FamilyFarmed Expo and Food Policy Summit

The sixth FamilyFarmed Expo will take place in Chicago March 17-19, with programming for farmers, local food businesses, restaurants, and policy advocates. There will be a conference March 17 on farm financing issues, and a Chicago Food Policy Summit March 18.

Hispanic farmers seek class action status for discrimination suit

Although the U.S. Department of Agriculture has been compensating Black farmers who sued for past discrimination in USDA programs over many years, Hispanic farmers who allege similar discrimination have not been certified as a legal "class" that can jointly bring a lawsuit. The Hispanic farmers are still permitted to bring individual lawsuits alleging discrimination, but these are expensive and have little chance of success.

NPR's All Things Considered yesterday afternoon emphasized similarities between the two legal disputes, suggesting that the Hispanic farmers are being treated unfairly by comparison to Black farmers in similar circumstances.

Soon after President Reagan took office in the early 1980s, the USDA's civil rights division was quietly dismantled. Nevertheless, the agency continued to tell farmers that if they felt they weren't getting loans because of their color or gender, they should file a complaint.

But for the next 14 years, those complaints were put into an empty government office and never investigated. By the 1990s, black farmers filed a lawsuit — Pigford v. Glickman. Because the USDA failed to investigate years of discrimination complaints, U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman certified the black farmers' case as a class action. And with that ruling, rather than risk a trial, the federal government settled with 15,000 black farmers for $1 billion.

The next year, Hispanic farmers filed their lawsuit. And although their discrimination complaints had been thrown into the same empty USDA office, the judge in their case decided the Hispanic farmers would not be allowed to sue as a class.

I looked up the 2006 decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals, to see if the court mentioned any differences between the class-action petition of the Hispanic farmers and the earlier lawsuit by Black farmers. That appeals court decision centered on a debate about statistics. Because the USDA program rules on their face seemed to be non-discriminatory, the lawyers for the Hispanic farmers needed to show that there was systematic discrimination in practice.

First, an econometrician, Jerry Hausman, showed that Hispanic farmers seemed to get USDA program support at lower rates than non-Hispanic farmers. But, opposing attorneys and their experts pointed out that many of the Hispanic farmers may have never applied for support, in which case USDA could not be blamed if the farmers did not receive report. Second, the farmers presented another statistical analysis that appeared to show differences in USDA data for Hispanic and non-Hispanic loan applicants. But, opposing attorneys argued that some of the Hispanic applicants might not have been citizens, or they may have had deficient applications in other respects that were not "controlled" using regression analysis.

However, details such as citizenship information were not provided in the USDA data that were available for the second analysis. At one point, the author of this analysis, Karl Pavlovic, gave vent to his frustration (.pdf):

Dr. Freedman [the opposing expert] is simply using the myriad deficiencies in the databases produced by USDA to play a speculative game of 'gotcha' against the simple analyses that can be performed with the limited data produced. USDA produced some boards and a few nails. Dr. Freedman then criticizes my analyses for being a serviceable raft and not the Queen Mary.

As with many policy arguments, the question turns on where one places the burden of proof when absolutely clear answers cannot be found. The USDA and the court of appeals place the full burden on the plaintiffs to provide proofs that rule out alternative explanations for the disparate treatment of Hispanic farmers by USDA programs.

Because the chosen standard of proof is essentially impossible, this approach would mean that a farmer who faced real discrimination would not in fact be able to pursue a remedy through USDA or the courts.

US dairy crisis, message from Willie Nelson & Farm Aid

The drastic drop in milk prices paid to farmers over the past year has led to an unprecedented crisis for dairy farmers who, on average, are being paid less than half the cost of production. Low prices and high production costs threaten to push nearly one-third of dairy farmers off their land over the next couple of months, strengthening corporate control of the dairy industry and severely impacting the health of local and regional economies nationwide.

“Setting a fair price for milk won’t fix all the problems that led to the current crisis, but it may be the only way to keep thousands of dairy farmers on their farms this year,” said Farm Aid board member Willie Nelson. “Unless Secretary Vilsack takes immediate action, huge areas of the United States may be left without any local dairy farms at all.”

Dairy farmers have been hit with a catastrophic combination of factors beyond their control. Farmers are struggling to pay bills from record high feed and fuel costs; adequate credit is increasingly impossible to come by; and the price of milk paid to farmers by processors collapsed a record 30 percent in January alone, and is currently down 50 percent since July 2008. In the meantime, the top dairy processors have recently announced 2009 first quarter earnings that are up from the same period last year. The top processor, Dean Foods, reported their first quarter earnings are more than double that of last year thanks in part to the plunging price Dean pays to its milk producers.

Under Section 608c (18) of the Agricultural Marketing Agreement Act of 1937, the Secretary of Agriculture is required to adjust the price of milk paid to farmers to “reflect the price of feeds, the available supplies of feeds, and other economic conditions which affect market supply and demand for milk and its products.” Farm Aid urges Secretary Vilsack to use this power to immediately institute a set price for milk that reflects the cost of production, keeping dairy farmers on their land.

“The U.S. has a tradition of local and regional milk distribution, making dairy farmers a base for strong local and regional economies. The loss of these farms will reduce spending in small businesses, investments in banks and shrink the community tax base. If we lose a third of our dairy farms in the next few months alone, imagine the impact on these economies by year’s end.” said Carolyn Mugar, executive director of Farm Aid. “As our independent family dairy farmers go out of business, our milk supply gets more consolidated by giant confinement dairies that do not contribute to our local economies or act of stewards of the land like our family farmers do.”

The petition can be accessed by going to www.farmaid.org/dairyfarmers

Following Parke's lead, I would like to disclose that I am (proud to be) interning at Farm Aid. Cross posted from Epicurean Ideal.

Farmers market season is back

Thank goodness. I don't know if it's me, but produce in the grocery store seems scary. This is likely attributed to the information I receive in my classes. Is ignorance truly bliss? Nay. Regardless, there is something endearing of purchasing vibrant colored produce at an outdoor market in the community. Getting to meet farmers, neighbors and artisans is a perk. Fresh produce that was picked fairly close by is the prize. Can't wait to pull out my Moosewood Cookbooks and start eating more seasonal foods from my favorite food group: VEGGIES!I love the Moosewood collection. Very simple instructions and ingredients and mostly vegetarian.

Here is the press release for the Massachusetts farmers market season kick-off:

Winter is over and Farmers Markets are back!

We know you’ve missed us, but don’t despair, the wait is over! The Federation of Mass Farmers Markets is pleased to announce the opening of our local farmers markets. In just a few days – on Tuesday, May 19th – the Copley Square market in Boston will open for the season. The Copley Square market is one of our largest and runs from 11:00am to 6:00pm every Tuesday and Friday from May 19th through November 24th. Buy your fresh veggies, local meats, artisan breads, jams, delicious sandwiches, and fruits of all kinds here. It’s so much more vibrant than the produce aisle at the supermarket.

If you don’t live near Back Bay you still have plenty of other options. Other markets run by Mass Farmers Markets include:

* City Hall market in Boston, which begins May 27th and runs on Mondays and Wednesdays
* Davis Square farmers market in Somerville, which begins May 27th and runs on Wednesdays
* Central Square market in Cambridge, which begins June 1st and runs on Mondays
* Framingham Village Green market, which begins June 11th and runs on Thursdays.

Visit www.massfarmersmarkets.org for a complete list of the 180-plus farmers markets opening across the state over the next few months.

Once the markets are open you can look forward to fresh produce local to your area. Great finds in May include arugula, mesclun mix, and chard. You’ll also see tender asparagus, tangy garlic scapes, fava beans, and maybe fiddleheads if you’re lucky. Radishes, rhubarb, strawberries, and peas will follow as May blends into June. And don’t forget: cheese, baked goods, preserves, locally raised meat, and other goodies are always available and locally made by our vendors.

So, stop by the market closest to you. You'll help support local farmers, learn about your community, and get a fantastic meal in the process.

About Mass Farmers Markets

Mass Farmers Markets is a non-profit organization that harnesses the power of farmers markets to create healthy communities across the state. MFM is the only organization working state-wide to facilitate relationships between farmers and consumers of all income levels in order to improve the livelihood of farmers and increase access to fresh, local food. For more information, visit www.massfarmersmarkets.org.

Cross-posted from Epicurean Ideal.

Returns to scale in organic and local agriculture

At the third annual graduate student research conference organized by Friedman School students this past weekend, I moderated a session with three fascinating presentations by Robert Paarlberg, Susan Roberts, and Mark Winne.

Paarlberg praised the environmental potential of new "precision farming" technologies in conventional agriculture. He recommended targeted commercial pesticide applications and GMOs over organic agriculture. He argued that the alternative good food movement's emphasis on older food and farming traditions cause the movement to overlook the new industrial technologies that could really make a bigger difference for the environment.

One of his punchiest claims was that organic and local agriculture hinders the adoption of new pro-environmental technologies by preventing farmers from reaching adequate scale. Yet, when pressed, he agreed that most high-technology agriculture in the United States is conducted by farms with a scale of several hundred thousand dollars to a couple million dollars in sales. This is larger than your neighborhood CSA but not really very big from the perspective of most U.S. industries. Certainly, even within a particular small regional foodshed such as New England, there is room in the market for many competitive producers on this scale. Similarly, the federal government's organic labeling standard allows farmers of all scales to be organic.

Reflecting on Paarlberg's presentation, I could not see how local and organic agriculture really threatened most of the environmental farming technologies that Paarlberg finds most promising (GMOs, prohibited in the organic rule, are an exception that requires more discussion than time permits). Paarlberg's argument raises the question of whether organic and local food advocates can accept mid-sized family farms along with small farms as part of their sector. From advocates I have spoken with, I think the answer is "no problem."

For example, see Bob Comis at Ethicurean yesterday, discussing the need for moderately larger scale in progressive meat and poultry production, to make good meat more competitive with factory farm meat. Or, consider Kathleen Merrigan's eloquent response to tough questions from Senator Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) at her Senate confirmation hearing today, explaining how she can advocate for sustainable agriculture and what Saxby called "production agriculture" at the same time (I'll add a link to a transcript later when it becomes available).

Mid-scale local production preserves most, though not all, of the advantages of small-scale local production. And mid-scale production lowers costs and helps the local food movement overcome skepticism about its relevance to consumers of all income levels.

Saxby sees organic agriculture and production agriculture as enemies. Instead, why can't local and organic agriculture can be production agriculture?

King Corn

In the engaging and insightful documentary King Corn (trailer from YouTube below), college friends Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis use their year of experience farming an acre of corn in Iowa as the frame on which to hang a wider exploration of the U.S. food system.

I finally watched King Corn last week after missing it in the theaters and waiting for it from Netflix. I should have seen it sooner. There's a lot to like.

• Cheney and Ellis are charming stand-ins for the film viewer, looking with astonishment on an industrial system few people understand.
• The film overcomes gimmickry in part through excellent interviews with Ken Cook, Michael Pollan, an agronomist, a corn syrup industry public relations person, and more. The interview with former Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz, prophet of the agriculture motto "get big or get out," is of considerable historical interest. This interview reminded me of Michael Moore's interview with Charlton Heston in Bowling for Columbine, but Cheney and Ellis are kinder to their host.
• A tour of urban neighborhoods, chaperoned by a fellow who grew up in the neighborhood and who lost a parent to diabetes, extends the film's scope beyond the heartland and increases its relevance to audiences anywhere in the country.
• The film is clever in its use of visuals to communicate complicated information, such as hand-drawn bar graphs that provide substantial quantitative detail without breaking the film's rustic tone, and funny animations using a toy farm to illustrate the agriculture system's interrelationships.

The Boston Globe's rave review points out that the film's gentle tone makes easier watching than Super Size Me or Michael Moore's work, but without subtracting from the film's motivational impact.

Salamonie Farm

My two children and I enjoyed a number of evenings recently with Salamonie Farm, by Noah Hershberger, as our bedtime reading. It is a fictionalized account of a year in the life of a six-year-old boy and his Amish family in Ohio the 1950s.

The book carries its Amish themes with a perfect understatement. It had never occurred to me that, when one lives without electricity, ice cream must be a winter treat. By the time the boy visits a non-Amish neighbor couple in their kitchen, the reader shares the boy's interest in the refrigerator.

Somewhat from the same literature as the Laura Ingalls Wilder books, Salamonie Farm gently teaches about life on a farm and in a pious religious community, but also more roughly teaches about sibling rivalry, fear of strangers, bullying, and the hard economics of manual labor, including child labor.

I promised earlier to tell you about my five-year-old daughter's questions about vegetarianism. She has been hitting us with a patient steady inquisition for weeks now. In one chapter of Salamonie Farm, the family cooperates with neighbors to slaughter a hog and a cow. My kids were especially interested, because they had recently seen for themselves how sausages were made. The moral of the chapter was supposed to be that the wise father's respectful but practical attitude towards the slaughter compares favorably to that of a couple of neighbor boys, who mistreat animals. But my daughter wasn't buying it. Didn't the Dad laugh, she asked, when one of the workers pinned the pig's tail on another. It didn't seem to my daughter to meet the Dad's own standards of respectfulness.

In just partly related news, our family is giving up meat for lent. We will eat eggs and dairy products, and I think my son will still eat meat with his school lunch. I'll let you know how it goes. Today is Ash Wednesday in several Christian traditions.

Unlimited estate tax exemption for farmers?

Under current law, farmers who leave $4 million per-couple in nominal farm assets to their heirs do not have to pay any estate taxes. Because of provisions that let them value their farms at less than full market value, some farmers can leave farms whose full value is almost $6 million to their heirs without paying estate taxes. Despite the rhetoric of estate tax opponents, there is no evidence that any farmers nationwide have to sell their land to pay estate taxes.

Yet, estate tax opponents in the House and Senate have proposed an unlimited estate tax exemption for farmers. In other words, farms would be treated differently from all other assets, and farmers could leave to their heirs even the largest landed estates without paying estate taxes.

If farmers are already well protected under current law, what motivates the estate tax opponents behind this proposal?

The answer is: it's not about the farmers. This proposal offers a loophole for billionaires in other lines of work to leave great wealth to their heirs, without paying estate taxes, by buying up farmland. The foreseeable consequence will be higher farm land prices and, paradoxically, greater challenges for young farmers who want to take up their parents' and grandparents' honorable work on the land.

Read the report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities for the full story.

House vote

The Kind-Flake amendment was defeated, of course, and the Farm Bill passed the House. This Farm Bill has been a great education in the cynical economist's view of public policy decision-making. The bill's supporters perfectly gauged how much funding for nutrition, conservation, and fruits and vegetables it would take to split the advocacy coalition that would otherwise have demanded reform to the traditional row-crop subsidies.

The House Agriculture Committee had to make some adjustments to conservation programs and agricultural insurance programs that will anger some Senators who support those programs. Still, it is hard to imagine this bill failing or even changing much at this point.

Perhaps in five years, under the influence of this bill, rich farmers will be even richer, small family farms will be even fewer, and farmers in developing countries will be even poorer. Look on the bright side. We can all hope for reform in Farm Bill 2012.

Farm Bill in the House Agriculture Committee

See FarmPolicy and Ethicurean for coverage of today's hearing in the House Agriculture Committee, or listen to the streaming audio yourself.

Meanwhile, I am fascinated by efforts to crunch the numbers and fashion a Farm Bill reform proposal that benefits a majority of Congressional districts that are represented on the House Agriculture Committee. You can see the appeal of this question. Of course, urban and suburban districts would benefit from reform, but their legislators do not care enough to spend political capital on this issue and they do not sit on the House Agriculture Committee. The clever question is to ask what combination of fruit and vegetable subsidies, conservation payments, rural development projects, and community food programs should win the votes of a majority of legislators on the committee.

See this post from the Blog for Rural America and this post from the Ruminant.

The internet and food policy advocacy

In yesterday's Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Bob Condor offered U.S. Food Policy's coverage of Country of Origin Labeling (COOL) as an example of using the internet to organize communities in support of public interest food policy positions. Condor's jumping off point was a description of the Chicago-based public interest marketing organization Sustain, which supports family and organic farming in the Midwest:

There are many perspectives about whether the Internet is dividing us or uniting people and communities.

Food activists tend to fall on the side of communitybuilding.

"It used to take days or even weeks to get the word out about an issue or rally," one organic food activist told me several years ago. "Our new weapon is e-mail. We can mobilize people in hours now. It's powerful -- and, believe me, we need it."

That activist, Chicagobased Jim Slama, and his green public relations and marketing firm, Sustain (sustainusa.org), were central figures in convincing U.S. consumers to send more than 275,000 e-mails and postings to the Department of Agriculture in 2000 to take exception to the proposed National Organic Standards.

Before then, organic certification was more in the hands of food activists who wanted to discourage the use of pesticides and other chemicals in plants. The private National Organic Standards Board was adamant that the proposed rules would allow irradiated and/or genetically engineered foods to qualify as organic, plus sewage sludge would be acceptable for watering any "organic"-label food.

Yuck.

But those 275,000 comments worked, thanks in large part to Slama and other activists spreading the word about an extended public comment period. The USDA couldn't neglect the number of comments (and prospective voters) no matter how many lobbyists might be knocking on their doors. By 2001, the final organic rule was passed after reinstating prohibitions on irradiation, genetically modified seed and that nasty sewage sludge.

Sustain's project on family farming, FamilyFarmed.org, was recently chosen at the NetSquared conference as one of 21 public interest projects for future funding and mentoring from leading social networking experts in Silicon Valley.