The farm bill draft released by the Senate Agriculture Committee last week (April 20) falls far short of the providing farm and food policies Americans want. In a national poll last year, 78 percent said making nutritious and healthy foods more affordable and accessible should be a top priority in the farm bill. They’re going to be sorely disappointed. If it passes, this agribusiness-as-usual proposal will largely perpetuate our broken food and agriculture system, leaving in its wake a long legacy of poor health and degraded soil, water and habitat, especially in the industrial agriculture heartland.

Without the efforts of Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), the chair of the committee, the bill would have been even worse, but as it is, the proposal will continue to give away tens of billions of taxpayer dollars in subsidies to the nation’s largest, most profitable and environmentally damaging farm businesses. To pay for this giveaway, the Agriculture committee’s proposal would slash programs for conservation, nutrition, rural development and beginning and socially disadvantaged farmers.

That’s exactly what the majority of Americans polled said they don’t want. 

An All-You-Can-Eat-Buffet for the Subsidy Lobby 

The committee could simply have ended the widely discredited direct payment program and redirected the money to healthy food or conservation programs that benefit the public and save money in the long run. Instead, legislators created an expensive new entitlement program (called “shallow loss”) that guarantees nearly 90 percent of the income of farm businesses already enjoying record profits. It also leaves untouched a bloated $9-billion-a-year crop insurance program that pays about 60 percent of farmers’ crop insurance premiums, no matter how large the farm, and sends billions to crop insurance companies and their agents.

Most of the benefits of these proposed programs would flow to the big five commodity crops (corn, soy, cotton, rice, and wheat) that provide feed for livestock, raw material for processed food and corn ethanol fuel for our cars. Not only would these proposals be highly inequitable and wasteful, but the new revenue guarantees, combined with unlimited insurance subsidies and high crop prices, will create powerful new incentives for growers to plow up fragile wetlands and grasslands and erase many of farming’s recent environmental gains.  

Table Scraps for Good Food

With most of the savings from ending direct payments being poured into even more wasteful programs, there is little left for anything else. When it comes to promoting better food, the bill would provide a few new important scraps. There’s $20 million a year for promoting local food; $10 million for Community Food Projects; and $20 million for the Hunger-free Communities Program to create incentives for SNAP (food stamp) recipients to buy healthy food at farmers’ markets. But the committee also cut $4 million from organic research funding (to $16 million a year and cut funding to support Beginning Farmers in half, to $10 million. Never mind that we have a serious shortage of young farmers and the average age of all farmers is hovering around 57.

The fruit, nuts, and vegetable sector is generally happy with their scraps, which add up to an extra $75 million a year, mostly for marketing and research. Yet few of the no-cost policy changes outlined in the Local Farms, Food and Jobs Act–introduced recently by Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-Maine) and Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio)–which would help build local food systems and expand access to healthy and sustainable foods, made it into the bill.

Modest Trims to Lavish Subsidies Could Easily Pay For Good Food

With the full Senate expected to consider the bill later this year, the only real hope for redirecting the ill-considered spending cuts to conservation and healthy food programs will be to persuade other senators that there are smarter policy options if they are willing to pry the needed resources out of the hands of wealthy farm operators.

According to a recent Government Accountability Office report, simply capping crop insurance premium subsidies at $40,000 per farm could yield as much as $10 billion in savings over 10 years. This would be nearly enough to spare conservation and anti-hunger programs from the proposed cuts while affecting just four percent of the subsidy recipients, who currently collect more than 30 percent of the total!

According to the same report, reducing the average crop insurance premium subsidy by 10 percent might save another $10 billion over 10 years. This would be more than enough to significantly pay down the deficit and cover the modest $200 million annual cost of the Local Farms, Food and Jobs bill and the Beginning Farmer and Rancher bill.

A portion of that subsidy savings could also be used to not just restore but actually double funding for organic agriculture, reinstate funding for the socially disadvantaged farmer program cut by the committee and double the number of low-income schools participating in the Fruit and Vegetable Snack program.

None of these modest cuts to the crop insurance subsidies would harm the integrity of that program or leave farmers with inadequate coverage.

Watch for the Budget Deficit Smokescreen

In spite of the committee bill’s major flaws, outrage from good food advocates has been muted thus far, in part because expectations were exceptionally low.

The overriding message from Congress, meekly accepted by too many, is that the current budget-cutting climate makes it impossible to expect new money for nutrition, conservation, local, organic and healthy food, no matter how valuable (and oversubscribed) these programs are. All we can hope for, they say, is to hold onto current funding or minimize cuts.

But the nation’s difficult fiscal situation shouldn’t get all the blame. The main culprit is the farm lobby’s stranglehold on the majority of Senate and House Agriculture Committee members and the unwillingness of those who would prefer a reform-oriented farm bill to seriously challenge Congress to do better.

Disregard the Coming Spin

As the farm bill moves to the Senate floor, there will be a lot of spin-doctors proclaiming that this is the best that can be expected in the current fiscal climate. But if the goal is really to save money and invest wisely, it makes no sense to give away unlimited crop insurance premium subsidies to wealthy farm operators at the expense of feeding hungry people, protecting our water, and investing in healthy food.

It will not be easy to break the farm lobby’s long-standing grip on Congress. But it is certainly not going to happen if we stay silent. It’s time to pick up the phone and let your representative and senators know that you want a fair farm bill that invests in a healthier food system for you and your family.

Call the U.S. Capitol Switchboard at (202) 224-3121 and ask for your senators’ and/or representative’s office.  Tell them you think the Farm Bill should invest in healthy food. Tell them to cut crop insurance subsidies instead of nutrition, conservation and healthy food programs.

Originally published on AgMag

Part history text, part socio-political commentary and part call to action, Food Fight: The Citizen’s Guide to the Next Food and Farm Bill offers something for everyone from the seasoned agriculture advocate to the newcomer on the food systems scene. The newly re-issued book by Dan Imhoff comes just as the federal debate over the 2012 Farm Bill is heating up.

The book is divided into three sections: Why the Farm Bill Matters; Wedge Issues; and Turning the Tables. To set the context, Imhoff summarizes the early history of the farm bill, describing the Dust Bowl, the Great Depression, and the overproduction of crops that led to its creation as a cornerstone of the New Deal. The history lesson continues with a short summary of the impact of the Green Revolution on farm bill policy, as well as the story of how the bill came to include hunger and nutrition programs, and the ebb and flow of conservation programs to incentivize environmental stewardship on the nation’s farms and ranches. And because no discussion on the farm bill would be complete without discussing commodity subsidies, that’s covered too.

After laying down the foundation, he devotes the rest of the book to strategic topics. He lays out a number of “wedge issues” that could change the terms of the farm bill debate—government deficits, the increasingly apparent impacts of climate change on agriculture, and other emerging ecological crises, the rise of the local food movement, food security concerns, and more.

The last few pages of the book are devoted to “Turning the Tables” and Imhoff offers a checklist of 25 ideas whose time has come—an aspirational menu for American agriculture. Finally, he provides a succinct activist tool kit with tips on organizing and a resource list of organizations across the country engaged in progressive advocacy on the farm bill and related issues.

Perhaps my favorite quote from the book—maybe because I can relate to it–is this: “I confess, I am a reluctant policy wonk. But these are the issues of our times. If Americans don’t weigh in on the Farm Bill, the agribusiness lobbyists will be more than happy to draft the next one for us as they have done for at least 30 years.”

The book is available online at Watershed Media where you can also see a number of other of Imhoff’s books. You can also order it on the action-oriented Food Fight site that features farm bill-related events, news and a “what you can do” section.

A rational, coherent blueprint for a healthy national food supply might be too much to ask. But after years of studying the Farm Bill, I’d be thrilled to see a dent made in four of its most glaring conflicts of purpose.

1. Don’t subsidize what you don’t want people to eat.

In broad strokes, the Farm Bill generally has three primary thrusts: 1. Nutrition spending like SNAP (formerly called food stamps), emergency food assistance, and school feeding programs; 2. Subsidies for commodity crops and income support for farmers; 3. Land, soil and ecosystem conservation. These first two are like trains on separate tracks running in completely different directions. (Come to think of it, so are the second and third. They will be addressed below.)

In early 2011, the USDA replaced its Food Pyramid with My Plate, a simple graphic representation of the food groups recommended. My Plate’s message is clear: A healthy plate should be at least half full of fruits and vegetables and another 30 percent should comprise whole grains. The last 20 percent of the plate is reserved for proteins. A serving of low-fat milk or yogurt rounds off the serving recommendations.

If there were a matching USDA Subsidy Plate, however, its message would be: Fill your plate with meat and processed foods. Nearly two-thirds of the corn, over half of the soybeans, a great deal of the cottonseed and cottonseed meal, and even some of the wheat produced in the U.S. are fed to livestock. The remainder of the corn and soybeans are either processed into biofuel or industrial food ingredients. And these are the crops the Farm Bill primarily subsidizes. Fruits, vegetables and nuts–the very items the USDA wants us to eat most of–are known as “specialty crops” and currently receive only a small fraction of farm subsidies despite their high nutritional values. Well over 60 percent of commodity subsidies flow to crops fed to animals.

It’s the industrial beef, hog, chicken and dairy operations that win out; subsidies mean they get cheap feed. According to the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, the meat, egg and dairy sectors were the beneficiaries of the majority of the $246 billion in subsidies given to U.S. food producers between 1996 and 2009.

2. Don’t pay polluters.

Massive dairies, hog and poultry factories and other livestock feedlots house thousands (often tens or even hundreds of thousands) of animals. Some produce as much waste as the sewage system of a small city. The difference is that animal feeding operations don’t install municipal waste treatment plants to clean up their messes.

And yet this type of food production has been supported for a decade by a Farm Bill program called the Environmental Quality Incentives Program. EQIP, as it’s called, must spend 60 percent of its budget on livestock producers, many of whom are the worst, environmentally speaking. And what are they spending that money on? Manure lagoons and waste trafficking.

EQIP started as a conservation program, meant to help small livestock producers keep animal waste out of creeks and waterways. But now, thanks to lobbying, the massive animal farms can be reimbursed for up to 75 percent (capped at $300,000 per owner) of their costs for animal waste storage and hauling and compliance with laws like the Clean Water Act. Should we have to pay livestock operators to comply with basic laws? Should our tax dollars build the infrastructure for massive meat, egg, and dairy factories?

Meanwhile, EQIP funds to organic farming projects are capped at $20,000 a year per operator.

3. Don’t subsidize overplanting.

Nothing in the Farm Bill–nothing–continues to be more counterproductive than the complete disconnect between commodity crop subsidies and conservation programs. On the one hand, subsidies encourage farmers to plant in every inch of soil, crop insurance programs eliminate farmers’ economic risks, and disaster bailouts encourage plowing even on marginal lands in areas prone to flooding and drought. On the other hand, the U.S. Department of Agriculture directs less than 7 percent of its overall spending toward conservation, much of that to right past wrongs and to clean up problems stemming from over-farming.

Consider, for example, that even as 1.7 million acres were enrolled in the Conservation Reserve Program in South Dakota between 1985 and 1995, more than 700,000 acres of grassland were converted to crops–primarily corn and soybeans (already in excess supply). This absurd process only accelerated during the last Farm Bill, as even grasslands used for hay and pasture were transformed into corn fields. Such a dichotomy makes Farm Bill conservation programs seem more like a distraction than a coordinated national stewardship strategy.

In the case of the Wetlands Reserve Program–arguably the Farm Bill’s most successful conservation effort to date–only wetlands previously impacted by agricultural development are eligible for funding; you can’t use the money to save pristine ecosystems (unless they’re attached to land damaged by farming or ranching).

4. Don’t farm corn for fuel.

The drums are finally beating against ethanol subsidies and tax breaks that suck up $7 billion per year in tax dollars. It’s about time. For years Congress has mandated that gas be blended with ethanol to push our fuel supply further. And yet, we’re practically spinning our wheels backwards. It takes about two-thirds of a gallon of petroleum products to sow, fertilize, irrigate, harvest and process a gallon of corn ethanol. That’s minimally cutting our dependence on foreign oil.

In fact, in 2010 a full 36 percent of the U.S. corn crop was turned into ethanol. That only displaced about 8 percent of what we put in our gas tanks. Americans could save that much gas with a 1.1 mpg increase in the fuel efficiency of our cars and trucks. Here’s a kicker: Ethanol-laced gas actually lowers fuel efficiency by 3 to 4 percent.

America faces numerous and complex food- and farming-related challenges in the years to come: curbing the obesity epidemic, halting the loss of habitat, stopping disease outbreaks like e. coli, bringing up the next generation of farmers and ranchers, and many more. The Farm Bill is our chance to right things that are wrong with the food system. Even small amounts of well-directed funding can do a great deal for a beginning farmer education program, habitat restoration effort, or local food project. It would help if the Farm Bill could stop fighting itself. And maybe then it can start to align along one sensible strategy: Create economically and environmentally healthy farms to grow healthy and affordable food.

Originally published on Huffington Post

Two years ago this week, the USDA and U.S. Justice Department began a series of joint workshops on anti-trust issues in agriculture. More than 4,000 farmers participated, and 16,000 people submitted comments. (Civil Eats reported on these hearings here and here.) Yet at a press conference this week, marking the anniversary of the first workshop, a panel of farmers reported that little has changed. A handful of companies still control huge portions of livestock, dairy, and poultry markets, they said, and farmers continue to face abusive and unfair treatment.

“There are some winners,” said Rhonda Perry, a livestock and grain farmer and director of the Missouri Rural Crisis Center, “But those winners are clearly not farmers or consumers. Those who benefit have really been embarrassingly successful at convincing Congress and our leaders to do nothing.”

The message at the workshops, panelists said, was loud and clear: Agricultural markets are not fair. A small number of companies hold most of the power, and farmers and consumers pay the price. Government regulation is needed to restore fairness and competiveness.

One panelist, South Dakota rancher Bob Mack, used the NCAA basketball tournament to explain: “Every team plays by the same rules. The officials are there to make sure those rules are followed. That’s all farmers want. Fair, open competition.”

Wisconsin dairy farmer Paul Rozwadowski recalled, “At the dairy hearing in Madison all the people on the panel testified with the exact same message: Dairy needs a new pricing mechanism. One by one they testified how they are producing milk at a price that is less than the cost to make it. They explained how it is affecting the daily maintenance of their farms and causing a devastating burden on their families.”

Rozwadowski said that these same issues were present across the food system. He heard farmers testify that the consolidated ownership of seed markets allowed companies to effectively dictate what farmers planted and when they planted it. They said the price of seed corn had jumped more than 300 percent, and they saw no end in sight.

Kay Doby, a former poultry farmer from North Carolina, spoke at the Alabama workshop, which focused on poultry production. She said that she and her fellow farmers spoke up because they were fed up with unfair treatment and believed their voices could make a difference. In Alabama, Doby spoke to Secretary Vilsack about a fellow farmer whom she was assisting who lost his contract through no fault of his own. He was facing bankruptcy and the loss of his family farm, and committed suicide. “This is real. This is personal,” she said. “What we’re asking for today is for the USDA and DOJ to help.”

Still, Rozwadowski said, “We are left with the impression that USDA and DOJ are deliberately neglecting the big picture.”

“Companies have a lot of money and influence,” said South Dakota rancher Mack. “The money has overwhelmed some very good people’s desire to change things.”

The farmers who testified in 2010 were concerned that by speaking up, they were inviting retaliation by the companies, putting their jobs, farms, and futures at risk. The Justice Department assured farmers that they would be protected.

One of the most dramatic moments of the Alabama workshop occurred when farmer Garry Staples spoke about his fears of retaliation. U.S. Assistant Attorney General Christine Varney told him, “I fully expect that you will not experience retaliation.” Then she gave him a piece of paper. “But if you do, call me at that number.”

Yet today, farmers report that are experiencing retaliation, and that they have little protection when it happens. That phone number won’t do Staples much good; Varney left the Justice Department last year.

Doby, the former poultry farmer, says that poultry farmers who testified have lost their contracts or had their payments reduced. “Many others continue to struggle under very abusive situations,” she said, noting that she only felt safe speaking out today because she no longer depends on poultry for her income.

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.