Reform is necessary to ensure the survival of future generations of farmers. (Photo by Danilo.)

This week, President Obama returned to Iowa, where he launched his successful bid to the White House, to speak about “jobs and economic security” in rural America. According to the White House, his bus tour is not a campaign trip, but veteran political observers would disagree. For farmers and rural advocates, this tour is really about something much larger than electioneering or a new jobs program: It’s about the survival of rural America.

While the plight of urban decay has been widely publicized in the mainstream press, similar issues facing our country cousins (myself included) — lack of well-paying jobs, rural brain drain, food deserts, poverty, and lack of access to quality health care — have either been ignored or largely misunderstood by policy-makers and the press. Today, more rural Americans are on food stamps and face bleaker economic prospects than their urban counterparts, despite the romantic image of small-town life often portrayed in the media.

For the past 50 years, rural America has seen its best, brightest, and most mobile flee the countryside in search of jobs as federal farm, economic, and trade policies have slowly bled family farmers off the land. Since 1960, when John F. Kennedy was elected, America has lost over 1.7 million family farms — the backbone of rural economies — with farmers in the U.S. today now outnumbered by prisoners.

Despite increases in farm productivity and improved planting and harvesting equipment, more insidious economic factors, like increased industry consolidation, poorly designed subsidy programs, and overspecialization in industrial livestock production, with poor contract protections, have hollowed out the countryside. Instead of prosperity, industrial agriculture has created vast profits for corporations at the top of the food chain, but left a growing number of rural America’s Main Streets to resemble ghost towns, and its residents poorly prepared to meet the nation’s important challenges of the 21st century.

While, despite a growing national awareness of food and agriculture issues, many people in urban areas have never met a farmer or someone who produced the food that appears on their plate each day, most Main Street businesses in rural America realize that their livelihood and very survival are tied to the economic well-being of the local farm economy.

And if you want to save rural America, you have to save the family farmer.

Obama’s rural agenda, circa 2007

Since the president’s Iowa tour is about creating jobs and economic opportunity for rural America, it might help to start out with a refresher of what President Obama promised the first time he toured the state, which helped him on his road to unexpected victory during the Iowa caucus.

When Obama first ran for president in Iowa, he cultivated a serious grassroots reform platform in agriculture that included:

• Caps on subsidy payments

• Regulating CAFOs (factory farms)

• Encouraging local and organic agriculture

• “Preventing anticompetitive behavior against family farms”

That last one was important. I remember receiving an advanced copy of Obama’s rural agenda before it was released in October 2007, reading those words, and thinking, “We finally have a candidate who understands rural issues and is willing to do something about it.”

In the past 30 years, since Ronald Reagan took office, the U.S. government has stopped enforcing antitrust laws, while recklessly encouraging an orgy of corporate mergers. During this time, food and agriculture production has become one of the most concentrated sectors in the U.S. economy. General economic theory states that when four or fewer companies control more than 40 percent of market share, that industry is no longer competitive — competition being the lifeblood of capitalism, innovation, and democracies.

Today just four companies control 84 percent of the beef packing industry and 66 percent of the pork packing industry, and just one company, Monsanto, controls genetically engineered seeds for corn, cotton, soybeans, and canola on more than 90 percent of the acres that are planted with GMO seeds. Such excessive market concentration has given corporations an increased stranglehold on supply, shrinking both profits and markets for family farmers. Since 1952, farmers have seen their share of the food dollar that they receive shrink from 47 cents on every dollar spent on food to barely 20 cents.

Antitrust investigation to nowhere?

To his credit, President Obama and his staff listened to the plight of family farmers when he caucused in Iowa. As a result, last year, the Obama administration launched a series of workshops to investigate anti-competitive practices in food and agriculture. These workshops were potentially so historic that I felt compelled to travel across the country to all five of them in hopes of witnessing the dawn of a new era in agriculture, when our government would finally stand up for family farmers instead of promoting agribusiness profits.

Regretfully, the Department of Justice (DOJ) has so far refused to issue a report or take any meaningful actions against the largest violators.

Even worse for farmers was the news last month that DOJ antitrust chief Christine Varney was leaving the administration without finishing the job to join a white-glove law firm in New York. For many farmers, who have endured the corrupt practices of agribusiness for decades, Varney was seen as the last best hope to free farmers from an unfair system that has driven hundreds of thousands livestock farmers out of business and shackled them with abusive contracts.

In December of last year, I traveled to Washington, D.C. to deliver more than 200,000 comments from farmers, citizens, and Food Democracy Now! members in a private meeting with Chr
istine Varney and other DOJ and USDA staff, to explain the urgent need for antitrust enforcement. As always, Varney was committed in her personal statements, but did let it slip that others who were part of the investigations were potentially in opposition. With Varney leaving, family farmers and rural America may never get the justice they deserve.

Hope for rural America?

Even now, an important decision waits on the president’s desk that will have more to do with creating jobs and economic security for rural America than any bus tour or another White House briefing paper on jobs.

During the drafting of the 2008 Farm Bill, Congress required the USDA to write rules that addressed problems of market manipulation and unfair contracts to protect livestock farmers. Known as GISPA, for the USDA agency that overseas their enforcement — Grain Inspectors, Packers and Stockyard Administration (GIPSA) — the new rules would create a fair marketplace for farmers to sell their livestock without fear of retaliation, require packers to maintain written records over price deviations, and prevent undue preferences.

More than anything, the completion of the DOJ/USDA antitrust investigations, with significant enforcement actions, and the finalizing of strong GISPA rules, will determine the fate of the family farmer and rural America for the century to come.

If President Obama truly wants to create jobs and economic security for rural economies and see farmers thrive, he’ll follow through on the promises he already made to Iowans and make sure that farmers have the access to fair markets that they deserve.

In reality, the best way to create jobs is by saving the ones that you already have. The same is true about keeping farmers on the land. The equation for success in rural America has never changed: Make sure farmers receive a fair price in the marketplace, and the wealth will spread, our communities will prosper, and our nation will flourish. After a century of listening to false promises by D.C. politicians, rural America is paying closer attention to what these folks do once they’re elected, versus what they say on the campaign trail. And it’s time that Washington got down to the business of putting farmers first — after all, their jobs just might depend on it.

How is it that a country can put a man on the moon, but can’t seem to feed it’s children school lunches that are safer than those eaten at McDonald’s or Jack in the Box?

In the past 10 years more than 23,000 school children have become sick as a result of hundreds of food poisoning outbreaks in our nation’s lunchrooms. A recent investigation by USA Today found that the meat served in U.S. school cafeterias faces less testing and lower safety standards than the mystery meat in Big Macs and Whopper Juniors.

USA Today reporters discovered that meat served at McDonald’s, Burger King and Costco is tested as much as 10 times more often as the ground beef served in America’s school cafeterias. While fast-food chains take samples on their production lines every 15 minutes, the USDA only tests 8 times a day.

In addition to testing more frequently, fast-food chains also set more stringent limits on so-called indicator bacteria. In the case of generic E. coli, the USDA allows 10 times more bacteria than Jack in the Box!

This fact should be a national embarrassment to all members of Congress, USDA officials and meat industry executives who have allowed our nation’s school lunch programs to become the dumping grounds for cheap commodity products that feed the bottom line of corporate agribusiness.

Each year the USDA purchases more than $1 billion in cheap commodities as part of the federal contribution to the school lunch program. Regretfully, the USDA is driven by two factors: get the food for the lowest price and prop up prices for commodities that are in oversupply or are unattractive to business purchases. Not quality. In 2009 alone, the USDA purchased more than $151 million of commodity pork to prop up failing industrial pork producers. Even worse is the USDA’s purchase of “spent hens”, i.e. the worn out, diseased chickens of the factory farm egg industry, which not even KFC will serve to it’s customers.

Previous reports have estimated that nearly 30% of the more than 100 million egg-laying hens culled each year find their way into our children’s lunch via the National School Lunch Program. The rest ends up as Alpo.

Why is it that meat that should end up as dog food is being fed to our nation’s school children?

Fast Food Gets Taken to Court, Food Safety Wins

To find out why fast-food restaurants are doing a better job, one only need to look at the industry leader Jack in the Box, which USA Today says, “pioneered many of the safety standards now used across the fast-food industry.”

Seventeen years ago, Jack in the Box was on financial and PR life support as it was reeling from the notorious 1993 E. Coli outbreak at multiple restaurants across the West Coast that killed four children and sickened hundreds of customers.

An unknown Seattle lawyer named Bill Marler found that Jack in the Box’s improper handling and undercooking of tainted hamburger meat was responsible for the outbreak. Marler’s determination to fight corporations who skirt U.S. food safety laws led to a $50 million class-action settlement and is a major reason why Jack in the Box and McDonald’s are leading the way in testing and proper handling of meat they serve their customers. Unlike the U.S. government, these fast-food chains finally decided that killing customers is bad for business. How long will it take the USDA to reach the same conclusion?

Unfortunately the meat industry killed reforms created at the end of the Clinton administration that would have rectified this problem.

Once Upon a Time – Bush Kills Clinton Era Reform

In 2000, Secretary of Agriculture, Dan Glickman implemented a science-based “zero tolerance” policy on salmonella and E. coli in meat sold to U.S schools. Almost immediately, the industrial meat lobby started to squeal.

Within months of taking office, Bush officials were gutting Clinton’s new food safety policies in favor of Industrial Meat, which found the new regulations too “burdensome.” Rather than stepping up testing, the new Bush USDA proposed the irradiation of meat for s
chool lunches and the creation of  “a system to weed out suppliers who did not meet standards.”

Unfortunately, this weeding out process has proven ineffectual.

In the past five years alone, at least six orders of ground beef sold to schools “exceeded the limits” of “indicator bacteria” which would have been rejected by fast-food restaurants.

Most recently, Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn, the chairwoman for the House appropriations committee on agriculture and a champion for food safety, called for the temporary closure of a Fresno meat facility, and an investigation into Beef Packers Inc., the 7^th largest supplier of ground beef to U.S. schools. The Cargill-owned meat processor has a long history as a habitual violator.

DeLauro’s concern stems from the fact that the Beef Packers facility has failed to meet USDA standards more than 40 times in recent years and also had more than a million pounds of ground beef rejected due to salmonella contamination during the 2003-2004 school year alone.

Barely a week ago, Beef Packers Inc. issued their second recall for the year regarding meat contaminated with an antibiotic-resistant strain of salmonella. In August, the California meat processing company recalled more than 800,000 pounds of contaminated meat. Somehow the USDA purchased 425,000 pounds of meat made during the same time frame as the contamination, even though 1 of 4 test samples tested positive for a virulent strain of salmonella Newport, which food safety experts say should have disqualified that batch of meat from school lunches, but it did not.

For any parent concerned about their children’s health, these standards should be cause for alarm.

It’s Obama’s Turn Now – Time to Get it Right!

While this problem didn’t start in the Obama administration, it needs to end here. The quickest way for this to happen is for the USDA to stop providing cover for the meat industry and to start refusing to buy from the bottom of the barrel.

The good news is that Secretary Vilsack has promised “an independent review of testing requirements for ground beef” that the USDA sends to school.

The problem is: What will this “independent review” mean for food safety in America’s school lunchrooms? And who will do the review? Typically when the USDA, or almost any government body, calls for a “review” or to set up a panel to “study” an issue, it inevitably means invitations to “solve” the problem are extended to the very lobbyists who helped create it in the first place.

If the Obama administration wants to prove their determination to protect our children’s health, they can stop playing chicken with our children’s lives by catering to every agribusiness lobby that ventures their way and start standing up for the American people.

The USDA needs to appoint an expert panel that includes public health experts and a couple of the retail and restaurant food safety experts who are responsible for the high safety standards at McDonalds and Jack in the Box. Obama should leave the lobbyists and the professors whose research is paid for by industry out of this process. This is one time when most people can agree; our nation’s children must come first.

Unfortunately for Whole Foods, Mackey’s foray into the health care debate hasn’t gone unnoticed.  Some progressives, incensed that the head of one of their preferred companies is helping pollute the debate, have expressed their ire via a boycott of Whole Foods.

While well intended, this is a bad strategy.

A boycott of Whole Foods won’t make a difference on health care, and it might actually hurt something progressives care about — organic and natural farmers.

Whole Foods Founder John Mackey Steps in It

With an audacity that borders on self-destructive, Mackey, a well-known “Libertarian,” began his op-ed on U.S. health care reform with a bizarre quote from Margaret Thatcher about socialism and other people’s money, and it went downhill from there.

Rather than see access to safe and affordable health care as a basic necessity in a civilized nation, Mackey calls any proposed government reform a “massive new health-care entitlement.”

For many progressives, Mackey’s invoking the Constitution and Declaration of Independence to deny an individual “right” to basic health care struck a powder keg of emotion. Mark Rosenthal, a playwright based in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, was one of them.

“I was disgusted,” says Rosenthal after reading the editorial. “I was nauseous at the thought of shopping at Whole Foods ever again. It made me want to vomit.”

So Rosenthal did what anybody who feels rage and indignation does today: he started a Facebook group.

In nearly two weeks, the Facebook boycott has garnered some 29,000 online fans, while Mackey’s tirade has created a cottage industry of blog posts regarding Whole Foods, its CEO and the boycott itself.

Why They Shop Elsewhere

After weeks of watching the health care debate be dominated by town hall protesters, and seeing the potential for reform slide away into a Clintonesque compromise, Internet savvy progressives jumped at the chance to focus their anger on one of their own—Whole Foods.

As someone who works in sustainable agriculture and is a progressive Democrat, I’ve seen many a “friend” who has signed the Facebook page. Many are serial joiners, others have longtime beef with Whole Foods for its perceived litany of sins, and others just like a good fight.  When a protest is just one click away – why not satisfy that urge for revenge?

Target the Real Enemies of Health Care Reform

But the fact remains that no matter how many people join the boycott or wave a protest sign outside Whole Foods, it won’t bring a single person in the country better health care.  If progressives want to achieve a public option, they need to stay focused on the true obstacles to reform.  Groups that have helped fan the flames, like United Health Care and the Republican party, the Blue Dog Democrats, and the Gang of Six, have been dragging their feet on health care reform since the beginning.

One good way to do this would be to make contributions to progressive members of Congress that stand up for health care.

Another is to target the Blue Dogs. Over at Daily Kos, Markos Moulitsas is working on holding Blue Dog Congressman Jim Cooper from Tennessee accountable; while Howard Dean is mounting a Senate whip count campaign against wayward Senators to push them in support of the public option.

The public option will only come through organizing politically against members of Congress who actually vote on health care. Everything else is political theatre. It may soothe the pain, but it won’t actually cure what ails our nation.

Beware The Unintended Consequences

While Mackey has made his company an easy target in this debate, Whole Foods is not the enemy. The small natural foods retail company that Mackey helped found in 1980 has been a national leader in many progressive causes for years, which may be why his editorial stung so much.

But for anyone who has followed Whole Foods for any period of time, Mackey’s libertarian views should not be a surprise.

And putting his politics aside, I’m far more concerned about the collateral damage that could be done to Whole Foods suppliers, mainly organic and natural farmers and some of the smaller and midsized organic companies whose products Whole Foods sells.

Despite what many critics of Whole Foods say, as a company it has done much more good than it has harm and is largely responsibly for helping popularize organic and natural foods in the U.S.  In doing so, Mackey and Whole Foods have helped create a market for thousands of farmers across America to grow food in ways that do not harm the environment, farm animals or consumers’ health.

And while Mackey may not support universal health care as a right, his life’s work and that of his company has increased Americans’ access to food that is safer to eat, more nutritious, and will contribute less to the burden of the current health care crisis than his competitors.

Unfortunately, the only responsible thing left to do is to ask John Mackey to step down as the CEO of a company that he helped build, and to ask him to go it alone, just as he believes the uninsured citizens of this country should do.  Whole Foods, and the farmers they help survive, shouldn’t suffer, but the author of that WSJ editorial should for putting America’s organic and sustainable farmers in harm’s way.

Last week a new food safety bill passed unanimously out of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and opinions vary widely on the current bill. Known as H.R. 2749, the Food Safety Enhancement Act of 2009, the bill is being hailed as everything from as “the most sweeping reform of the food safety system in nearly 50 years” or the “totalitarian control of the food supply,” depending on what you read.

In addition to being supported by Consumers Union, the bill has also garnered the backing of the Grocery Manufacturers Association and the American Meat Institute due to compromises committee chairman Henry Waxman ironed out during committee consideration.

Key compromises that brought industry giants on board were the reduction of an annual registration fee for food production facilities from $1,000 to $500, capping the amount any single company would have to pay for both foreign and domestic operations at $175,000 and exempting meat and poultry from oversight by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The latter compromise was made to keep the bill from passing into the hands of the House Agricultural Committee, which would have likely gutted many key provisions of the bill.

Good, Bad and Caution

The current bill is an effort by Congress to revamp our nation’s dysfunctional food safety system, giving the FDA more regulatory power and resources to help stem the tide from the growing number of record food safety outbreaks in everything from lettuce, spinach, peanut butter and now cookie dough.

According to Consumers Union, the new food safety bill contains what they consider to be several steps in the right direction, including: inspection of high-risk food facilities at least every 6 to 12 months (FDA currently averages inspections one every 10 years), FDA recall authority, requirement of food facilities to register and pay an annual fee, and a traceability program.

Those more cautious about the bill include the Farmer to Consumer Legal Defense Fund, the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association and the National Pork Producers Council.

In fact, the Farmer to Consumer Legal Defense Fund opposes the new food safety bill, citing among it’s chief concerns are that HR 2749 will “adversely impact small farms and food producers, without providing significant reforms in the industrial food system” and that it “does not address the underlying causes of food safety problems, including industrial agriculture practices and the consolidation of our food supply.”

The Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association is cautious, bringing up several good questions regarding definitions in the bill and how they will impact small farmers and processors. Russell Libby of MOFGA asks, “When is a farm a food processor that is a food ‘facility’ that warrants FDA regulation and oversight? When does a farm have enough potential impact on the food system to warrant FDA scrutiny?” Additionally, MOFGA states that “it oppose[s] laws that create barriers to entry for farmers and specialty food processors.”

For others who are skeptical of the bill, these remain “unanswered questions”.

What American Food Safety Needs Now is Reform

Even as the debate rages on about how the U.S. will create a new food safety system, with all of the attention focused on FDA’s failure to assure the safety of the food it regulates, a very quiet controversy is brewing at the USDA over the fact that the agency has yet to name an Under Secretary for the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS).

So far, the two leading candidates for the job, both with close ties to the food industry, have been knocked off track due to the efforts of a small collection of food safety advocates and a few advocacy groups who believe that food safety is not something that you should create a “Team of Rivals” around.

After watching the new administration’s efforts to select political appointees that conform to the plotline of a popular nonfiction book, it’s time to remind them why they won the election. Last year when Americans went to the polls in record numbers, they voted for change and the hope of reform.

What is becoming more evident every day is that while Republicans reward their base, Democrats kick their’s to the curb.

As one food safety expert who has been leading the charge for food safety reform in Washington for over twenty years said recently, “It’s funny. When Republicans win the election I have to fight the meat industry and when Democrats win I have to fight the meat industry. When is somebody going to stand up for the American consumer?”

We couldn’t agree more.

If the Obama Administration is Serious About Food Safety – We Need a Reformer

Every year in the U.S. an estimated 76 million people get sick with foodborne illnesses and 5,000 die, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. One person who knows this fact better than almost anybody else in this country, is food safety lawyer Bill Marler.

Marler recently came to the public’s attention with his generous offer to pay for author Michael Pollan’s visit to Washington State University, after his book had been removed from the freshmen reading program. What many may not know is that he’s been known as a leading advocate for food safety for nearly two decades.

Marler first leapt to national prominence as the lead attorney in the famous 1993 Jack in the Box E.coli outbreak. Since that time, Marler has led the charge in protecting the rights of consumers against unsafe practices of major corporations. While dedicated to a high standard of food safety protocols, Marler is also pragmatic about the real economic need for food safety.

Poor food safety practices also have a major negative impact on the bottom line of business, costing U.S. companies more than $6.9 billion each year, which Marler believes could be better spent to keep America’s food supply truly safe.

Despite the food industry’s long contempt for personal injury attorneys, Marler could end up being their dream pick for the FSIS spot if they were willing to allow the motivated attorney to oversee the much needed change in food safety policies at the USDA.

Known as a fair but fierce opponent, Marler draws as much criticism from the industrial meat crowd as he does from proponents of local agriculture, with strong stances on the need for inspection and a concern on the growing interest in raw milk.

Why select Marler as the head of the FSIS? Because he’s a champion of citizen’s rights to safe food and he knows the system better than anyone. He’s also willing to balance the concerns of the meat industry and local foods at the same time.

If the Obama Administration is serious about reforming America’s food safety system, there really is only one choice – Bill Marler for FSIS. Now’s the time.

The assault on rural America continues unabated. For the past six months dairy farmers across the country have suffered a historic drop in milk prices while operating costs remain high. Since December 2008, the price that farmers are paid for the milk they produce has plunged over 50 percent, the largest single drop since the Great Depression.

While organic dairy farmers have faced a decrease in overall sales due to the recent world financial meltdown and tight budgets on the home front as a result, the current drop in milk prices is impacting mainly conventional and small to mid-size family dairy farmers — the worst crisis most dairy farmers have faced in their entire careers.

Without immediate action from President Obama, USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack and members of Congress, this current crisis could be the launching point for the final liquidation of the independent family farmer.

Plunge in Milk Prices + High Costs of Production = Final Liquidation

According to the USDA, the average cost of production for milk is $24.08 per hundredweight (cwt or 100 pounds), while the price dairy farmers were paid for their milk in April sunk to $10.78 cwt.

This means that dairy farmers are earning less than half of what it costs to produce their milk. Imagine having your salary cut in half and still trying to cover the same monthly bills. Even worse, feed and fuel prices are starting to go up in the past few months.

For farmers, most of whom work too long of hours and are paid too little money, this is the perfect formula for a final liquidation of one of the last remaining independent segments of ag production. For years, small and medium-sized farms have relied on their dairy cows to stay relatively free from domination by factory farms and corporate agribusiness. But no longer.

The Past Revisits the Future – 1998 and Eight-Cent Hogs

What we are witnessing today with dairy farmers has happened before and is part of a historic trend that must not be allowed to continue. As Chris Petersen, President of Iowa Farmers Union and an Iowa family hog farmer, said recently, “First they consolidated the turkeys and chickens, then the hogs and now they’re coming after dairy.”

Petersen spoke at a rally for dairy farmers held on May 30th in Manchester, Iowa, where some 150 family dairy farmers from across the country gathered at a small town livestock exchange, some traveling from as far away as New York and Pennsylvania, in an effort to draw attention to the ongoing crisis.

As a hog farmer who survived the 1980’s farm crisis, Peterson is painfully familiar with the impacts that industrialized agriculture and consolidation have had on family farmers and rural America.

For many Iowans, the current crisis in dairy is eerily reminiscent of 1998, when prices hog farmers were paid for hogs dropped to 8 cents a pound, virtually wiping out an entire generation of hog farmers during a single market downturn.

In 1997, the year before the crash, there were over 122,000 hog farmers across the U.S. Today less than 65,000 remain. In Iowa, the nation’s leading hog producer, there were over 18,000 hog farmers in 1997, while less than 8,300 exist today, with most animals in this sector now raised in confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs) or factory farms.

For those who missed the consolidation of livestock in the 1950’s and 1960’s when it happened to the chicken growers, and then the 1980’s and 1990’s when they came for the hogs, this year will be the final sell-off of the family dairy farmer. The final sector reliant on livestock will at last be captured.

In addition, the industry trend towards animal confinement that has taken off in the past decade in dairy will increase significantly if these small and mid-sized farmers are allowed to fail.

Increasing consolidation in the dairy industry has also played a factor in the current crisis, creating an uncompetitive market for dairy farmers. Just one cooperative, Dairy Farmers of America (DFA) controls 40% of milk produced in the U.S., severely limiting competitive pricing for farmers. But not only does DFA have undue market power, they also have a history of market manipulation and were fined $12 million last year manipulating the milk prices in the commodities market.

U.S. Faces Catastrophic Loss of Dairy Farmers in 2009

Leading farm advocacy groups such as Farm Aid and the National Family Farm Coalition are estimating the potential loss of 20,000 family dairy farmers as a result of the current milk crisis. If action isn’t taken soon in Washington DC, America could lose up to 30% of U.S. dairy farmers — possibly more — as they strain under the monthly cost of debts, which are piling up each month.

Meanwhile, banks have already started cutting off farmer’s access to loans across the country and have increasingly begun seizing herds when farmers can’t make payments.

In a phone call received last week, one farmer told how a neighboring dairy farmer in eastern Iowa had lost his farm. The 550 head family dairy farm was seized last month, forcing a father and his two sons off the farm. Only five years ago, the father had expanded their operation so he could eventually turn the farm over to his sons. Now that dream is gone. To make matters worse, the bank seized the last trailer full of cows on a Friday and the youngest son got married the following day, a wedding that turned from a celebration into a tragedy.

The same farmer who related this story said that he had received a call from his banker who was coming to visit his farm the next day, with no reason given. The farmer said he was current on his payments, but wasn’t sure if his credit would be cut off like it had to several dairy farmers he knew across Iowa.

Stories like this are becoming increasingly common in rural America, especially in dairy country – states like California, New York, Pennsylvania, Vermont and Wisconsin.

The loss of so many family dairy farms could launch the next Great Depression for rural America’s economies. As farmers are forced off the land once again, as they were in the 1980s, the businesses and communities that rely on them stand to lose their tax and customer base.

Crashing the Farmer’s Price for Free Trade

While cyclical problems of supply and demand and have caused numerous market collapses in the past, a closer look at the dairy crisis exposes deeper fundamental problems in the dairy sector.

Currently the chattering political class in Washington DC keep repeating the line that the current crisis is due to “overproduction,” but an inspection of dairy imports and exports tells a different story

A recent post from John Bunting, a New York dairy farmer who writes for Milkweed and runs his own blog, tallied the imports of milk protein concentrates or MPCs and found a record increase in imports in the first quarter of 2009. Between January and March of this year imports of MPCs, not including casein and other dairy products, increased a whopping 24.59% according to the USDA Foreign Agricultural Services.

MPCs are broken-down proteins and fats created by milk being processed at high temperatures and contain tasty things like bacteria and somatic cells. More problematic are the fact that MPCs are considered a glue additive and while not actually approved as a food additive by the FDA, Bunting calls them “technically an illegal ingredient,” can be found in such things as baby formulas, sports drinks, yogurt, pizza and ice cream.

If that doesn’t sound too bad then remember that these foreign milk-like substances are coming from China, India and a host of other countries that don’t have very stringent food safety regulations. Think milk from China, melamine in baby formula, etc – not a good strategy for food safety.

Another interesting trend pointed out by Bunting is the loss of dairy exports by the U.S. during the first quarter 2009, totally over $638 million over the same quarter in 2008. On top of this, Leslie Hatfield reports over at the Huffington Post that according to the National Milk Producers Federation dairy imports into the U.S. “have risen from $80 million to almost $3 billion in the last 10 years.”

So if we have record imports of milk products that compete against our own farmers on their sales in the U.S. and then they have a net loss approaching a billion dollars in trade that takes away from further potential sales, plus a massive increase in imports over the past 10 years, then what we really don’t have is a “surplus” of milk – but a serious trade deficit when it comes to milk products that is pushing American’s dairy farmers to the brink this year.

Additionally, for the month of March, Bunting reports that dairy exports fell by 32.9%. Even with Vilsack’s recent implementation of the new dairy export program, it’s hard to imagine making up that $638 million in time to save the thousands of dairy farmers that will be forced to shut down their barns by the end of this year.

Loss of Family Dairy Farms = Death of Rural America’s Economies

It’s estimated that dairy farmers are currently losing up to $200 per cow, per month. Since dairy processing and dairy farms have one of the largest economic multipliers of any segment in agriculture, with each cow generating $17,000 per year in economic development in the form of jobs, goods and services created, the loss of a single 85 head dairy farm will drain a local economy of nearly $1.5 million in economic activity.

For the eastern Iowa county that lost a 550 head dairy farm last month, that’s $9.4 million flushed out of the local economy forever.

Unfortunately, the number of dairy farms being forced out of business is just beginning. In the next few months, as more banks cut off additional loans to farmers, these numbers are going to climb to record levels for the dairy industry.

A recent conversation with a dairy industry worker revealed the loss of 10 additional dairies across Iowa in the last 6 weeks – totaling another 3,060 dairy cows or $52 million erased from small town local economies across the state.

And while $52 million is chump change for Wall Street banks, which are churning through government bailout cash faster than a five-legged mule, losing a third of U.S. dairy farms this year will be catastrophic for our rural communities.

For people who are having a hard time understanding how bad this will be: This could be rural America’s last stand for independent family farm agriculture. Increasingly, family farmers, rural Americans and farm advocates are pleading with President Obama, Secretary Vilsack and Iowa’s Senator Tom Harkin to do something about it before it’s too late.

Every day, every delay, costs America another farmer. And our farmers are not a renewable resource that can be grown and planted in a single season.

If up to 30 percent of dairy farmers are forced to go into foreclosure, the U.S. could see over 3.1 million of the nation’s 9.3 dairy cows sold off and potentially liquidated. A quick calculation shows the current dairy crisis, if allowed to continue, will blow a $52.7 billion hole in rural America’s economy – most likely more, as the ripple effect will send a shockwave through small towns and businesses across the country.

Rural America is Too Big to Fail

While Senators and Congressmen lined up in Washington during the past year to offer Wall Street a sweetheart deal for making a mess of the U.S. and global economy — erasing a lifetime of earnings for tens of millions of investors because of years of excessive greed — and then reluctantly bailed out Detroit for the sins of auto execs, politicians have done relatively little to help dairy farmers who are facing the crisis of a century.

Sure, Secretary Vilsack has made several small attempts to jumpstart the system, with a few stopgap measures, including $150 million in Milk Income Loss Contract (MILC) payments — which provided farmers who previously signed up for the program a meager $1.51 per cwt subsidy; the USDA’s March purchase of 200 million pounds of surplus nonfat dry milk for use in domestic feeding programs; and a recent use of the Dairy Export Incentive Program (DEIP) to subsidize 92,000 tons of dairy products destined for overseas. However, these steps have done almost nothing to stem the tide.

Unfortunately, none of these actions have translated into higher milk prices. Most U.S. dairy farmers see these attempts as worse than the usual band-aids farmers have been thrown in the past because it allows politicians to pretend they’ve actually solved the crisis when really it’s getting worse every day.

Conversations with dozens of dairy farmers from across the country reveal that the government MILC checks are barely able to cover costs of electricity, let alone feed bills, which have grown by up to 10 percent in the past four weeks.

“We’re not asking for a bailout, we’re just ask for a fair price,” says Jerry Harvey, a third generation Iowa dairy farmer who milks 70 cows in Promise City, Iowa.

And as many farmers across the country are now saying, if Washington thinks there are banks too big to fail, wait until Americans have to rely on food from foreign countries, which have much looser food safety regulations, to feed their families.

All these farmers are asking for is a fair price for the food they produce for American consumers, it’s time some folks in Washington start putting their heads together for a sustainable solution. The cost of failure for America’s dairy farmer is not something the U.S. can afford.

In 1906, Upton Sinclair published his classic book The Jungle, awakening America’s consciousness to the horrors of corruption in the U.S. meatpacking industry with the story of Chicago’s stockyards. The Jungle so shook the American people’s confidence in how their meat and food was processed, that President Roosevelt created the Food and Drug Administration to quell public outcry.

Fast-forward a hundred odd years later and all evidence points to the fact that we are living in an era of food crisis that rivals that of the turn of the last century. Regretfully, America’s modern food system has become The Jungle 2.0.

Indeed, there have been prodigious grumblings from Washington, D.C., over food safety issues in the past months. Thanks to the current peanut butter fiasco from the now bankrupt Peanut Corporation of America, our nation is once again in the throes of a record food safety recall, signaling that we need a serious overhaul of our nation’s food safety system and the industrial food model.

America’s current food system has the potential to create an epidemic food safety crisis much larger than that even Sinclair or Teddy Roosevelt could imagine. For a variety of reasons, including the corrosive influence of agribusiness corporations and lack of government funds, staff, and training, we now live in a world where food safety in America is on the verge of facing a collapse similar to those of our recent financial, mortgage, and housing industries.

The current crisis is an opportunity for the Obama administration to make bold change in how this country addresses how our food is grown, raised, processed, tracked, sold, cooked, and fed to American consumers.

Like all warnings that have come in the past, it would be easy to bury our collective heads in the sand and once again accept Washington’s standard approach — throw a band-aid on the system. But the truth is, we can’t afford it. At least nine people are dead from the latest contamination and over 650 have been sickened.

However, food safety is not only important from a human health standpoint, but also for reasons of commerce. With over 3,000 products taken off the shelves because a corporation failed to live up to the law, the impact of this recall could total over $1 billion. According to peanut-industry estimates, sales have dropped 25 percent for a loss of over $500 million for the industry.

If consumers lose faith in how American food is grown and processed, they will lose confidence in the companies and brands that have become household names. This not only hurts the food company, but also harms the small family farmers who grow and raise their food safely and can’t absorb the losses like large agribusiness conglomerates.

If the corporations that have helped create and reinforce the current flawed system don’t care about their customers’ safety, they should care about their profits. Simply put, a poor food safety system is bad for business.

Leading food safety advocates are recommending an end to band-aids as usual.

“What everyone needs to understand is that our country’s food safety system is deeply dysfunctional. As evidence, I need merely recite the recent scandals: spinach, pet food, tomatoes, and now peanut butter,” says author and nutrition and food safety expert Dr. Marion Nestle.

As a former member of the FDA Food Advisory Committee, Nestle understands the root of the problem.

“The system is fragmented between the FDA and USDA and deals with individual foods, not food systems. It begins at the packing house, not on the farm. And the rules that do exist are hardly enforced. We know what we need to do to produce safe food and it’s time we did it,” continued Nestle.

Several proposals are out there to reform the system, including a call for a single food safety agency. But the real question we must focus on now is WHO will be appointed to do the actual work.

The ability to reform a system starts not only with ideas or policy or even problems, but also with personnel. Who is hired for the job matters as much, if not more than, the policy proposal going forward, which is something that large corporations have understood from the beginning and is why we are in this current mess.

So the first place to begin reforming the system is by choosing the right person for the job, which is why Food Democracy Now! has advocated from the beginning at the secretary and under secretary levels. Like President Obama, we agree that it’s time to close the revolving door between government, corporate lobbyists and the private sector. And, while we got some good news when President Obama announced Kathleen Merrigan as the next Deputy Secretary of Agriculture, there’s a lot more work to be done.

The individuals chosen to head of the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service and other food safety positions in this administration need to come from the mindset that food safety begins at the farm level and that it must come before corporate convenience and profit. They should not have a preexisting bias towards technologies that try to paper over serious flaws in our nation’s food supply. Nor should they have served as lobbyists for or executives in large agribusiness corporations that profit from the status quo.

We need candidates with a proven record of objectivity, individuals who have the courage and record to put real teeth into regulation, inspection, and enforcement.

The fact is, food safety cannot be legislated or ruled into being if federal inspectors are not properly trained or enough workers are not hired or if farming practices are not fundamentally safe. Food safety cannot be cloned, genetically modified, implanted with an electronic chip or medicated or irradiated into being. Nor can food safety be solved by a quotidian reliance on additional technological interventions such as factory farming, excessive use of antibiotics, pesticides, massive slaughter houses and a consolidated non-regional processing system which have all converged to create the current food safety crisis.

Our political leaders need to understand what the grassroots already knows, that reforming the food safety system will come out of reforming agriculture. The problem has been created by rampant market concentration and consolidation; the solution is local and regionalized food systems, using sustainable practices that rebuild America’s rural economies and produce the healthiest, safest food in the world.

Now is time to plant the seeds for a 21st century food system that respects the biology and cycles of nature, that protects family farmers, worker rights, farm animals, rural communities and offers clean, safe and healthy food to American eaters.

We must invest in America and stop speculating with our future by continuing along the same old trajectory that brought us to where we are. Americans are ready for visionary leadership and creating a
real food safety system that works is a good place to start.

The recent nomination of former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack as Secretary of Ag was a disappointment to many in the sustainable ag and family farm community because of Vilsack’s close relationship with agribusiness and his penchant for promoting biotech and corn-based ethanol. Despite some positive comments during his confirmation hearing regarding nutrition, local foods and climate change, many in the sustainable ag community remain skeptical, while some remain hopeful.

I’ve written previously, as have others, to place Tom’s record in context; that he was the first Democratic governor of Iowa in 40 years and that during his governorship he had to contend with a Republican House and Senate.

This will not be the case when he heads the USDA with solid majorities in Congress, a call for “change in America” and support from the White House. There will be no one to blame for failing to put forward a progressive agenda for America’s food and farm future.

When Abraham Lincoln created the Department of Agriculture, he called it the "people’s Department." Lincoln would roll over in his grave if he could see how giant corporations have been bilking the American farmer the way war profiteers did during the Civil War.

Having written a letter to President-Elect Obama asking for a Secretary of Agriculture with a grassroots background in promoting sustainable agriculture I was not surprised when one of our picks was not selected.

I am not naive, I know how politics works and the fact is we could have gotten someone much worse. Our focus now is at the deputy and under secretary level and our current list of twelve candidates we have put forward the Sustainable Dozen, is a serious list of contenders who should all have a job at the USDA.

Two days ago I heard that one of our candidates is being considered for the position of Deputy Secretary and that several opponents of reform had stepped forward to disparage that candidate to those who make the hiring decision.

If anti-change agents think they can undercut Chuck Hassebrook or any of our candidates in backroom conversations without hearing a public response, they’re wrong. More than anybody, Chuck has stood up for independent family farmers for the last three decades. He was especially important during this last farm bill when he called out several politicians who shortchanged family farmers by scuttling payment limitations on subsidy programs.

As is always the case when there is a transition of power, a lot of jowls are scurrying up to the trough to be fed. And many of those making the fastest climb through the slop are the most dangerous ones to our democracy (especially our food democracy), which Obama pointed out during the campaign when he pledged to not have any corporate lobbyists in his administration.

If one looks at Obama’s Rural Agenda they will find that it is a very forward-thinking document, with a list of policy ideas that were designed to benefit independent family famers and rural economies while leveling the playing field that has been so stacked in the favor of agribusiness that it has resulted in record concentration in the livestock, seed, processing and slaughter industries and put hundreds of thousands of family farmers out of business over the past many decades.

If Obama is serious about change, one of the most important areas he is going to have to deal with is how America produces its food. And that change starts at the USDA.

As he admittedly read Michael Pollan’s Letter to the Farmer in Chief, he already knows that the issues facing agriculture today are as great as those facing our dismal economy and if they are not dealt with properly and promptly they have the potential to drag our nation down even further, especially if he follows the advice of some industry "leaders" who have gotten us into this mess in the first place.

If you look closely at Obama’s rural agenda it’s easy to spot the imprint of Chuck Hassebrook on many of those policies. A leader who has stood up for family during some of the most difficult times that farmers have faced in our nation’s history.

In order to make sure that Obama has someone with integrity and reform credentials at the USDA supporting Vilsack in his effort to become a forward-looking leader, we think it’s important that he consider Chuck Hassebrook for a high-level position at the USDA.

Chuck has the backbone to stand up to members of his own party and the sustainable ag community when he thinks they stray too far off the reservation and their positions hurt independent family farmers. If Vilsack is going to lead the USDA forward to a positive future for the 21st century, he’ll need somebody who has a track record for standing up to competing interests and has a good political nose if he wants to navigate the troubled shores of modern agriculture.

During Lincoln’s day nearly 58 percent of Americans were farmers. Today that number has dropped to less than 1 percent. If Obama/Vilsack want to stem to blood loss in rural America they’re going to have to appoint some serious agents of change.

Now that the Inauguration is upon us, it should be more important for our next administration to remember who brought them to the dance and stop dining with their enemies.

As the next head of the USDA, Vilsack will be charged with revamping a sprawling agency that has an annual budget of $89 billion and more than 92,000 employees, a task that he is uniquely qualified to do.

In Iowa, which my family has called home for six generations, Vilsack is known to be a smart, capable administrator who has been willing to listen to the concerns of family farmers and rural advocates. While attending a Practical Farmers of Iowa conference this past weekend, where many of the state’s most progressive and sustainable farmers gathered, there was almost universal agreement that Vilsack is capable of much more at the national level than he was as the governor of a former red state, where almost any progressive policy he would have put forward would have been blocked by a Republican-controlled Iowa House and Senate.

CAFOs and GMOs

That said, many are still upset over Vilsack’s 1995 vote as a state senator to repeal local control (H.F. 519), which stripped local elected officials from having a say in where confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs) are located. His promotion of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) has concerned members of the sustainable-ag community even more. They fear that his closeness with agribusiness companies will only prolong U.S. farm policies benefiting corporate agribusiness at the expense of family farmers.

Here in Iowa, while we have been disappointed with many of our political leaders, we are pragmatic and understand when it is important to work with them and when it’s time to hold them accountable.

As governor, Vilsack was able to do a number of good things, including create the Iowa Food Policy Council [PDF] and appoint several progressive ag and environmental candidates to the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, which was responsible for attempting to hold industrial ag responsible for its damage to our state’s air [PDF] and water quality, which is among the worst in the nation.

Unfortunately, Iowa has pretty much been plowed under by industrial hog confinements since we lost the right of local control in 1995, and thousands of independent family hog farmers have gone out of business as a result of this poorly thought-out policy. While Vilsack made the mistake as a state senator of voting against local control, he was able to reevaluate that position once it proved to be harmful to family farmers and the environment. He attempted some decent reforms, but he was blocked by Republicans. Still, he almost certainly could have done more.

Unique opportunities

Knowing this, we believe that our community has a unique opportunity to have positive input in future food and farm policy as a result of having a popularly elected Democratic president, who ran on a progressive mandate of change, and a Democratic House and Senate that will be more will sympathetic to our pressing concerns.

With the looming energy crisis, water shortages, the growing impact of climate change, the continued erosion of food safety, and rising food security concerns, the stakes are too high for agribusiness to continue as usual at the USDA.

Due to this convergence of very real problems, we are at the beginning of a new era for food and farm policy. The question that remains, however, is how do we go forward?

Going forward

As we have learned from the Bush administration, it’s not only important who you surround yourself with, but also whose advice you take. What will be more telling than President-elect Barack Obama’s selection of Vilsack as the next secretary of ag is whom he chooses to fill the top slots at the USDA, such as deputy, under secretaries, and deputy under secretaries.

This is why the minute Vilsack was chosen, Food Democracy Now! launched a campaign to promote a list of 12 candidates, who we’re calling the Sustainable Dozen, to fill those positions.

It is now time for the sustainable-ag and environmental communities to unite in order to confront the problems that face us as a nation and work together to create a sustainable 21st century food and farm system.

To do this, members and organizations of this community must put aside differences and present a united front going forward. Up until this time, a lot of criticism has been leveled at Vilsack for his closeness to the biotech industry — and rightfully so. As so often happens, an overzealous sales pitch by vested interests sold then-Gov. Vilsack on the idea that biotechnology was an unlimited scientific breakthrough that offered economic benefits for his state and its farmers. At the same time, the industry did its best to hide the very real threats that this technology poses to human and animal health and the environment. Now the facts about GMOs are starting to come out.

Our movement is big enough to contain the different views of organizations such as the Organic Trade Association, which promotes the interests of organic companies, and the Organic Consumers Association, a vigilant watchdog group that looks out for organic integrity and consumer safety, as well as companies such as Whole Foods, the largest organic and natural-food retailer in the world, and small, local co-ops.

In an effort to bridge the gap between the various members of our community, I have reached out to a variety of groups and individuals and have written a post on the Support Vilsack website explaining why I support Tom’s confirmation and why it may actually be good for us. While some in the sustainable-ag community may not like this, it was done after consulting leaders of the family-farm community here in Iowa such as Niman Ranch hog farmer Paul Willis, organic farmer Denise O’Brien, and Iowa Farmers Union President Chris Petersen, who have worked on these issues for decades. The mantra here in Iowa goes, Vilsack is a leader
who listens and one we can work with.

And while I understand OCA’s desire to hold Vilsack accountable for some of his past mistakes, it is now time to make our case to political leaders and educate consumers regarding the concerns over GMOs and other issues.

Finding common ground

If the food and farm movement is to maximize the opportunities of having a popularly elected president who ran on a mandate of change, and a Democratic Congress, we must put aside our very real differences and find common ground in order to confront the real enemies that threaten family farmers, our environment, human health, and consumer safety.

If we really want to create a sustainable food system for the 21st century, we will have to work in unison, and the next step is getting members of the sustainable-ag community placed in positions where they can act as guardians over our food supply and end the era in which agribusiness lobbyists and executives used the USDA, FDA, and EPA as revolving doors to promote their corporate agenda.

After that we must put forward policy ideas that will protect family farmers, the environment, animal welfare, and consumer safety, while renewing rural America and guaranteeing energy independence.

A first step would be enacting legislation that implements payment limitations, fully funds the Conservation Security Program, regulates CAFOs, encourages transition to organic, natural, humane, and more sustainable practices, labels human food products that contain GMOs, and moves beyond corn-based ethanol.

All eyes are now on the USDA to see if it will become an institution that stands up for the benefit of family farmers across this nation. It is important for our nation’s future to see if, under Vilsack, the department broadens its mandate to include a moral vision that vigorously protects consumer health, animal welfare, and the environment, or if it remains a hegemon of agribusiness interests.

In many ways, Obama’s legacy, as well as Vilsack’s, will be determined by what his administration chooses to do regarding U.S. food and farm policy. Nothing is more important to our existence than food and the soil in which it grows; now that awareness of how our industrial food system is having such a large impact on human health, the environment, the climate, and our rural economies has grown beyond a small circle of experts, it is vital that our leaders create significant change in these critical areas.

The consequences of half-measures, inaction, and divisiveness are too great. It will take visionary leadership and cooperation to correct the problems created by current U.S ag policy and chart a positive course for our collective future. We are in this together.