ann butkowski

If, like me, you’re still mourning the end of the fair’s foods-on-a-stick, I have great news for you. There’s a new portable delicacy in town: Varma lefse, the creation of South Minneapolis’ Nathan Matter and Alyson Sweet. Varma recently starting offering its lefse wraps at the Midtown Farmers Market.

We’ve learned a bit about how Farm Bill programs affect producers of commodity crops, but what about organic farmers? Before we dive into that, let’s review just what “organic” farming really means.

What is Organic?

The 2012 Farm Bill, a wide ranging bill that covers sustainable farming, organic food, big ag, food accessibility, and much, much more, will affect each and every one of us. Sadly, most people don't understand what it is or why it matters, and even fewer feel empowered to get involved and make a difference. Over the past several months, Simple, Good, and Tasty has published a series of articles about the Farm Bill, attempting explaining the issues in basic, understandable terms. These include:

Every time the Farm Bill comes up for debate, there are numerous ideas about how to “fix” the commodity programs. Calls abound to add new programs, scale back existing ones, tweak the payments here and there, and even scrap subsidies entirely (this recent New York Times editorial caused a bit of a stir). Not all of these ideas are new, however, and some of them have been tried before. As more people become interested in the Farm Bill and its impact on what we grow and consume, I think it’s important to understand a bit of the history behind why these programs are they way they are in order to talk about how we might want to change them.

Coupled and Decoupled Payments

I think of going to the gym as the penance I must do to absolve my love of ice cream, so I was pretty fascinated to hear that The Herb Box, Eden Prairie’s new local-food-minded restaurant, is located inside the Life Time Fitness center. Happily, The Herb Box is tucked between the lobby and the cleverly veiled indoor tennis courts, and its sports-bar-meets-Zen-retreat atmosphere -- and creative menu offerings -- kept my mind off of treadmills.

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.

In my last Farm Bill post, I wrote about the argument for directly subsidizing agricultural production: farm income is erratic, and in order to keep farmers in the business of supplying the food and fiber we all need, they must be guaranteed an adequate income. Under the current system, farmers are given direct payments simply for growing an eligible crop, such as corn or soybeans. In years when prices fall below the target price for a particular crop, they also receive countercyclical payments. 

Now that we’ve discussed nutrition and conservation programs in the Farm Bill, the time has come to direct our attention to the elephant in the room: agricultural subsidies. The commodity programs represent 15% of Farm Bill spending, which is $42 billion, the second largest Farm Bill allocation (you’ll recall that nutrition spending is the largest). And it’s a controversial topic that requires some careful consideration.

Since the commodity support programs are such an important topic, we’ll spend a few weeks on them. This time, we’ll try to understand how the commodity programs came to be and how they work, and next time we’ll talk more about their implications. 

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.

A few weeks ago, I had the chance to help out at the Midtown Farmers Market in Minneapolis, one of the area markets that allows patrons to use Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, commonly called Food Stamps) benefits to purchase fresh produce. Seeing firsthand how Farm Bill legislation is put into practice was a great reminder of how something as seemingly arcane as the Farm Bill can actually affect our neighborhoods, and of the kind of improvements we can make in the 2012 Farm Bill.