The joys of Small Farming in the USA

Sad editorial at the New York Times regarding the control that our government has over what a farmer can grow. And it is going to get worse with the new Farm Bill.

My Forbidden Fruits (and Vegetables)
If you�ve stood in line at a farmers� market recently, you know that the local food movement is thriving, to the point that small farmers are having a tough time keeping up with the demand.

But consumers who would like to be able to buy local fruits and vegetables not just at farmers� markets, but also in the produce aisle of their supermarket, will be dismayed to learn that the federal government works deliberately and forcefully to prevent the local food movement from expanding. And the barriers that the United States Department of Agriculture has put in place will be extended when the farm bill that House and Senate negotiators are working on now goes into effect.

As a small organic vegetable producer in southern Minnesota, I know this because my efforts to expand production to meet regional demand have been severely hampered by the Agriculture Department�s commodity farm program. As I�ve looked into the politics behind those restrictions, I�ve come to understand that this is precisely the outcome that the program�s backers in California and Florida have in mind: they want to snuff out the local competition before it even gets started.

Last year, knowing that my own 100 acres wouldn�t be enough to meet demand, I rented 25 acres on two nearby corn farms. I plowed under the alfalfa hay that was established there, and planted watermelons, tomatoes and vegetables for natural-food stores and a community-supported agriculture program.

All went well until early July. That�s when the two landowners discovered that there was a problem with the local office of the Farm Service Administration, the Agriculture Department branch that runs the commodity farm program, and it was going to be expensive to fix.

The commodity farm program effectively forbids farmers who usually grow corn or the other four federally subsidized commodity crops (soybeans, rice, wheat and cotton) from trying fruit and vegetables. Because my watermelons and tomatoes had been planted on �corn base� acres, the Farm Service said, my landlords were out of compliance with the commodity program.

And the reason:

In addition, the bureaucratic entanglements that these two farmers faced at the Farm Service office were substantial. The federal farm program is making it next to impossible for farmers to rent land to me to grow fresh organic vegetables.

Why? Because national fruit and vegetable growers based in California, Florida and Texas fear competition from regional producers like myself. Through their control of Congressional delegations from those states, they have been able to virtually monopolize the country�s fresh produce markets.

That�s unfortunate, because small producers will have to expand on a significant scale across the nation if local foods are to continue to enter the mainstream as the public demands. My problems are just the tip of the iceberg.

This is typical top-down governmental management. There is an incredible market growing for local foods -- with the mess that the whole "Organic" certification has gotten to be (again, thanks Big Agriculture), people are looking for local sustainably grown instead of big-farm organic and having this sort of regulation of land use severely limits the ability of farmers to provide what people are asking for. The editorial goes on to say that a bill to allow variances for small farmers (called FarmFlex) was essentially squashed by big agribusinesses in CA and FL. Sad news...