A grower of All Blue, Butte, Caribe, Russian Banana and a host of other organic and heirloom seed potatoes, Gerritsen is also president of the Organic Seed Growers & Trade Association (OSGATA), lead plaintiff among 83 North American family farmers, seed businesses, and organic agriculture organizations in a potentially groundbreaking lawsuit, Organic Seed Growers & Trade Association, et al. v. Monsanto, that’s just recently seen its first day in federal court.

This lawsuit is an “attempt to come up with a strategy to protect family farmers in this perverse situation we find ourselves in,” said Gerritsen, “whereby our crops can become contaminated by Monsanto’s transgenic seed, and beyond losing the value of our organic or non-GMO crops, we’re placed in the position of having to defend ourselves from a Monsanto-initiated patent infringement lawsuit. We need protection from the courts to prevent that injustice.”

I asked him to elaborate.

“It’s a preemptive lawsuit filed under the Declaratory Judgement Act, which allows people who are fearful of sometime in the future being sued, to petition the court for protection, in this case from their GMO contamination. We want them to keep their pollution on their side of the fence…we shouldn’t have to defend ourselves in court because of their trespass.”

According to the complaint against Monsanto filed by the Public Patent Foundation (PUBPAT), a non-profit, public interest legal group representing the plaintiffs in this case, the biotechnology behemoth’s aggressive, litigious behavior in protecting its seed patents over the years has forced the plaintiffs to take legal action.

The suit states that “roughly 500 farmers are investigated [by Monsanto] for patent infringement each year. Between 1997 and April 2010, Monsanto filed 144 lawsuits against farmers in at least 27 different states” for alleged patent infringement and/or the breach of its license to those patents. Additionally, the complaint documents Monsanto’s pattern of “investigation, accusation, and litigation” against other farmers who neither wished to possess, nor be contaminated by Monsanto’s GMO seed.

One case cited in the lawsuit and presented by the plaintiffs as indicative of Monsanto’s hyperactive legal strategy involved Indiana farmers, David and Dawn Runyon.  The Runyons became widely known after being featured in a CBS Evening News report in 2008, and then again in the popular documentary released the summer of 2009, Food Inc. In their case, according to a CBS transcript, “The Runyons charge bio-tech giant Monsanto sent investigators to their home unannounced, demanded years of farming records, and later threatened to sue them for patent infringement.”

The only problem was the Runyons never purchased Monsanto seed, never signed any agreement to grow the company’s genetically modified soybeans, and never gave permission to anyone from Monsanto to take samples of the Runyons’ soybean crop. Monsanto at one point sent the family a letter claiming to have an agreement with the Indiana Department of Agriculture allowing the corporation to take samples from the Runyon farm, although the agency did not exist at the time the letter was sent. Monsanto now states it has declared the Runyons “ineligible to purchase our technology.”

On January 31, lawyers for both sides of the Organic Seed Growers & Trade Association, et al. v. Monsanto case presented oral arguments before the court on a pre-trial motion by Monsanto to dismiss the lawsuit. The attorney for Monsanto, Seth Waxman, argued the farmers and other plaintiffs lacked a valid reason to fear being sued, as it was not a “ubiquitous threat,” ignoring the “intimidation effect” of the corporation’s litigiousness, according to the plaintiff’s attorney, Dan Ravicher of PUBPAT.

Farmer and OSGATA chief, Jim Gerritsen, commented after the day’s proceedings that it was that kind of intimidation which organic and non-GMO farmers needed protection from. “We have farmers who have stopped growing organic corn, organic canola, and organic soybeans because they can’t risk being sued by Monsanto. It’s not fair and it’s not right.”

In our conversation earlier, Gerritsen expressed his optimism about the case, citing a number of events worldwide which, he argued, heralded a dramatic shift in public opinion around the issue of GMO foods–a recent unanimous vote in Peru for a ten-year moratorium on GMOs; French President Nicholas Sarkozy’s public commitment to place new restrictions on GMOs in France; the Label GMOs initiative in California, for which supporters will soon begin gathering signatures; and finally the Occupy movement, which he believes has irrevocably altered the whole conversation around food and democracy.

“I think the Occupy movement has been recognized by Americans to be asking the right questions. The polls that I’ve read suggest a majority of Americans support raising issues of corporate control over our government and economy being out of control, and that power needs to shift back to the people. I think it’s creating an atmosphere where we’re not satisfied with just maintaining a status quo that is working against the people. There is no human-created institution which can remain standing when the people stand united in opposition to it.”

Judge Naomi Buchwald has promised to rule on the motion to dismiss the lawsuit by March 31.

It is countdown time for the USDA’s Grain Inspection, Packers and Stockyards Administration, or GIPSA’s proposed rule that would protect small family livestock farmers and ranchers from the historical monopolies of the big four meat packers who control the market. You’d expect that pro-citizen groups and all enlightened meat consumers would be united in hot pursuit of fair market access for small farmers, pushing the USDA to allow the GIPSA rules to be enforced after the comment period ends on November 22nd. You’d be wrong.

GIPSA is good for the sustainable meat supply, national food security and the survival of the small family farm. The rule would truly level the playing field between thousands of small independent family farmers and ranchers fighting to stay in business and the four behemoth meatpackers who currently control prices and therefore monopolize the supply chain. Civil Eats covered the GIPSA story here and here.

In a strange twist this week, CREW (Citizens for Ethical Responsibility and Ethics in Washington) has attacked the head of GIPSA, twisting his words and sticking up for agri-business as we know it. CREW’s Executive Director Melanie Sloan runs an organization that does exemplary work protecting citizens from egregious governmental slip-ups on national ethics. But CREW penned a frontal attack letter to USDA Acting General Counsel Steven C. Silverman on November 15 accusing J.  Dudley Butler, Administrator of the USDA’s GIPSA, of scheming to benefit trial lawyers rather than protecting family farms. CREW’s letter takes comments made by Butler out of context and makes GIPSA appear to encourage lawsuits and thus represent another barrier to an ethical US meat production system.  The exact opposite is true.

According to Adam Warthesen of the Land Stewardship Project, CREW’s letter misses the point. “To me, the letter looks like it was written line by line by the large meat packers who will benefit if GIPSA fails. Farmers I talk to all agree that Butler is a man of integrity, and that it’s about time we have someone like him who understands what’s at stake for independent farmers. It is disingenuous of CREW to ask him to step down because when the rule passes, the administrator position will end anyway. Furthermore, if the opposition had concerns, why didn’t they raise them in June instead of bringing this to light one week before the comment period ends? This is clearly a smear campaign orchestrated by those opposing the rule.” said Warthesen.

Other farmer advocacy groups concur. In a November 5 press release Bill Bullard, CEO of R- CALF, which represents thousands of small-scale cattle ranchers, also calls this new attack a “deceptive smear campaign against an USDA official” and says this takes the focus away from the real problem.

R-CALF’s release states:

“The purpose of the proposed GIPSA rule is to prevent monopolistic meatpackers from capturing control of the livestock supply chain away from independent family farmers and ranchers,” Bullard said. “And, the rule does this by preventing meatpackers from actually exercising their inherent, monopolistic market power to harm both consumers and livestock producers.”

The release continues, “Bullard charges that meatpackers and their apologists are trying to divert attention away from the necessity of the GIPSA rule by attacking the GIPSA chief. He said the first attack came from BEEF magazine writer Troy Marshall, who unethically captured only a partial response Butler made to an audience member’s question during the annual meeting of the Organization for Competitive Markets (OCM) over a year ago. Bullard said Marshall then used Butler’s partial response to falsely accuse the GIPSA chief of intending to encourage more lawsuits in the livestock industry with the GIPSA rule.”

CREW, if you’re worried about benefiting trial lawyers, consider how they along with millions of American consumers will struggle to find meat not produced on factory farms for their families’ tables when all small producers of cattle, hogs, lamb or chicken are driven out of business by large meat packer monopolies. You should know that GIPSA is good for small farmers and consumers. You have chosen the wrong battle with potentially tragic results for family farmers.  You should go attack industrial meat or Monsanto if you’re hankering for a fight. We’ll support you if you do.

Photo: Ree Drummond via Flickr

Last week, the National Research Council (NRC) upped the ante with the publication of Toward Sustainable Agricultural Systems for the 21st Century. The report will surely be an important milestone on the path toward agricultural sustainability. This 570-page tome, an update of the 1989 NRC report Alternative Agriculture, set out to investigate the sustainability of various agricultural production systems. It aims to distill principles of practice that can underlie agricultural production across geographies and scales, with a particular focus on applying practices—drawn from the U.S. experience—in less developed countries, specifically sub-Saharan Africa. The report also illustrates sustainable practices by showcasing a range of case study farms, many of them a review of studies conducted for the 1989 report.

The NRC report sidesteps the debate about what sustainable agriculture is by arguing that the “pursuit of sustainability is not a matter of defining sustainable or unsustainable agriculture, but rather is about assessing whether choices of farming practices and systems would lead to a more or less sustainable system as measured by the four goals.” It argues the “inherently subjective” nature of characterizing sustainable agriculture and underscores the degree to which different groups emphasize different goals of sustainable agricultural systems, which the NRC frames as:

• Satisfying human food, fiber, and feed requirements, and contributing to biofuels needs;
• Enhancing environmental quality and the resource base;
• Maintaining the economic viability of agriculture; and
• Improving the quality of life for farmers, farm workers, and society as a whole.

The bottom line conclusion of the study? In order to meet society’s long-term needs for food, fiber, and fuel, and minimize externalities, “agricultural production will have to substantially accelerate progress towards the four sustainability goals” outlined above.

The authors stress the need to pursue two approaches simultaneously: incremental and transformative change. In other words, we should support positive baby steps toward one or more of the goals across all farming types and scales, while at the same time striving to re-envision a model farm landscape, as well as a policy framework that will facilitate its realization.

Where do farmers fit?

So just what will it take for our production systems to make this shift? The NRC strongly emphasizes that scientific knowledge is the necessary foundation to progress toward sustainability, stating that “[s]cience generates the knowledge needed to predict the likely outcomes of different management systems and expands the range of alternatives that can be considered by farmers, policy makers, and consumers.” Science is undeniably important to the development and refinement of sustainability practices and policies. But where do farmers fit?

The NRC report makes surprisingly little reference to farmers’ knowledge in the American context, but it does recommend that the USDA and other research support agencies “encourage researchers to include farmer-participatory research or farmer-managed trials as a component of their research.” But is this kind of partnership really about placing farmers’ knowledge on a level playing field with that of scientists? The stated objective of this farmer involvement is to “enhance information exchange and enhance farmers’ adoption of new practices and approaches,” a formulation that emphasizes a flow of information from scientists to farmers, not the other way around.

Farmers can not only offer new innovations and advances in farming practices, but importantly, an understanding of what approaches have worked and not worked over decades and even generations of diligent trial-and-error on a given piece of land. Yet many farmers are not inclined or encouraged to document their experience in formal academic format that has come to be the respected standard for knowledge among decision-makers.

Many analyses, including the bulk of the NRC report, take a literature-based approach, which typically (and often inadvertently) ignore or downplay farmers’ experience and knowledge. One byproduct is that decision-makers in our society tend to overlook farmers as experts, and they get subjugated in broader decision-making processes. It may be that sustainability cannot be achieved until farmers are understood as agricultural experts in their own right and broader solutions truly integrate practitioners and their knowledge systems.

The NRC report correctly acknowledges that the loss of local agricultural knowledge is a key barrier to sustainability in farming systems. True sustainability will require a recognition and acceptance of a diversity of agricultural knowledge systems.  As core actors in any kind of agriculture, farmers must be placed at the center of proposed change models, in coalition with representatives from throughout the model supply chains and food systems that foster healthy food systems more broadly.

As Toward Sustainable Agricultural Systems for the 21st Century indicates, different people—agricultural producers included—emphasize different aspects of sustainability. True sustainability requires all four goals to be met. It is to farmers like the ones profiled in the report, especially those who have scored high on all four sustainability goals, that we should look to in order to move U.S. farming to greater sustainability. Not only do farmers like these offer up valuable practices, but they hold important value systems and worldviews that are essential underpinnings for agricultural policy, as well as society as a whole.

What would it look like to truly place farmers like these at the center of agricultural policy and production systems for the 21st Century? How can we build collaborative decision-making models that better integrate farmers and communities into policy decision-making?

The discussion on American agriculture is evolving every day, and as a result, agribusiness has been stoking a backlash against those pushing for a change in how we grow our food. Notably, Michael Pollan has been a target at recent university speaking engagements; a few weeks ago at Cal-Poly, when a feedlot owner threatened to rescind a donation if Pollan was allowed to speak solo, the university caved, making his talk a part of a panel discussion. This is all an indication that the conversation on fixing our broken food system is gaining traction, as the discussion grows more nuanced, more solutions-oriented and more threatening to the status quo.

Last month in New York, Lisa Hamilton, author of Deeply Rooted: Unconventional Farmers in the Age of Agribusiness, hosted just such a nuanced discussion on the current state of agriculture featuring Verlyn Klinkenborg, New York Times writer whose column is called “The Rural Life,” farmer Fred Kirschenmann, Distinguished Fellow for the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University and President of Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, and farmer Mary Howell Martens, who grows 1400 acres of organic corn, beans and other grains with her husband and three children in Penn Yan, New York.

The panel focused on assessing the situation farmers are now caught in, and discussed solutions, including focusing on improving the foodshed, rebuilding rural communities and strengthening “ag in the middle” through trade partnerships.

Hamilton began the talk by telling a story about an opinion piece she wrote that ended up in both rural newspapers and on various progressive outlets, including Civil Eats. She thought this was telling, because it showed that both rural and urban dwellers have an interest in redefining what it means to be a farmer, and bringing back a human scale to agriculture. Here is a quote from Hamilton’s piece from last May:

In the future, farmers’ importance will only grow. Their intimate, human-scale knowledge of the land is what will allow agriculture to adapt to climate change. And as the cheap energy that industrial agriculture depends on disappears, it is farmers, with their small-scale innovation and sheer manual labor, who will feed us. Why do we care about having more farmers? Because deep down we know they are essential to a functioning food system.

She defined a farmer as “someone who grows crops in sufficient quantity to be a true commercial entity, yet is still close enough to the ground to bring human scale and values to the process.” While the amount of small farms (1-49 acres) grew by about 100,000 between 2002-2007 according to the most recent ag census, medium-sized farms, most of which fit her description, have suffered, while the largest farms (with more than 2000 acres) have continued to grow. Martens brought this point home by talking about the crisis her medium-sized farm faced in 1993 when she realized that “500 acres of conventional crops cannot support a family financially.”

Martens also spoke about the dairy crisis as emblematic of the deeper problems facing our food system, in which the quest for slight increases in margins by numerous farmers has led to overproduction and then collapse. This happened in the dairy sector through the use of “sexed semen” which has increased dramatically the amount of female cows online to milk, and the use of rGBH, a growth hormone, which increases production (with risks to the health of the cow and the public). “We are sort of on the threshold of a major change, if we do this wisely, or a collapse if we don’t do it wisely,” she said.

Kirschenmann gave some historical perspective, describing how farming was the last place where the principles of industrialization (specialization, simplification and economies of scale) were applied, and unsuccessfully, as we are now seeing a strain on resources that cannot continue into the future. He described infrastructure as a key to getting farmers out of this broken system. Right now, they are not able to grow other crops because there is no market; elevators in Iowa are only prepared to buy corn and soy. He suggested a new model of localism, revaluing the foodshed around towns and cities, and he encouraged farmers to band together and create cooperative structures and share technology, so that they all benefit from access to new markets. We must move away from a discussion of “black hats and white hats,” he said, referring to passing judgment on farmers who choose GM seed or chemical agriculture. “Conventional farmers’ backs are against the wall,” he said, adding that they, too, are “looking for alternatives to expensive inputs.”

Klinkenborg spoke about extending the conversation to places like Iowa, stating that we should ask ourselves, “not how broad we can make local, but how personal we can make it.” He reminded us that the decrease in social and biological complexity in rural America was not the natural fulfillment of the free market operating, but instead a purposeful chain of events leading to such a consequence. As a result, he said, farmers have fewer and fewer choices about what they can grow. He cited his cousins, who grow GM corn and soy in Iowa, and saw the decision to change seeds as an attempt to increase yields, and thus margins. This comparison paralleled Martens’ dairy example, but issues of pricing with commodity crops are often masked by subsidies.

Martens and her husband, Claas, are great examples of how, beyond the land, farmers can also be stewards of the community. In reaching out to their neighbors, they have shown many of them a way out of the trap of chemical-based agriculture and helped them to transition to organic. “We need to bring back the sense that farmers have some control over [the choices they can make on their land]” she said.

For a taste of the discussion, check out this short video produced by Wicked Delicate co-conspirator and Civil Eats contributor Curt Ellis:

The myth that our food is grown on Old McDonald’s Farm is true in one respect: the “Old.” In 2002, the U.S. Agricultural Census reported that the average age of American farmers is 55 years. Generations of farmers’ sons and daughters have seeped out of rural communities in search of more prosperous lives. The next food crisis is fast approaching: we need millions of new farmers, food artisans, distributors, cooks, retailers, educators, agrarians and activists. We need them all to be creative, eco-literate and socially responsible, because they’re going to have to fix our broken food system and steward our ailing planet back to good health.

That’s a big task. They need our help, too.

Students and young workers are taking the lead in teaching their generation the origin and value of their food. It’s early to name this trend a full-blown “Youth Food Movement,” but the seeds are being sown. Aspiring farmers are searching for apprenticeships on the small farms of other families; Severine Fleming is documenting them in a film, The Greenhorns. Guerrilla teams of urban gardeners are reclaiming vacant lots for food. Green for All is building jobs for young people in the “green economy.” The Center for Land-Based Learning, Alemany Farm and others give urban and rural youth experience-based education on farms. The Real Food Challenge and the Student/Farmworker Alliance are organizing national campaigns to improve the purchasing practices of colleges and universities and are linking with larger movements for community justice. Slow Food on Campus is thriving. The theme of fall’s Terra Madre 2008 is the Youth Food Movement; 500 youth “delegates” will be convening at Slow Food’s headquarters in Italy for the event, and the largest and most ambitious delegation is young people from the U.S.

For this generation of young people, Slow Food Nation is a learning opportunity. The program to support the Youth Food Movement at Slow Food Nation aims to develop these networks of young people, provide them with new resources and link them to mentors in the greater food movement. Youth “delegates” are coming to Slow Food Nation from universities, farms and NGOs in every corner of the country. Their hope is to share that “A-ha!” moment when the impossible notion that there are others working, struggling and striving to bring slow food into schools and onto tables is suddenly an inevitable reality. Those who have a stake in the future of food are ready to take hold and plant it firmly in the ground.

The program to support the Youth Food Movement at Slow Food Nation will feature workshops, training sessions, social gatherings and a track through broader events like the Taste Pavilions and Changemakers Day. To learn more, please write Gordon Jenkins at gordon [at] slowfoodnation [dot] org.

Photo Credit: Yale Sustainable Food Project