Did you feed the chickens this morning? Gather the eggs? Did you think about the farm? Not even when you ate?
Your answers to those questions are a reflection of the state of agriculture today. Farming has never been easy — it requires amazing stamina because planting the crop and harvesting the crop is in the now; it does not revolve around eight hour days. But Farmer Debbie Hawkins of Tucson, Arizona, says small farming and farming with a conscience has never been more difficult.
At the end of the depression, one quarter of the population were farmers. Today, farmers make up less than 2 percent of all families. The impacts of these changes are myriad, from the rusting of rural communities and loss of a certain small town way of life to the environmental destruction caused by hog factories and agricultural chemicals.
Consolidation and industrialization are both causes and byproducts of the declining small farm, and legislation plays a major role in hastening this decline. According to a recent report by the Environmental Working Group, 61 percent of farm subsidies from 1996 to 1998, totaling $23 billion, was paid to just 10 percent of the country’s largest farms. Overall, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) estimates that gross farm income has increased by $161 billion since 1960, amounting to an 18 percent increase in net income; yet farm subsidies have increased by 25 percent.
Richard A. Levins, Professor and Extension Economist at the University of Minnesota, charges that companies began leading technology policy in the 1960s and that farm policy became a way of "cleaning up the mess, of making the best out of a bad situation, and of convincing the people that the wreckage lying before them was all for the better."
The infamous Freedom to Farm Bill, introduced in 1996, is emblematic of farm policy that victimizes family farmers. It was drawn up with the supposed intention of leveling the playing field by removing public regulations and allowing the market to dictate the farm industry. Specifically, it eliminated commodity price support programs that had been in place for big crops of wheat, the feed grains, corn, oats, and barley, as well as rice, cotton, and wool, comprising about 30 percent of farm product sales.
In 1997 prices for farm crops — especially wheat — plunged, and farmers had no safety net. Congress passed an emergency aid proposal, and direct payments to farmers tripled in 1999, totaling $21 billion. In all, government wound up paying out $4 billion more than the farm aid record set in 1987 during the "farm crisis."
Big Pork
If small farmers are going broke in the midst of all this payola, then where’s the money going? To the big guys. In agriculture, as in other areas of big business, mergers are the name of the game. Last year, grain producer Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) bought Donaldson Lufkin Jenrette, the number one meat packer, to become the second largest grain producer since Cargill’s 1999 takeover of Continental — the previous number two. The biggest pork processor, Smithfield, bought Murphy Family Farms and Carroll’s, the two largest pork producers. These mergers mark a new kind of monopoly, vertically integrated, so that one organization sells seeds, manufactures chemicals, "buys" the crop when it is harvested, and processes it into mass-market food. In fact, four firms control 82 percent of beef packing, 75 percent of hogs and sheep, and half of chickens. And today, competitors are buying pieces of each other. For instance, ADM owns 18.5 percent of its rival IBP after last year’s newest purchase of an additional 6.3 percent.
The initiator of a class-action lawsuit, feedlot owner Mike Callicrate describes IBP, Inc. (Iowa Beef Packers, the world’s largest producer of beef, pork, and related allied products) as a "very organized buyer dealing with disorganized sellers." He specifies that "IBP would come to your feedlot and bid at a very low price, searching for the weakest cattleman," with no intention to buy because they have their supply. The desperate seller would [accept], further lowering the price, and ensuring the lowest possible price when IBP does buy.
Some blame Ronald Reagan. After all, Reagan’s lawyers declared huge companies were no longer a problem if it could not be proven in advance that the size of the companies distorted consumer prices. Indeed, there were 4,100 food industry mergers between 1982 and 1990. The cancer continued to metastasize under the Democrats; during the Clinton administration, sixty-eight acquisitions took place in the seed sector alone.
The cost of all this? One of the results of these monster-sized corporations is loss of choice for farmers who wish to sell their goods. Because they must sell to the prevailing buyers, they must grow what the buyers want, at the price the buyers dictate. Since Columbus landed in the Americas, 75 percent of the native foods are gone. Since 1900, 97 percent of the food plants available have disappeared. Of course, such lack of choice leads to lack of diversity, and increased risk for ruin.
It is no wonder that Linda Cooper, chef and author of Bitter Harvest, calls agricultural corporations the biggest destroyer of biodiversity. Industrial agriculture, after all, is based on monocropping — the practice of planting one type of crop year after year. This practice promotes soil erosion — one-sixteenth of an inch of soil each acre, and sixteen inches in one hundred years. That is sixteen inches of irreplaceable, rich, living soil. Furthermore, chemical usage harms the soil itself, killing off the microorganisms that keep soil healthy, directly reducing the nutritional content of soil and directly reducing the nutritional content of our food.
There is not enough room to cite all of the environmental consequences of the livestock industries. However, using hogs as an example, the pork industry produces five tons of manure for every U.S. citizen each year, and stores it in twenty-five-foot deep lagoons as long as football fields. According to an article in the Boston Globe, "In 1995 in North Carolina, a record hog waste spill of 35 million gallons killed 10 million fish and closed 364,000 acres of coastal wetlands to shellfish harvesting. Spills in Iowa, Minnesota, and Missouri in 1996 killed more than half a million fish. In Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina, waste from hog and chicken factories is widely believed to have caused pfiesteria, which has killed more than a billion fish and excess nutrients flowing down the Mississippi River are believed to have resulted in a dead zone the size of New Jersey in the Gulf of Mexico."
In some cases, these environmental risks are shouldered by farmers who are forced, by lack of alternatives, to contract out their crops or livestock to corporations. In effect, the farmers own the land and the crops, so that all liability is theirs. Yet they have, by contract, only one — corporate — buyer, who obtains product on extremely beneficial terms.
Biotech
Farmers are left scrambling and desperate for magic bullets, so they are vulnerable to the promises offered by sellers of genetically modified seeds and potions, including recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH), which has proven to cost farmers money in the purchase of the hormone, additional medical expenses for cows, and shortened bovine lifespans.
Monsanto estimates that 30 percent of cows are treated with rBGH, despite the fact that in a review by veterinarian experts, animals treated with rBGH were shown to suffer traumatic side-effects, including a 50 percent greater risk of lameness (due to their enlarged udders), fertility problems (due to their swollen udders) and a 25 percent greater chance of developing udder inflammation, known as mastitis. The same report indicates that rBGH may pose health risks to people because it increases the amount of growth hormone people ingest. Some laboratory experiments and epidemiological studies suggest it may also be involved in the progression of breast, prostate, and colorectal cancer.
In a reaction against rBGH and for small farmers, Vermont was the first state in the U.S. to take a consolidated stance against biotechnology; the state legislature passed a law requiring all products containing rBGH to be labeled. Agricultural businesses sued, however, and after two court hearings, a second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel blocked Vermont’s labeling law.
Elsewhere, concerned people across the country are finding government policies and elected officials interested in issues other than food safety, environmental quality, or humane farming practices. Despite both the environmental and social destruction they’ve wrought, South Dakota Governor Bill Janklow calls these large corporate farms responsible citizens. He has lured them into South Dakota with astounding tax breaks and other incentives.
It isn’t always obvious on a day-to-day basis, but the fate of the small farmer is everyone’s fate. Just as mergers benefit CEOs and hurt the little guy, record farm subsidies are benefitting conglomerates at the expense of individual farmers. And the low food prices that result come at an incalculable cost to our planet and our health. In any case, uniform standards for produce and other crops lead directly to greater control for corporations. Once they have the control they seek, we will have it all: anemic food, poisoned air and soil, and high prices, too.
It’s easy to overlook the fact that when you buy your food in massive grocery stores, out of season and shipped an average of 3,200 miles, you endorse a system that cares only about profit — not about your health, or the health of the planet. But you’re worth more than that. So ask yourself: who gathered your eggs this morning?
Kari Redfield is a fitness and food writer in Tucson, Arizona. Her most recent book, The Living History of the Food Conspiracy, a tale of intentional living, can be purchased through the Food Conspiracy Co-op Web site.
Resources
Foodfirst
Environmental Working Group
Some grass roots organizations that support small farms:
Pennsylvanians for Responsible Agriculture
Carolina Farm Stewardship Association
Wisconsin Citizen Action’s Family Farm Stewardship Campaign
Humane Farming Association, San Rafael, California
Organization for Competitive Markets
Western Organization of Resource Councils
New England Small Farm Institute