Earl Butz's dream

At Grist, Tom Philpott evokes the Ancient Mariner--"Water, water, every where,/Nor any drop to drink"--while looking at the absurdities of industrial agriculture in the midwest, where corn fields stretch to the horizon but the locals only eat what's grown in their region when it returns "in the form of corn-syrup-sweetened Coca-Cola and corn-fed McDonald's burgers."

"Currently, a typical farm in the Midwest produces inputs for industrial production. What if, instead," Philpott wonders, "farms focused on growing fresh food for their neighbors?"

He points to the work of independent Minnesota farm researcher Ken Meter who in a 2001 paper "Finding Food in Farm Country" [co-authored with John Rosales], " argues persuasively that the dismal economics of farm-state agriculture could be improved by developing local markets."

Meter's work shows that commodity farming, rather than building wealth, extracts money from rural communities. In a seven-county region of southeastern Minnesota in 1997, farmers brought in an impressive $866 million selling their wares. However, amazingly, they incurred $947 million in costs to do so -- a loss of a cool $80 million. Federal subsidies covered just half of that loss; the rest had to be made up by non-farming activities.

Moreover, nearly half of the $947 million in incurred expenses left the area, as payments to distant suppliers of seeds, fertilizer, and pesticides, or to banks in the form of interest.

Meanwhile, though, the seven-county region's 120,000 households were busily buying food and eating it. Meter reckons that southeastern Minnesotans were spending $500 million on food annually -- and only $2 million of it on fare grown within the region. Yet if they could manage to buy just 20 percent of their food from nearby growers, that would amount to $100 million in additional sales for the region's farms, more than wiping out their $80 million loss in 1997.

In spite of big ag having done all that it can to ensure that all energies of Midwestern farmers are directed toward "the mass production of a few inedible commodities," Philpott writes that Meter proves "in case study after case study" that "Farming for distant commodity markets sucks resources out of communities, and residents of those communities spend heavily on food from outside." A little effort at redeveloping atrophied local food markets might make the bread basket of America worthy of the name again.

Read the whole article...

And a little background as to how Iowa got this way, courtesy of Michael Pollan's NY Times article, The (Agri)Cultural Contradictions Of Obesity:

So why did we ever abandon [New Deal farm policy that featured price supports and grain reserves, with minimal costs, if any, to taxpayers]? Politics, in a word. The shift from an agricultural-support system designed to discourage overproduction to one that encourages it dates to the early 1970's -- to the last time food prices in America climbed high enough to generate significant political heat. That happened after news of Nixon's 1972 grain deal with the Soviet Union broke, a disclosure that coincided with a spell of bad weather in the farm belt. Commodity prices soared, and before long so did supermarket prices for meat, milk, bread and other staple foods tied to the cost of grain. Angry consumers took to the streets to protest food prices and staged a nationwide meat boycott to protest the high cost of hamburger, that American birthright. Recognizing the political peril, Nixon ordered his secretary of agriculture, Earl (Rusty) Butz, to do whatever was necessary to drive down the price of food.

Butz implored America's farmers to plant their fields ''fence row to fence row'' and set about dismantling 40 years of farm policy designed to prevent overproduction. He shuttered the ever-normal granary, dropped the target price for grain and inaugurated a new subsidy system, which eventually replaced nonrecourse loans with direct payments to farmers. The distinction may sound technical, but in effect it was revolutionary. For instead of lending farmers money so they could keep their grain off the market, the government offered to simply cut them a check, freeing them to dump their harvests on the market no matter what the price.

The new system achieved exactly what it was intended to: the price of food hasn't been a political problem for the government since the Nixon era. Commodity prices have steadily declined, and in the perverse logic of agricultural economics, production has increased, as farmers struggle to stay solvent. As you can imagine, the shift from supporting agricultural prices to subsidizing much lower prices has been a boon to agribusiness companies because it slashes the cost of their raw materials. That's why Big Food, working with the farm-state Congressional delegations it lavishly supports, consistently lobbies to maintain a farm policy geared to high production and cheap grain.