One example is Focus Agriculture, put on by the Agri-Culture organization, a non-profit offshoot of the Santa Cruz County Farm Bureau. This unique “first-in-the-nation” educational program targets business professionals and community leaders, providing a thorough and in-depth look at the multi-faceted arena that is agriculture.

Agri-Culture strives to bridge the divide between rural and urban areas, recognizing that most policy about our farmland happens in cities, away from the people and places that should have the most input about those environmental decisions. The Farm Bureau noticed that most of the decision makers with agriculture didn’t actually have a thorough understanding of the industry. To address the abstract nature of this issue, the Focus Agriculture program was developed in 1989 and is now in its 22nd year.

Each year, a handful of applicants out of a large pool are selected to participate in the class. If chosen, they receive a grant of $1,500 towards the $2,000 tuition and if they achieve perfect attendance during the nine, daylong sessions, $100 is refunded. This must be one of the cheapest educational deals around (the math would be $44 per session) considering the scope of information that is acquired over the course of almost a year.

Over nine months, direct hands-on learning coupled with lectures and seminars are offered on a wide range of topics. Farm tours, Production and Labor, Ethnic Groups in Agriculture, Environment and Technology, Government Relations and Politics, Regional Diversity of Commodities Produced and Marketing and Foreign Competition are some of the themes addressed during the year. Agri-Culture’s Celeste Din says that much of the curriculum stays the same from year to year, and many of the presenters and participating community organizations have been a part of the program since the beginning. However, due to the ever-changing nature of environmental issues and contemporary food policy, the program works at maintaining relevant content to today’s world.

The 21 participants of the 2011 class illustrate the diverse audience this program serves. A bank manager, a photography teacher, a senior finance analyst, a county planning director, mixed in with someone from CCOF and the Land Trust. In the past, they have had state senators, mayors and various politicians mixed in as well. Agri-Culture’s Board of Directors purposefully chooses applicants to create a varied class, one or two people that are directly involved in agriculture, but the rest to represent parts of the public that don’t know that much about the industry. It seems like a great opportunity for sharing ideas and learning from each other’s contrasting experiences and professions.

John Fisher, Program Director of the Life Lab Science Program, is a graduate of the 2001 Focus Ag class. That year, he went to a lumber mill, an abalone farm, UCSC’s Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems, Driscoll Berry Farm, a packing plant for paper and containers, Quail Mountain Herbs, a rose breeding company, a small organic apple farm and heard from a variety of winemakers. He also shadowed the owner of a gigantic strawberry farm for the one-on-one portion of the program, kind of like a ride-along in the world of agriculture. “When I walked in there were like six people on the phone in this office striking berry deals, just like being a trader but their commodity was strawberries. It was cutthroat, total wheeling and dealing,” he remembered in fascination.

Here in Santa Cruz County, we are used to seeing an abundance of small, organic farms. The waiting list to get into a farmer’s market is literally years long, and you can basically throw a rock in any direction and hit a farmer of some sort no matter where you happen to be. But the South County is less transparent, ironic since it represents the “salad bowl” of the world. The strawberries grown in this region are shipped around the globe, a multi-million dollar industry that hardly equates with the typical identity of a Santa Cruz “farm.” But the fact that this gigantic diversity of scale exists here is exactly what Focus Ag is all about. The program truly presents every model, discussing the bigger economies of agriculture in a way that many of the participants would have never comprehended before.

And so it might be challenging for a hardcore environmentalist to sit through a lecture from the Agriculture Commissioner discussing the importance of pesticides in our county, it would at the same time be an opportunity to really hear from the other side and know what goes through the minds of those farmers who might be breeding plants on a molecular level instead of hand-digging a trench for heirloom potatoes.

John recalls visiting the berry grower Driscoll and seeing teams of geneticists conducting plant tissue cultures, more a science lab than a farm. But now he knows even more about what is actually going on here. “Focus Ag always showed two sides of every controversial issue. They brought in really conservative organizations along with experts in sustainability. This let us understand the challenges of running an ag business and we learned about the big issues that agriculture faces,” he said.

The Farm Bureau is none too happy with the EPA today for publishing a blog post urging Americans to give up meat.

The post in question was written by an EPA intern and recounts her decision to stop eating meat. The author, Nicole Reising, cites the “environmental effects of meat production” and urges readers to stop eating meat.

….

The American Farm Bureau Federation issued a statement today decrying the post as disrepectful to ranchers.

“While this is a position taken by an intern of the agency, EPA should control its blog space,” said AFBP President Bob Stallman. “What is written on its blog comes across as its official position toward farmers and ranchers that it regulates and shows a terrible disregard for them and the agriculture industry.”

To be clear, the American Farm Bureau Federation calles itself the “Voice of Agriculture,” but it’s really the voice of industrial agriculture–and the few companies that benefit from it. To say that the EPA “regulates” concentrated-animal feedlot operations (CAFOs) is a bit fanciful. As the Washington Post recently put it:

Despite its impact, manure has not been as strictly regulated as more familiar pollution problems, like human sewage, acid rain or industrial waste. The Obama administration has made moves to change that but already has found itself facing off with farm interests, entangled in the contentious politics of poop.

The brazen intern in question, Nicole Reising, had proposed–without considering the feelings of meat-industry execs or CAFO operators!–that “Regulations can be made to help prevent the effects of meat production, but the easiest way to lessen the environmental impacts is to become a vegetarian or vegan.”

Over on TNR, Brad Plumer quibbles with Reising: “if you’re trying to tamp down on the consequences of meat production, the ‘easiest’ approach may be to start small and just convince people to eat less meat, rather than swearing off it altogether.”

I would quibble with Reising and Plumer. Habits form and congeal over decades. Historically, meat has been dear; it’s now cheap largely due to specific government action and inaction over the past 30 years.

People aren’t going to cut back on meat because EPA interns and political bloggers want them to. Curbing the ruinous practices of the meat industry starts with enforcing the regulations already on the books; and that means a new commitment on the part of Reising’s bosses at the EPA, as well as leaders at FDA and USDA, to make the meat industry pay for the messes it creates.

When that happens, people will surely eat less meat–and the meat that they do eat will tend to come from ecologically robust agriculture, and not the dark, Satanic meat mills that now dominate. Check out my recent post on what it would take to expand human-scale, pasture-based meat production.

Originally published on Grist

Causing no end of difficulties in our national discourse is the steadfast belief held by both the right and the left that everything is either right or left: bad or good, strong or weak, despotic or patriotic.  You’re either with us or you’re against us.  President Obama addressed this very effectively before both House Republicans and Senate Democrats in recent days.  It is media driven to a large extent because the media need controversy to sell papers, or bytes or views or whatever it is they’re selling these days.

The most common form this takes is the old build’em-up-then-tear’em-down routine.  Perhaps the only thing many Americans enjoy more than the uplifting emotion of a success story is the schadenfreude of watching that success come tumbling down.  So when an idea comes to the fore, the critics ooze from the woodwork and their primary tactic is divide and conquer.  Label it, frame the debate, and the fight is won or lost before the story is even told.

For a long time in the circles I travel in this was not a problem because the ideas embodied in what some have come to call SOLE food (Sustainable, Organic, Local, & Ethical) were not perceived as a threat to the established paradigm.  Recent successes such as Michael Pollan’s work have, however, shined a very bright spotlight on advocates of real food.  As a result, people who have been toiling at these ideas for decades are becoming targets of powerful interests in the Big Food lobby.  Such is the case this week at WeeklyStandard.com, where Missouri Farm Bureau vice president Blake Hurst has found his most recent audience.

Mr. Hurst was among the earliest vocal detractors of Mr. Pollan’s work, as well as that of anyone who might find flaw in agroindustrial model.  His essay last summer, titled The Omnivore’s Delusion, did an excellent job of exploiting Pollan’s success to rally the big corporate agriculture interests against the perceived threat of critics both in the media and in the field.  It’s natural: he felt attacked and he responded, and has now done so again.  Unfortunately Mr. Hurst’s vitriol, then as now, only serves to fan the flames of a fire that needn’t be burning.  Individuals on neither side of the debate are inherently evil, in fact both want the same thing: healthy food for all.  Since our ideas for how to accomplish this differ, we are immediately cast into the right and left corners and told to come out fighting when the bell rings.

Of course this is not a new phenomenon.  City and country folk have mistrusted each other since the beginnings of civilization (which, it bears pointing out, came into being because of agriculture).  Nonetheless our society has changed enormously in the last 100 years.  Where once nearly everyone lived on a farm or had an immediate relative who did, today only 2% of the population lives in rural America.  It’s not a surprise that when the 2% senses criticism emanating from within the other 98% they’re going to feel a bit nervous.  Some of the critiques in fact even come from within the 2% (witness cattleman Will Harris in Georgia).  In his most recent essay though Mr. Hurst’s fears are misplaced, and he remains little more than a tool for moneyed interests.

The essay suffers from many errors of presumption as well as fact.  He contends that Kathleen Merrigan’s Know your Farmer initiative results from the idea that “America, it seems, has been operating at a knowledge deficit when it comes to farmers, and farmers lack the social skills to close the gap between eaters and producers of food.”  He is partially correct in that people in this country and throughout the Western world have become increasingly distanced from their sources of food, and we have become so to our detriment.  The second part of his statement though, a backhanded swipe at critics of industrial agriculture disguised as self-deprecation and designed to raise the ire of his fellow Farm Bureau members, is uninformed to say the least.  Not only are the farmers I know perfectly capable in the “social skills” department, both they and the rest of my friends in the movement to improve our food are working hard to close that gap.  Ms. Merrigan’s program is one of many tools.

While he correctly points out that the average age of farmers in America is 58, he misses the point that this means we are running out of farmers.  We actually now have more prisoners in America than farmers.  He goes on to put words in foodies’ mouths by claiming that we seem to think farmers are not sustainable.  Quite far from it, but many of the inputs many farmers use are not. These include the GMOs and chemical fertilizers that Farm Bureau and the Property and Environment Research Center he cites both adamantly advocate.  It’s not the farmers or even the farms that are unsustainable; it is the methods they have been railroaded into using by large corporate interests seeking markets for their chemicals since even before the early 70’s when Earl Butz and his “Get Big or Get Out” mantra took hold of American food.

The point is missed yet again when Mr. Hurst says:

In December, strawberries from California can be shipped to market in Canada with less total energy use than the locally grown crop. The food miles are greater, but the carbon footprint is smaller. True believers in the local food movement, of course, simply stop eating strawberries in winter. Their devotion is admirable, but a winter diet of freshly dug turnips and stored potatoes is hardly interesting.

I choose not to eat strawberries in the winter not because they come from far away but because they taste awful.  In my own restaurant, we stock everything feasible from local sources.  This does not mean, as Mr. Hurst would have it, that we have nothing but turnips and potatoes in winter, nor does it mean we forego oranges or olives because they don’t grow in Iowa.  Despite what he and his corporate-activist-supported friends at PERC might have you believe, the “SOLE” food movement is not a bunch of lefty Luddites, and that’s my main point (besides that I like turnips).  Not only does food I trust from people I know taste better for those reasons, it also keeps my dollars in my community.

Consider this: there are about 50,000 households in Johnson County Iowa, where I live.  If each of those households redirected just $10 of their existing weekly food budget toward buying something local, whether from the farmers market or a CSA or eggs from the farmer down the road, it would keep $26M in the local economy rather than it being siphoned off to China via Bentonville.  Now imagine the same thing in larger communities.  That’s not a left or right issue, that’s a hometown issue.

I must also point out Mr. Hurst’s use of the phrase “alleged global warming.”  It carries with it all the intellectual honesty of “alleged cancer from smoking.”

Agendas like those of Mr. Hurst, the Farm Bureau and PERC serve only the interests of the large corporations that fund them, not of the farmers whose toil fills their coffers.  Better to look to the like of the Practical Farmers of Iowa, who are truly concerned with the well-being of the food, the farms and the people on them.

This is not about rich v. poor, city v. country or smart v. dumb.  It’s not even I’m right and he’s wrong nor the reverse.  It’s that these issues are only important to those of us who eat, live and breathe on this planet.  It matters to those of us who have to pay for health care, and raise our children, and get and keep a job.  And the positions that the organization I work for, and many others take are not ones designed to attack farmers but rather to support them and all the people who are making food where it should be made: on farms and dairies, in breweries and wineries and vineyards and not in factories.

In addition to the havoc being wreaked on the environment, one of the biggest trespasses of industrial agriculture has been the elimination of millions of jobs, resulting in the emptying out of rural communities worldwide. The repercussions of the loss of opportunity for rural America has been tragic: many towns are now plagued by dilapidated schools and poor health services, and a rising epidemic of methamphetamine use and production has filled in where more beneficial small businesses used to thrive.

This emptying out was never better cataloged than in John Steinbeck’s great novel, The Grapes of Wrath. Written in 1939 after Steinbeck had researched and reported for years on the plight of the American farm worker during the early industrialization of agriculture, he captured the phenomenon thusly:

And then the dispossessed were drawn west — from Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico; from Nevada and Arkansas families, tribes, dusted out, tractored out. Carloads, caravans, homeless and hungry; twenty thousand and fifty thousand and a hundred thousand and two hundred thousand. They streamed over the mountains, hungry and restless — restless as ants, scurrying to find work to do — to lift, to push, to pull, to pick, to cut — anything, any burden to bear, for food.

As our Great Recession economy continues to shed jobs — an additional 85,000 were lost in December holding the unemployment rate at 10% — we should be creating opportunities in sustainable farming, the original, shovel-ready green job. Reconsidering what it is to farm will require completely new thinking about agriculture, combining the best of scientific knowledge while finding a balance between scale and community. Unfortunately, those who rely on the status quo of industrialized agriculture for their bacon see farming as a linear pursuit with one end: bigger farms using technical solutions — and thus fewer human actors.

Yet never before have we been so food insecure — 49 million Americans are currently not eating three meals per day, and one billion people in the world are hungry. The hungry cannot afford to eat — because there is too much labor in the world and not enough jobs. We claim to want to feed the world, but today’s farmers don’t even feed themselves; they make commodity products to be shipped far away and reformulated and sent back to their supermarket shelves. They do this because we’ve told them to, with our tax dollars and purchasing power. However, our system should not be about producing more food, but about producing better food on a human scale and cutting out the processors and the middlemen.

Stallman’s arguments against this smaller approach to agriculture ignores reality. There are still migrant workers doing backbreaking labor on farms often subject to doing the same monotonous movements for hours: picking tomatoes all day in the hot sun, or hand harvesting cotton (a common occurrence in light of the epidemic of superweeds in the south resistant to herbicides). By contrast, small farms are usually owned and worked primarily by the farmer. In addition, small farms are diversified to guarantee a profit through direct sales, and to stave off risk if one crop fails — and this just so happens to be a more worker-friendly (as the farmer gets to vary his/her work), resource efficient and an environmentally-conscious way to farm, too.

American policy makers have historically cowered in the face of the AFBF, but that organization is aging and old-fashioned. It’s time for politicians to see that another way is possible and that so much is at stake, and it’s time for new policies that reflect this knowledge. As the AFBF goes kicking and screaming into the 2010’s, it is worth remembering that America’s farmers (and most AFBF members) are on average 57 years old. We will need more farmers no matter what, however we hope to feed ourselves in the future, and newcomer farmers often do not agree with the climate change-denying AFBF. Second, we just don’t know whether sustainable agriculture can feed the world, but we do know that our current system has a ‘use by’ date, and that smaller, diversified systems have better yields and better protect our natural resources. Isn’t it worth a try? It would be unethical to continue the status quo knowing what we know about the nitrates heading downstream, topsoil loss, the fluctuating price of a barrel of oil, and of course, the fact that our children will die younger than we will because of what they eat.

It is time to revalue the farming profession and rebuild our communities again. It is time to break up the 10,000 acre farms into one hundred plots, and plant young people in the countryside who can use sustainable practices to rebuild the soil and bring it back to life.

Building a system that employs more farmers is not a step backwards, it is an acknowledgment of our respect for nature and a guarantee against future hunger. Perhaps we’ve lost Stallman’s generation on this front, both because industry has a strong hold on the AFBF and because it’s hard to teach an old dog new tricks. But farming is being reconsidered and changed as more and more young people realize the vital role they play in reinventing the food system and take up the challenge of doing it from scratch.

Land is a resource for the common good, and only small farms can rebuild what has been lost in rural America. This change will take the conscious effort by policy makers to go against the laissez-faire capitalism that has propelled us into industrial agriculture in the first place.