A note on the politics of food and farming

Clark Stooksbury is right: the question of whether deindustrialized farming practices can be “sustainable on a national scale” is – at this point, anyway – a red herring in the debate over food policy. It’s the subsidies – which benefit globalized agribusiness at the expense of the local and sustainable – that are the chief problem right now; if they go, the market is freed, and we can begin to get a better sense of what it can provide. Whether or not small-scale farming can “replace the present system” is a purely academic question.

In a similar vein, let me express my agreement with Andrew Sullivan on the excellence, and indeed Yglesias Award-worthiness, of this post by David Freddoso:

… today, liberal environmentalists are not the ones pushing ethanol. It’s Agribusiness, all the way. Most reputable liberals believe ethanol to be a big joke — an enormous corporate welfare subsidy with no real benefits and many downsides.

On many issues, Conservatives have more in common with ideological liberals than we do with the business interests that come to Washington looking for a handout. Our goal should be to persuade the Left — to use clear failures we agree on, like ethanol — to demonstrate that Big Business will always come to Washington for handouts until Washington stops giving them altogether. Each new handout is the next ethanol, the next sugar — and once you’ve started giving a handout, it never ends.

This is the kind of thing that needs to be repeated, and repeated, and repeated. The fact that the 2008 Farm Bill includes some $20 million in subsidies of the organic food industry, for example, is something that can easily be pointed to as a positive sign, an example of handouts gone right, the kind of thing that the federal government ought to be doing more of. But organic farming is precisely not – or at least, not always or even usually – sustainable farming, and the federal government’s role in slapping the organic label on anything and everything that meets some set of minimal standards (standards which, by the way, are notoriously expensive for small farmers to meet) has arguably been a step backwards for sustainability. Here, for example, is a bit from the latest issue of Edible East Bay, my local food magazine, about the organic dairy industry:

… while organic milk comes from cows that are required to be free of hormones and antibiotics and fed on grain and grass devoid of pesticides and GMOs, the USDA’s organic standards state only that these cows must be given “access to pasture,” but do not specify how much access. It’s ambiguous enough, argues Cummins, to allow a number of large dairy operations to significantly limit pasture time, instead keeping their herds enclosed for much of the day and feeding them mainly corn and other grains (which cows aren’t naturally meant to eat). More grazing might mean healthier cows, but it also means less milking, Cummins notes, which in turn generates less profit. Large operators often milk their herds up to three times a day. “You can’t milk three times a day and give enough time to pasture,” Cummins says.

Critics of big-dairy organic point to many ways in which the trend is not environmentally sustainable. Problems include the use of fuel for trucking in organic feed and shipping milk across large distances, pollution generated by huge amounts of concentrated waste, and the impact on local agricultural economies and small family farms across the country. A Cornell University study reported that the number of U.S. dairy farms with under 100 cows decreased by almost 50 percent from 1991 to 2000. It’s all a casualty, Cummins argues, of a corporate agricultural system that has rapidly infiltrated the booming organic industry, one that is profit-driven and run by publicly traded companies beholden foremost to their shareholders.

The nation’s two largest organic mega-dairy operators are Horizon and Aurora, both started by corporate-organic pioneer Mark Retzloff. While Horizon draws raw milk from a number of farms, its main dairy is located in the western desert of southern Idaho, where little grass grows and several thousand cows “graze” in an enclosed dry lot. Horizon is the nation’s largest organic dairy brand and in 1998 became the first publicly traded organic food company in the country. The younger Aurora, which brought in over $100 million in sales last year, operates five dairies in mostly arid regions of Colorado and Texas and has its own processing facilities. The nation’s leading private-label organic milk producer, it supplies organic dairy products to Safeway, Costco, and WalMart under their own respective brand names.

Cummins says neither company provides its herds with adequate pasture time, and their animals are not always raised organically from birth. “It’s no better to buy bogus organic milk produced on a factory farm than it is local, [conventional] milk,” he says.

It’s eminently questionable, of course, whether the fact that food producers are “driven by profits” is really the source of our troubles – Mark McAfee’s Organic Pastures raw milk dairy, which I profile in my Doublethink piece, is a multi-million-dollar operation replete with its own airstrip, and McAfee has actively courted the fortunes of venture capitalists. It’s also very much a place where quality matters, but what McAfee has realized is that – so long as government will leave him the hell alone – he can make loads of money by producing a high-quality product and selling it to the small but growing segment of the population willing to pay top dollar for it. Is this an approach that’s going to be able to provide milk to the entire U.S.? Of course not, but that doesn’t mean that government needs to be in the business of propping up McAfee’s competition.

The crucial point, though, is that that $20 million that will be spent on the Organic Agriculture Research and Extension Initiative will be going, not to the small, innovative farmers who produce a variety of seasonal crops and sell them locally through farm markets, CSAs, roadside stands, and small groceries, but rather to

• … administer competitive research grants, largely through USDA’s Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service. Research is to focus on determining desirable traits for organic commodities; identifying marketing and policy constraints on the expansion of organic agriculture; and conducting advanced research on organic farms, including production, marketing, and socioeconomic research.
• Other research and extension provisions for organic agriculture that are authorized, but not mandated, include data development on organic agricultural production and marketing; facilitated access to organic research conducted outside the United States for research and extension professionals, farmers, and others; and a mandated report on the need for additional funding for research and promotion of organic agricultural products.

… and so on. That’s to say, such federal monies will benefit the Mark Retzloffs of the world much more than the Joel Salatins or even the Mark McAfees. And this is arguably the case with organic “certification” more generally: it works in favor of those large-scale, industrial producers who can find ways to come into minimal compliance with the guidelines, and very much against those who try to go above and beyond them. Everyone gets the same label, consumers are freed from the sense that they ought perhaps to do some work to figure out where their food is coming from and how it is produced, and the race goes to the compliant rather than the creative.

It should go without saying that it would be quite a different story if the large-scale producers were to end up succeeding, as they surely would, in cornering a large share of a free – that is to say unsubsidized, choice-maximizing, and only very minimally regulated – market. The same goes if BP wants to give my university billions of dollars in research on biofuels: if they deem it to be potentially profitable, they should be encouraged to give it a go, but to the extent that their investment was motivated by the promise of federal subsidies, it represented a failure of scientific innovation rather than a success. We’ll never find out what is and isn’t sustainable until we stop piling free manure on the latest industries of choice.

Filed under: agriculture, conservatism, economics, environment, food, government/law