maximize production at all costs, the conservation ones offer incentives to consider ecological factors in making planting decisions.

For example, the Conservation Reserve Program rewards farmers for keeping environmentally sensitive land out of production—important at a time when high corn prices might tempt a farmer to squeeze a last couple of crops out of a highly erodible piece of land. Other programs give farmers incentives to plant buffer strips along streams, which can trap agrichemicals that would otherwise drain into streams and foul drinking water.

These relatively modest, successful programs deserve to be ramped up. Indeed, they could provide a template for a Farm Bill that makes sense for farmers, eaters, and the environment alike. Say, for example, we stopped paying farmers merely for planting corn, as some commodity programs do, or rewarding them for how much corn they harvest during low-price years, as other commodity programs do. Instead, say we started rewarding them for biodiversity: for expanding rotations to include other crops besides just soy, which would cut down on the need for agrichemicals. What if we paid them to plant nitrogen-fixing winter cover crops, which would build organic matter in soil and cut synthetic nitrogen use?