2008 farm bill

Last week, I attended a Farm Bill listening session held by the Community Food Security Coalition (CFSC) in Minneapolis. The organization was looking for input about what should be its 2012 Farm Bill policy priorities, but what it got instead was smorgasbord of ideas that would be difficult -- if not impossible -- to put into the Farm Bill as it is now. Because the Farm Bill directly affects the lives and livelihoods of all Americans (and many around the world), there are many stakeholders. But because it is both so broad and so complex, it’s hard to please everyone. It's even harder to get entrenched interests to agree to anything but incremental change.

During the summer after my junior year of college, I worked on a farm near Postville, Iowa. That summer I spent many sweaty, happy hours harvesting pounds of peas, potatoes, spinach, cabbage, and nearly every other vegetable you can think of, but the farmer always said we were less in the business of growing vegetables than of growing soil. This statement might sound strange at first – it’s easy to think of farmers as producing crops and livestock to eat, use, and sell – but farmers are also charged with the equally important role of being stewards of the land. After all, good soil is essential for plant productivity, which forms the basis of our health and economic wellbeing.

As a child of the Midwest, I’ve been surrounded by farms and farmers my whole life. Most of my immigrant forebears were farmers, and there’s a good chance that yours were, too. Although I’ve chosen a city lot instead of my grandfather’s alfalfa fields (at least for now), I’m quite interested in what will happen in the 2012 Farm Bill. The Farm Bill affects not just farmers, but everyone who eats -- and that’s all of us. The bill, with its grand scope and billions of dollars, will help define what we eat (and, thus, who we are) in thousands of subtle ways.