the hopeful hog

iowa II

2006-07-17T23:14:00.000-04:00

Yup, this is just what it looks like: a 50-foot-high pitchfork. Did I mention how much I love Iowa?

The conference ended Saturday night with a rousing BBQ with the ICCI staff, and I'm moving along to learning as much about hog production as my mind can wrap itself around. The research I'm doing, as far as I can tell (in each meeting, I find myself explaining it a little differently, and I've now kind of forgotten exactly what it was I was supposed to be asking about. How can I be expected to remember when absolutely everything is so interesting?)- anyway, it looks at whether (and how) federal farm policy drives the industrialization of livestock production systems. I was lucky enough to find myself at the ICCI conference presenting a paper we released just last week, which is available on-line here. Trouble is, I'm proporting to study something related to livestock production while knowing virtually nothing about how it's done. So yesterday, I spent the day on the farm of the co-founder of Niman Ranch, the sustainable meat company that sells to specialty outlets like Whole Foods and Trader Joe's, and to restaurants around the country. No, this is not typical swine production- but it's fascinating nonetheless, especially as consolidation and corporate control of hog production force smaller, independent producers to seek out niche markets like Niman's. The niche market outlets are growing faster than the supply of this type of meat, so it's a potential source of income for ever more small- and mid-sized family farms. It's also, I've found out from my interviews, one of the great hopes for drawing young idealists into the aging farm sector.

When Niman Ranch began, this hog farm in Iowa was it; now, there are over 500 hog farmers participating. They conform to Animal Welfare Institute standards for animal care and housing, which explains the huts and pasture you see below. A far cry from the confinement operations that are beginning to encroach up the road from the Niman farm.

The first thing we did was climb in his tractor and go out to water the hogs, who were beginning to swelter in the near-100 degree heat. Here are some happy hogs in their new mud pit.

Momma sows and piglets stay together for much longer under this system than they do in confinement, and they seem to appreciate it.

Pigs are curious. You can't tell, but they're eating my pants in this one.

The sows stay in the field for most of the time, except when they're brought to pens for breeding. Here, they're getting fed with corn grown on the farm.

It's hot! Happy sows under the hose.

Finally, we wandered around a wetlands he's restoring with help from the federal government's WRP funding and a hefty supply of native seeds. He let me keep the printout of a list of native plant species he finds around the wetlands, and it's over two pages long. It includes these Black Eyed Susans below, which I remember from our garden when I was growing up.

Somehow, "inspiring" doesn't quite cut it. Another Iowa moment in need of language I just don't have.

iowa I

2006-07-16T20:26:00.000-04:00

I think it’s safe to say that I was totally unprepared for Iowa. In a way, I guess that’s akin to saying that one was unprepared for the moon- it’s hard to know how to be prepared for something so unlike anything I’ve ever seen. I arrived Friday and drove straight to Ames for lunch with two wonderful friends, and spent the car ride up there trying not to hyperventilate. Perhaps it’s my mountain blood, but the flat landscape unnerved me in a way I hadn’t expected, made me gasp theatrically at every field of corn and soybeans I passed (and believe me, they really do go on forever, and fill every available space. Even the strips along the highway are that deep green or gold-topped hue). Like the dumbstruck east coaster I am, I stopped along the highway to take pictures.

I came for the conference of Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, a group that I can honestly say is the most energetic, passionate group of activists I’ve ever been around. (I know- I’m waxing hyperbolic. I think Iowa does that to you, though; once you’ve tried (and failed) to accurately describe how much corn there is, there’s just no way you can go back to words of a normal scale). Friday night started out with a dinner and speeches by a few long-term ICCI members who blew me away with their energy. In a complete 180 from the activist groups I’ve been part of in the past, I was by far the youngest person in the room, aside from a few kids whose parents brought them along, and a few of the younger ICCI staff. The group began 31 years ago working on redlining in Des Moines and has expanded to work on other urban issues like predatory lending, and on rural issues as well (helping communities keep out factory farms, resist eminent domain takeovers that benefit private developers, etc). In recent years, they’ve created a program focused on issues specific to Iowa’s growing Latino population. That means lots of work on labor conditions and labor rights, often in meatpacking and other assembly-line plants.

Perhaps the most amazing thing about the group is how it’s clearly grown and transformed over the years to accommodate new but parallel issues (predatory lending work evolving into resisting exploitative livestock growers’ contracts, for example), and how the members have evolved as well. At a barbeque on Saturday night at the director’s house, he described it to me as the slow expansion of each members’ sense of what constitutes their community. People get involved because of something that’s happening in their town, maybe even next door, but they stay involved because they recognize the parallels between their own experience and the experiences of others. That awareness broadens their sense of community to include other towns fighting factory farms, and then urban residents being taken by banks, and then-- now-- immigrant laborers with whom they often don’t even share a common language. Even looking in from the outside, I sensed the power of the members’ understanding that universal structural inequities bound their individual experiences together. They act on that understanding collectively, too, which is one of the reasons they’re so effective. Lewis Lapham, the keynote speaker on Friday night, chose a great quote from William Sloane Coffin to describe this phenomenon: “To show compassion for an individual without showing concern for the structures of society that make him an object of compassion is to be sentimental rather than loving.” ICCI, he said, was definitely loving. The democratic party was sentimental. Touché.

the biofuel illusion

2006-07-06T17:34:00.000-04:00

Friend Julia Olmstead has a fabulous guest commentary in the Denver Post (and lots of other papers around the country, since it's syndicated) on biofuels. Go Julia! Read her refreshingly clear summary of why we need to think beyond the biofuel revolution here.

letter to the post

2006-07-06T17:18:00.000-04:00

The Washington Post made a splash over the weekend with an article on how wealthy landowners benefit from farm subsidies. It frustrated me- not because I don't agree that they benefit in a big way, but because I wished the article had gone much deeper than it did. It asked the question, "who supports this messed-up system?" and the only answer it gave was wealthy landowners. I decided to write a (way too long) letter to the editor, which I'm guessing won't get published. So instead of just sending it into the ether of the WP letters box, I'm posting it here as well.

July 4, 2006

To the editor:

While I agree that U.S. farm policy is in need of a major overhaul, I was dismayed to see that Dan Morgan, Gilbert Gaul, and Sarah Cohen's July 2nd article on subsidies ("Farm Program Pays $1.3 Billion to People Who Don't Farm") perpetuated several harmful misconceptions about farm policy. The tendency to lump all income support tools under the demonized heading of "subsidies" is misleading, and muddles public debate over the future direction of U.S. farm policy. The authors, like many policymakers, have also focused their analysis on the gains to wealthy landowners from subsidies, leaving the more powerful interests that benefit from our current policies out of the spotlight of public scrutiny.

Until 1985, U.S. farm policy tried to provide a fair market price for farmers' crops. It did so through supply management, land set-asides, and loan repayment rates that acted as price floors. Starting in 1985, but largely in the 1996 Farm Bill, Congress stopped regulating supply and price; production shot up, while prices dropped (between 1996 and 2005, prices fell 32% for corn and 21% for soybeans). Congress then dramatically increased government payments to farmers. Some of these payments were "decoupled" from production, leading to the debacle described in the article. Others kicked in when prices dropped, so they have grown over the years. The key point is that Congress replaced a system where farmers were compensated largely by market prices with a system where farmers were compensated largely by taxpayers, via government payments.

The new system means that the companies that buy bulk U.S. farm products and turn them into higher value items-- processors, like Archer Daniels Midland, who turn corn into high fructose corn syrup, or industrial livestock operations like Smithfield who use it for feed-- win big. Their operations are, in effect, subsidized by the policy, while taxpayers foot the bill. These industries were strong backers of the 1996 policy changes. And in a congressional hearing leading up to the 2002 Farm Bill, livestock industry reps harshly criticized any policy change that would raise market prices or restrict the production of feed crops.

If we want to make meaningful changes to the broken farm policy, we need to understand who really benefits from it. Wealthy landowners certainly do. But agribusiness corporations and industrial livestock companies benefit far more, and are worthy of your reporters' scrutiny.

Sincerely,
Elanor Starmer
Cambridge, MA

the ethanol debate continues

2006-06-25T12:17:00.000-04:00

Articles about ethanol seem to be popping up everywhere recently- including in today's New York Times. Ethanol is the fuel alternative made from switchgrass, sugarcane, or, in the United States, corn- and the corn-based ethanol industry is booming beyond anyone's expectations. Thanks to ethanol industry lobbyists, last year's Energy Policy Act included a provision calling for the production of 5 billion gallons of ethanol per year by 2007, growing to 7.5 billion a year by 2012. Current production is around 4.6 billion gallons, so jumping on the ethanol bandwagon now seems to be a lucrative move. That's particularly true because refiners and blenders receive a $0.51 a gallon tax credit from the federal government, on top of the value added they capture from turning cheap corn into fuel. Corn sells on the market at below $2 a bushel, and refiners get a $5 a bushel profit once the crop is converted into our alternative fuel of choice.

There are a number of disturbing facets to the trend, not the least of which is that corn is heavily dependent on fossil fuels for its production (nitrogen fertilizer, which corn soaks up like water, is made from natural gas), and that current production methods for corn are ecologically unsustainable. But besides the environmental questions, it's worth asking who's reaping the biggest gains from the ethanol boom.

According to an op-ed penned by Institute for Local Self Reliance head David Morris in the New York Times recently, in 2003, 80% of ethanol production facilities were owned by farmers local to the areas where the facilities were located. Now, 80% of new ethanol is produced in plants controlled by absentee owners. The biggest of those absentee owners is agribusiness giant Archer Daniels Midland, which controls 24% of the U.S. ethanol market. ADM is putting a lot of its eggs in the ethanol basket- understandably, given that it's been lobbying heavily for government support for agri-fuels since the 1970s. Earlier this year, it went so far as to hire a major player in the petroleum industry, ex-Chevron executive Patricia Woertz, as its new CEO.

That means that ADM is now receiving a hefty $0.51-a-gallon subsidy from the U.S. government to take corn, a crop that U.S. policies have ensured is as cheap as possible, and turn it into windfall profits. Policies requiring increased use of ethanol by the nation's fuel industry, and incentives for auto makers to make cars that run on E85, have sent demand for ethanol soaring. That means higher prices for ethanol, which means more money in the pockets of ADM- coupled with more government subsidies to the corporation as production increases. All this for a fuel based on a gas-dependent crop. So are we really "going green by going yellow"? Ethanol's capacity to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is questioned by scientists such as Cornell researcher David Pimentel. "The government spends more than $3 billion a year to subsidize ethanol production when it does not provide a net energy balance or gain, is not a renewable energy source or an economical fuel," said the scientist in a recent press release. "Further, its production and use contribute to air, water and soil pollution and global warming."

Corporate livestock strikes again

2006-06-15T18:23:00.000-04:00

A Chicago Tribune article from earlier this week exposed a bill that’s been laying in wait since December in the House Subcommittee on Environment and Hazardous Materials. Let’s hope it stays there. Pushed by the corporate poultry industry via the ironically-named group “Farmers for Clean Air and Water,” and co-sponsored by 164 House members, the bill would exempt animal manure from being labeled a hazardous substance under the federal Superfund law. Superfund regulations have been used in a number of cases brought by communities and environmental groups against industrial livestock operations for environmental damage. The Tribune article discusses a pair of cases that have riled the industry:

“[In 2001,] Tulsa [Oklahoma] filed a lawsuit against the poultry industry after algae blooms polluted the city's water supply, a case that was settled after poultry companies in the watershed agreed to regulate their application of manure as fertilizer. The state of Oklahoma followed up with its own lawsuit last year, suing poultry companies for polluting the scenic Illinois River (this one starts in Arkansas) water basin, a popular destination for tourists.”

The impressively persistent Oklahoma Attorney General, Drew Edmondson, has promised to take the fight against pollution from corporate livestock operations from watershed to watershed in his state. The industry has struck back with its new lobbying effort, and with clever PR that paints the Superfund regulations as inimical to the interests of all farmers, not just to corporate CAFO (confined animal feeding operation) owners. Another excerpt from the Tribune article:

“The livestock industry also argues that if successful, Edmondson's lawsuit could have apocalyptic repercussions, from harming the organic industry to forcing the livestock industry overseas.”

But Superfund regulations allow for the “normal” application of manure for fertilizer, so family farmers who raise livestock and use the manure on their crops aren’t affected. If that’s the case, then what’s going on here? It seems like a another example corporate livestock operations trying to cash in on voters’ sympathy for the good old American farm. If corporate operations and family farmers are “all in this together,” then CAFOs housing 50,000 hogs can benefit from policies meant to protect smaller, diversified, and more ecologically responsible family farms. That’s happened already with right-to-farm laws in a number of states. The Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy has a detailed report on the environmental, labor, and livelihoods implications of corporate livestock production; see the section on how CAFOs avoid local, state, and national environmental laws here.

For more information on campaigns to hold corporate livestock and agribusiness accountable, see:
Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement http://www.iowacci.org/
Agribusiness Accountability Initiative http://www.agribusinessaccountability.org/page/home/
Missouri Rural Crisis Center http://www.inmotionmagazine.com/rural.html
Land Stewardship Project http://www.landstewardshipproject.org/programs_factoryfarms.html