People Love Local Food. Yet Local Farmers are Disappearing. What’s Going On? (Episode 65)

And so the reality is that as few as two or three companies control just an enormous percentage of the meat that we’re eating.

And then the company, the same company owns the distribution that comes and picks up the chickens, brings it to their company owned slaughterhouse and controls their own packaging. And often even transportation to the retail store. So that consolidation is not just that they control 50% of any one of those operations. But it’s the entire supply chain has become vertically integrated. And the role of the farmer has become diminished and along with that, the power of the farmer has also become diminished where farmers are now in most of these sectors price takers rather than price makers. And are really subject to the whims of their corporate buyers.

And so that’s getting some attention and momentum on capital hill and certainly shores up what a lot of advocates and farmers have been saying for a long time, which is that the farmers are controlled so much by the corporate processors and sort of the end buyer that they don’t have the authority and agency that we would associate with an independent business person.

That they should reevaluate whether the loans are actually serving the farmer or if they’re serving the corporation. So there’s been a little bit of movement on it. We’ll have to see whether the SBA does move ahead with shifting its loan giving practices.

And cooperatives were originally conceptualized in the sector as a means for farmers to have a bargaining power against powerful middle men. But over time the cooperatives themselves have become so powerful that now we see more like a relationship between the cooperative and the processor than the cooperative and the farmer. And so that has become a very difficult thing for many farmers to navigate. And particularly in the northeast, there is often issues trying to switch between different cooperatives. Farmers will find that other cooperatives aren’t taking on new farmers or that their cooperative has an unspoken agreement with the competitor that they won’t sort of poach each other’s farmers.

And so if farmers are struggling to make ends meet with the prices they have, basically their only option is to tough it out or to sell their cows. And that’s why we’re seeing such a dramatic drop in the number of farms.

I know that we’ve seen in California and Arizona these huge dairy farms with thousands and thousands of cows. Is that something that, if we can get cheaper milk through these big farms, isn’t that something that we should be in favor of even if we feel nostalgic about the lost dairy farm?

And I think that that’s a set of policies that, now, is seen as antithetical to capitalism, antithetical to American values, but we forget that that was our sort of guiding agricultural philosophy for a long time. And it was only the introduction of the idea of quote “free market” agricultural economy that overturns the plan management and moved us more towards industrial production and more towards the types of farming that we see today, such as you mentioned farms in California that have hundreds of thousands of cows for dairy production. And so I think that it’s important to recognize that there was a decision to make that transition that was federal policy-makers decided that this was the way we were gonna go for a variety of reasons and incentives, and that there are other models, if we look to other countries. For instance, Canada has always had certain types of supply management in their dairy economy. And if we also just look back to our own history not so long ago.

You’re listening to Leah Douglas, a staff writer and associate editor and the Food and Environmental Reporting Network. I’m Stacy Mitchell, with the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, we’ll be right back after a short break.

Hello everyone. Thanks again for listening to Building Local Power, I hope you’re enjoying today’s episode. I wanted to take just a short break today to let you know about a few of the other ways that you can get involved with the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. If you like this podcast, you might also really appreciate our newsletters, and we have several. The one that I’d recommend if you’re particularly interested in following issues of corporate concentration, a growing movement around addressing monopoly power, is our Hometown Advantage newsletter. It’s got our latest writing on corporate power, companies like Amazon and Wal-Mart, plus it’s got great stories and resources on how communities are effectively fighting back.

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Alright, and we’re back with Leah Douglas, staff writer and editor at the Food and Environmental Reporting Network. So, just before the break, we were talking some about supply management, and I wanted to just dig in a little bit more to why that shift happened. As I understand it, in the early part of the 20th century, we used to have policies that, as you said, basically put a floor below which the prices that farmers were paid couldn’t drop. They had to get a minimum sort of price, and there was also a management on the overall supply so that the market wouldn’t become so flooded with milk, for example, that prices would crash and then farmers would be left not able to get the money they’d put in to producing milk back out of it.

My understanding, from looking at some of your reporting on this, is that that system seemed to work pretty well, that it was a pretty sustainable way to go for rural economies, pretty good for maintaining a good, affordable supply of food. Tell me a little bit about the moment when we abandoned that, and how that came about.

And so, as a result, in the decades shortly after that, there was a massive shift towards producing certain types of commodities very intensively in a practice that’s now called “mono-cropping,” which means planting the same crop over hundreds and hundreds of acres without much rotation, without much regenerative soil practice. And that was a period of time where we saw this major change taking place.

Though I will say, I think that these are still controversial ideas, and I think that there’s … I’ve heard from a number of farmers that the idea of particularly drawing land out of agricultural production in order to control supply is something that’s quite controversial because farmers feel very sensitive to wanting to work and the idea that certain land would not be worked in order to maintain a certain commodity level, is very unappealing to a lot of farmers. There’s certainly a good argument to be made there, too. So I think that there’s …What’s interesting, and I think unique, about this moment is just the amount of conversation and openness to new ideas and to pushing back on this sort of system that’s become so overwhelming and so the harms of consolidation are becoming so apparent that new partnerships are being made and new bridges being built between different types of producers who can all identify that this sort of era of corporate control is not serving them.

This is an issue for low-income families of all races and across the country, but it’s been a particular issue for black farmers in the Southeast, where there’s a very high concentration of heir’s property-owners. And so there’s been decades of advocacy done on behalf of those farmers and by those farmers to change some of the laws and regulations in USDA, the Department of Agriculture, because if you don’t have a clear title to your land, then you’re not able to participate in most types of USDA programs, including getting loans through the Farm Service Agency, which is known as quote, “the lender of last resort,” for farmers who have trouble accessing capital through other means.

And because farming is such a loan-dependent industry, FSA loans are really essential tool that heir’s property-owners have been boxed out of. And so, this farm bill, in large part due to the work of the Congressional Black Caucus, which really took on this issue, includes some stipulations that USDA is going to provide some services to families that own heir’s property to help them figure out who might be a clear owner to the land, and help them simplify their titles, and then also to lower the bar for accessing a farm number, which is the piece of information you need to get into these USDA programs.

So this is the first time that this issue’s been taken up by the farm bill, and it’s quite exciting for many advocates who have been working on the issue for a long time.

One area I think is really interesting is to look at certain laws that have been taken up by farm industry groups as sort of vehicles for deregulation even though on their face the laws are pitched as protections as farmers. So a couple examples of these laws would be Ag-gag laws which are laws that prevent documentation of farms, farming operations. And then some states it goes so far as to prevent even photo journalism or other types of public interest documentation of what’s happening at large scale farms.

Another bucket of laws that’s similar to this is right to farm laws which exists in every state. And are basically, were originally imagined as just protecting farmers from basic, sort of nuisance lawsuits. So if a neighbor didn’t like the smell of five pigs living next door they couldn’t sue the farm out of business. That bucket of laws has been taken up by the food industry and their perimeters have been greatly expanded through lobbying at the state level to encompass all types of restrictions on what farms can be sued for. So, and to be clear, when I’m saying farms, quote on quote, the visual is more like a contained animal feeding operation, a massive industrial scale farm, not a mom-and-pop operation.

Unfortunately, in the case where those CAFO’s are driven by a corporate factor, what we’ve also seen is that if one community succeeds at fending off the introduction of a new CAFO the company can pick up and move to the next state over or the next community over where maybe the people there have less resources, maybe they just don’t have enough capacity to fight it off. And they can then plant the CAFO there. So that’s another way where it can be still important to think about the national context of these corporate entities. Because as long as they still have that national reach they’re still able to move their operations around and dodge some of these fights. But with that particular example of, Lone Jack is the name of the town in Missouri, is quite optimistic.

Well that’s great. I have just a couple of last questions for you. I’m gonna ask you for some recommendations, both reading and drinking recommendations. But first, I was actually curious to know a little bit about how did you get into this? How did you become such a passionate advocate for food systems and so interested in reporting on it?