While farmers were the star of the show at last Friday’s antitrust hearing in Ankeny, Iowa, the debate over the monopolization of farming is one where all of our interests are squarely at stake.

Anyone who eats and has a brain should be downright terrified that just a few giant businesses control the vast majority of food available to us as consumers.  Perhaps that explains why more than 15,000 people submitted comments in anticipation of the hearings – four more of which are scheduled this year as a joint effort of the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

To his credit, Attorney General Eric Holder seemed to be trying not to mince words in Iowa – always tough for an attorney – and particularly so for one under the right’s atomic microscope.  Noting that farming “has been at the core of the American economy ever since there was an American economy,” he went on to say, “[W]e’ve learned the hard way that . . . long periods of reckless deregulation can foster practices that are anti-competitive and even illegal. . . .  We know that a growing number of American farmers find it increasingly difficult to survive by doing what they’ve done for decades. And we’ve learned that some of them believe the competitive environment may be, at least in part, to blame.”

Farmers who attended a pre-hearing meeting Thursday evening made the case for themselves.  Noting that farming goes back “forever in my family,” Todd Leake, who grows wheat, soybeans, sunflowers and navy beans in North Dakota, said, “The crops we grow are the basis of civilization.  If anything belongs to the public domain, if anything belongs to the people of the world, it’s the crops we grow for food.”

Iowa hog farmer Larry Ginter, a long-time opponent of factory farms, also made the connection between the plight of American farmers and the struggles of so many people outside our borders, saying,”  “Labor, family farms, democratic rights are in a pitched battle against the dictatorship of capital. We’ve got to understand that this is an international struggle.  Those Mexican workers coming up here are family farmers. Those Sudanese workers in the packing plants are family farmers and workers being driven off by the big dictatorship of capital. We have to understand that we are not alone in America.” Urging his fellow farmers to action, Ginter concluded, “Nothing can happen on the farms unless farmers turn the wheel and plant the seed.”

Wisconsin dairy farmer Joel Greeno, said “My parents’ 29^th wedding anniversary was a farm foreclosure. Their 30^th anniversary was a sheriff’s auction on the courthouse steps.  My neighbor’s farm was stolen from him that was owned since 1942 by his family. He came to ask how to get food stamps because he’d always lived off his farm, no longer had that, and said that his social security of  $9,000 a year couldn’t feed him.  This has got to end. Washington has got to step up.  DOJ is our only lifeboat. They have to fix this. They have to correct it. Monsanto does not have the right to dictate the value of my life, my work, and the food I produce. Kraft Food does not have the right to set the price of my milk, which they do without question.”

Patrick Woodall, a research director for Food and Water Watch, and a panelist at the hearings said, “At the end of the day, farmers and activists could speak truth to power and delivered a tough message to the regulators that action was long overdue, it was time to bust the agribusiness trusts and level the playing field for farmers and consumers. Many audience members, like Marcia Ishii-Eiteman from Pesticide Action Network North America, also challenged the reliance on agrochemical inputs and the false hope of genetically modified crops.”

U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack said, “This is not just about farmers and ranchers. It’s really about the survival of rural America.”

He’s right, of course, but that’s not just some romantic Rockwellesque notion; almost anyone who eats depends on a shrinking number of farmers struggling at the other end of our fork. If they disappear, our freedom to eat what we choose will vanish as well.

The delegation came here to evaluate how the United States operates within Codex Alimentarius compliance standards. Their visit ran the gamut from meeting with folks from ADM and Pfizer to meeting with Consumers Union and Food and Water Watch. Their agenda offered them the opportunity to hear a wide range of opinions. And among our visitors, there was clearly a diversity of opinion as well.

photo by Robin Madel

Russia is not currently producing enough food for its people, relying heavily on imports.  Aware that the desire to rapidly increase food production could result in the adoption of unsustainable practices, we spent much of our time with our visitors talking about what we believe is wrong with American-style industrial agriculture.

Most meat produced in the United States comes from confined animal feeding operations that pollute our water and air, while torturing the livestock unfortunate enough to be born into these horrendous environments. While the United States currently lacks the processing and distribution infrastructure to make sustainably-produced meat readily available, change is in the air, with both government agencies like the USDA and food activists working to change this picture. And, while sustainably raised meat is expensive, as my colleague pointed out, when you factor in the costs of industrial meat – including direct subsidies and the environmental and health costs, sustainably raised meat starts to look like the better bargain.

As things stand now in the United States, the rush to monopolize food and collect fat profits has left us with unsustainable factory farms, genetically-modified organisms that have never been found to be safe, and a water and air pollution problem that we are only just beginning to get our heads around. Russia, in its rush to produce food quickly, could face a similar fate unless the nation is mindful and deliberate in how it proceeds. It would be wonderful if, instead of going down this same dirty, destructive road, our Russian friends can, instead, learn from our mistakes.

This case hinged substantively on whether the construction was defined as a new facility, or an expansion of an existing facility, under the Illinois Livestock Management Facilities Act.  The act was amended by the Illinois legislature in 1996 in recognition of the fact that market forces were leading to the construction of larger CAFOs, which increased the threat of groundwater and air pollution.  To balance these issues with the state’s desire to promote agriculture, the updated law requires “minimum setbacks, stiffer design requirements, and an opportunity for public notice, comment and hearing” when a new animal confinement facility is proposed.

According to the Illinois Appellate Court – which issued the ruling the state Supreme Court refused to review – the farmer who is the defendant in this lawsuit, “admitted [that] the location of the proposed facility would violate setback requirements” if the CAFO he plans to construct was considered new.  However, the same court accepted the defendant’s argument that the planned structure qualifies as an expansion of an existing CAFO under the law, and therefore does not trigger the more stringent environmental requirements imposed on new facilities.

The farmer’s claim that he is “expanding” his facility, rather than building a new one, was based upon his plans to build on the site of a hog confinement building that was demolished in 2004 and which housed, at times, as many as 2,300 animals.  Supporting his claim was a finding by a state agriculture department employee that the cost of the proposed “expansion” would be less than half the cost of a “new” facility.  Under the Livestock Management Facilities Act, an expansion that costs less than half of what it would cost to build a new CAFO is not deemed a new facility.

The CAFO to be built will house 3,750 hogs – about 62 percent more than the one that was demolished in 2004 – bringing 62 percent more waste to a community with at least 60 homes within a two mile radius.  In fact, even as they ruled against the community, the appellate court wrote, “plaintiff no doubt has valid concerns about the arrival of 3,750 hogs in the neighborhood.”

The dissenting judge on the three judge panel reasoned that the court should have considered “not necessarily whether the defendant’s project constitutes a ‘new’ facility, but whether it is the sort of project that [the] legislature intended to be subjected to more strenuous notice, processing, and setback requirements.”  To support this contention, he cited a 1988 case in which the Illinois Appellate Court found that expansion of a landfill could trigger the more stringent requirements and review generally reserved under the law for a “new” landfill because it, “in effect, increases its capacity to accept and dispose of waste.”

In the landfill ruling, the court took into account that “adjusting the dimensions of a landfill . . . will surely have an impact on the ‘danger to the surrounding area.’”  Sadly, in deciding the CAFO lawsuit, the court failed to make this connection between the consequences of its ruling and the legislature’s intent to prevent environmental and public health damage from the construction of large factory farms.

Illinois courts routinely allow defendants to sue the losing party for fees and damages when a trial court’s preliminary injunction is found to have been “wrongly issued,” as the appeals court ultimately decided happened in this case.  This appears to leave the plaintiffs, area residents who came together to address environmental concerns about this new factory farm, holding the Big Feed bag.

Last May, when New York politicians announced zoning changes and tax incentives to address the huge problem of food access — or lack thereof — in many New York City neighborhoods, food advocates and community activists thought the plan could be improved.  They quickly mobilized and today, the new, improved, Food Retail Expansion to Support Health (FRESH) bill is slated for passage by the New York City Council.

City officials estimate that the FRESH program will help build 15 new grocery stores and upgrade 10 existing stores over ten years, while creating 1,100 new jobs and retaining 400 more. The program’s financial incentives include real estate tax abatements, as well as tax exemptions on materials used to construct, renovate or equip grocery stores.  These publicly financed benefits will be available to store owners in low-income neighborhoods throughout New York City that lack sufficient supermarkets.

Meanwhile, the city’s zoning law will be revised to allow residential developers to build slightly bigger buildings if they include space for a neighborhood grocer on the ground floor.  These zoning incentives will be available in four New York City neighborhoods: the South Bronx, Upper Manhattan, Central Brooklyn and Downtown Jamaica, Queens.  Additional zoning changes will make it easier for grocery stores to be built in light manufacturing districts, where, until now, they were required to obtain a special permit. The new zoning will also reduce the cost of developing grocery stores by reducing the parking that a store is required to build when locating on pedestrian streets.

All of this sounds pretty good, right?  Still, members of the Good Food, Good Jobs Coalition, made up of dozens of labor and community organizations, knew it could be better.  They lobbied tirelessly over the past six months to insert the concerns of workers and working class New Yorkers into the final legislation that is expected to pass today.

The coalition focused their efforts on three key points:

• Making sure that stores that receive FRESH incentives are affordable to low income New Yorkers;

• Giving the community in which stores want to locate a say in considering whether to grant applications for the zoning incentives; and

• Pressuring stores that receive FRESH benefits to provide jobs with fair wages and benefits.

While they didn’t get everything they wanted, thanks to the coalition’s hard work, the final FRESH legislation includes standards designed to make stores that benefit from the program more accountable to the communities they serve:

• All stores that are built or upgraded under the FRESH program will be required to apply to the EBT (Food Stamps) and WIC (the Women, Infant and Children) supplemental nutrition programs to accept these forms of payment.

• To guard against exploitative labor practices, stores will be required to answer questions about their relations with employees before receiving financial subsidies, with the answers posted online so that community and labor watchdogs can effectively weigh in on those decisions, before program applicants are approved or rejected by the city’s Industrial Development Agency.

• Stores that want to take advantage of the zoning incentives will be required to first meet with the local community board, with the board submitting recommendations to the City Planning Department before approval.

On Monday, the coalition hosted a standing-room-only meeting to celebrate their success in having these standards written into the final bill.

With perhaps 500 people attending, Bruce Both, president of United Food and Commercial Workers Union, Local 1500, which represents 23,000 New Yorkers, said “Unless we bring in the concerns of working class people we will not be able to pursue the sustainable food movement in any meaningful way.” Noting the importance of closely scrutinizing business practices, he added, “Even if a store sells fair trade coffee, does that mean it’s fair to its workers?  Businesses that stand to benefit from public subsidies should be held accountable to the public.”

Sustainable chef and food advocate Dan Barber agreed, telling the crowd, “It is time for this movement to broaden its base.”  He also made a pitch for home cooking, noting how much of the environmental damage caused by food comes from processing and packaging.  “None of the issues related to sustainable food will be solved if people don’t cook,” Barber said.

City Council Speaker Christine Quinn ending the meeting by announcing “Food Works New York,” a six month planning initiative to comprehensively link jobs, health, and environmental issues with food for New York City and the surrounding region.

Using the example of romaine lettuce, Quinn noted that, while the city Education Department now buys a huge quantity of lettuce for school salad bars, every bit of it comes from California or Maryland.

“New York City is the largest institutional buyer of food outside aside from the military,” Quinn said. “Right now we have identified famers in Rockland County [which is just 12 miles northwest of the city] who would love to supply New York City’s schools with lettuce, but they can’t. Why not?  Because we don’t have a wash and bag facility in any of the five boroughs – something that we could build to create jobs and support our local economy.  We talk a lot in New York City about getting food to poor people, which is a good thing.  Let’s also use food to get people jobs, so that they can afford to feed their families.”

Well, one thing’s for sure. While Quinn and the city council pursue Food Works New York, members of the Good Jobs Good Food coalition will be right there, looking over their shoulders, keeping them on the right track.

When writer and former Mademoiselle editor Eleanor Perényi died in May at 91, her New York Times obituary noted that she used her “years of toil in her Connecticut garden as a window onto the wider social world, ranging over history, myth and philosophy.”  All true – bewitchingly so – especially to someone like me, without a deep sense of ancient history, as Perényi excelled at describing growing practices and agricultural customs going back thousands of years.

She also had compelling views, not found elsewhere to my knowledge, about the use of gardens and flowers in suppressing, even imprisoning, women, across the centuries and hemispheres, arguing that while women invented crop agriculture while men were off hunting, they were later relegated for thousands of years to growing flowers, “of all plants the least menacing and the most useless.  Their sole purpose is to be beautiful and give pleasure,” she added.  Employing references ranging from the bible to Medieval gardening texts and the ancient Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon, Perényi went so far as to write, for example, “one of the principal functions of the . . .  garden from Turkey to China was the incarceration of women.”

What the Times failed to note, surprisingly, is that  Perényi, whose Green Thoughts: A Writer in the Garden, is a much beloved classic, was decades ahead of her time in delineating the noxious effects of industrial agriculture that define much of our food politics today.

Thirty years ago, describing how the federal Plant Variety Protection Act of 1970 led to reduced public funding for agricultural research, Perényi wrote:

Patenting has suddenly meant big money and the emergence of seed companies, once largely in private, family-owned hands, as worthwhile victims of conglomerate takeover, often by petrochemical giants.  Most gardeners don’t know this.  They see the friendly face of David Burpee and read his message (‘Dear Friends and Fellow Gardeners’) on the second page of the catalogue as of old. But Burpee no longer belongs to the Burpee family who founded the business in 1876.  It is the property of ITT . . . .

Shell, Monsanto, Pfizer, Celanese and Upjohn all have made inroads into the seed business in recent years.

Only the most blissfully ignorant will have to be told that this is sinister news, that the interests of these companies aren’t ours.

Bearing out her warnings, of the 27 seed and plant sources Perényi critiqued in her book, I could find evidence of just seven still in existence. She went on:

The green revolution may yet turn into a green nightmare; for not only do the new hybrids lack the resilience of the older native strains with their built-in adaptation to local conditions, they depend for their success on chemical fertilizers and pesticides – which, aside from other disadvantages, are for the most part manufactured by western conglomerates that are in turn dependent on that other scarce resource: oil.

Perényi, who never completed high school, was a cultured, self-educated woman who made a living writing articles for The Atlantic Monthly, Harpers, Vogue, The New York Times and other publications, as well as several books.  In the early 1960s she was commissioned to interview Organic Gardening founder Jerome Rodale, and later called her visit to his farm “one of the more inspiring events in my life.”

Adhering to organic practices, Perényi raised hundreds of varieties of fruits, vegetables, herbs, trees, shrubs and flowers over 30 years, relying on rotted manure, plant compost, and seaweed that she gathered along the nearby Connecticut shoreline to fertilize the soil.  Her observations on what makes a healthy garden, and on the death cycle wrought by pesticides, are the same ones clean food advocates are advancing today:

. . . [N]ature left alone will strike a tolerable balance among the predators. And we organic gardeners had better be right because time is running out on the indiscriminate users of chemicals. A point of no return has already been reached in several parts of the world where more and more deadly pesticides are deployed against insects more and more able to resist them, natural controls are destroyed, and the ecology is in ruins.  Diseases aren’t being cured either.  On the contrary, as more land is devoted to single, high-yield, high-profit crops like wheat and soybeans planted in the same soil year after year, blights are both more frequent and more devastating. . . .

You would expect the agricultural establishment, dominated as it is in large part by the petrochemical industry, to set its face against change and to loose a barrage of defensive propaganda – and it has.  What you ought not to expect is for the gardening press, with so much less to lose, to follow suit – as it has.  Gardening books, newspaper columns, radio programs devoted to answering gardeners’ questions, continue to give the impression that sprays (and chemical fertilizers) are the answer to everything, with no hint that alternatives exist, let alone that there is a school of thought totally opposed to both.

Compost of course is basic.  Aside from its fertilizing and soil-conditioning properties, it teems with antibiotics and is thus the best insurance against disease.

There are other secrets to a healthy garden, and one of them . . . is to have it full of a number of things: vegetables, flowers, herbs, small fruits and berries, rather than the sparsely planted modern plot.  The kitchen garden in particularly oughtn’t to consist of a limited number of vegetables in segregated rows.  This may satisfy a sense of order but is an invitation to predators and diseases to demolish a crop overnight.

While it’s interesting to read these arguments foreshadowing what has evolved into today’s sustainable food movement and a quickly emerging political force, the best reason to read Perényi is to savor her sharp wit, practical knowledge of hundreds of plants, and the evident joy she took in her garden.

An American who married a Hungarian Baron from whom she later divorced, Perényi first learned to work with the earth on her husband’s 750 acre 400 year old farm in Ruthenia (Ukraine).  However, she never saw her work there grow to fruition.  Even as she planted perennials, she later wrote:

[T]he first guns of World War II were booming on the other side of the mountains at our backs, in Poland.  I could hear them while I worked and the premonition I had then was fulfilled.  I knew I wouldn’t see my plantings come to maturity, and I didn’t. The property is now a state farm, the castle, minus most of its looted furnishings, a museum; that part of old Hungary is now incorporated into the Soviet Union.

My second garden, as readers will see, is on the Connecticut coast.  I took it up with reluctance, not because it was less grand than my Hungarian one, but because I am one of those unfortunates who when they lose something they love can’t immediately replace it with a new model.  I grieved over my lost garden and all that went with it, and I didn’t want, ever again, to be attached to a piece of ground. But it didn’t work out like that.  Gradually I did become attached.  Gardening became my avocation and greatest pleasure.

As someone who has read Green Thoughts many times over, and continues to consult it for inspiration and advice, I will always be grateful that Perényi relented, allowing herself to take on a second garden which, even the casual reader will quickly realize, became the love of her life.

With the U.S. economy in freefall, the number of people receiving federal food assistance benefits grew by nearly four million nationwide in 2008. In October the Food Stamp program, whose roots stretch back to the Food Stamp Plan of 1939, was renamed SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), to signal a stronger focus on nutrition – on helping low-income Americans put healthier food on their plates.

While SNAP funds can be used to buy Doritos and Twinkies, after a decade of public health alarms about obesity, heart disease and diabetes, program administrators are trying to reverse the longstanding trend of poor people often eating the least nutritious food. This has strengthened advocates’ arguments that farmers’ markets should be outfitted to accept payment using the Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) debit card system that replaced paper Food Stamps a decade ago.

Items that can be purchased with SNAP benefits at farmers’ markets include the whole cornucopia of meat, fish, produce, eggs, dairy, bread and other baked goods, as well as products like jam and honey. However, getting the payment system in place has been complicated, because markets don’t have the electric hookups and phone lines to allow individual vendors to process EBT payments.

Today, New York is a national leader in making SNAP work at farmers’ markets. From 2002 to2007, Food Stamp dollars spent at the state’s farmers’ markets grew from just $3,000 to $90,000. By 2008, 112 markets were equipped with EBT technology. Even so, that’s just over a quarter of the roughly 400 farmers’ markets throughout New York.

Diane Eggert, director of the New York Farmers’ Market Federation, anticipates that SNAP dollars spent at the state’s farmers’ markets will increase “three to four times this year over last, based on the growing interest in access to local food and greater need for food stamps as unemployment skyrockets.” The Federation administers New York’s farmers’ market EBT program, so I asked Eggert why so many of the markets still don’t accept SNAP payments.

“It’s time consuming and there’s a lot of back-end labor,” she explained. Getting the EBT technology into a farmers’ market is just the first step. Along with the machines, the markets are issued tokens or other scrip that SNAP participants purchase and then use to buy food. The vendors, in turn, redeem the scrip for cash. EBT sales and use of the scrip must be carefully tracked and logged.

In addition to handling the administrative work, more outreach is essential. “Promotional work needs to be done so that consumers know they can use their SNAP allocation at farmers’ markets,” Eggert said. The Federation is working hard to spread the word through food pantries and other community service organizations. They also do outreach through WIC (Women, Infants and Children), the federal program that funds supplemental food for pregnant and nursing mothers and their young children.

Through its Farmers Market Nutrition Program, WIC also gives money to 46 states to issue coupons that can be used to buy food at farmers markets authorized to accept them. In 2007, more about 1,300 farmers markets, road side stands, and farmers in New York State alone were authorized to sell food to WIC coupon holders. While the dollar amounts are tiny – just $24 for an entire season in New York, for example – the hope is that they will introduce low income residents to local sources of fresh food.

All told, as of June 2008 there were 605 farmers’ markets nationwide equipped with EBT technology, a 14 percent increase over the previous year. But while some states, such as California, Connecticut, Michigan, and Missouri, are rapidly increasing the number of farmers’ markets that accept SNAP benefits, others have only a few. Those of us who routinely shop at the markets can help by asking whether they have EBT. If the answer is no, be prepared to explain that not only will accepting SNAP benefits help low-income Americans eat better food, it will increase market sales and support for local farmers.

While Eggert called New York unique in running the SNAP program at farmers’ markets state-wide, markets across the country that accept EBT funds “tend to do an excellent job of outreach,” she said, adding, “This effort is in its infancy. But the U.S.D.A. is encouraging it, and they are working on developing guidelines.”

Meanwhile, much more outreach is needed to sign people up for SNAP benefits. Income levels of people who are eligible to receive benefits this year range from about $13,500 for a single person to $18,200 for a family of two, $27,500 for a family of four, and so on.

As unemployment rises and the nation continues shedding jobs, at least 30 percent of eligible Americans and immigrants are not enrolled for this crucial form of food assistance, so every voice is needed to help spread the word!

food stamps, federal assistance, wic, snap, supplemental nutrition assistance program, farmers markets