[Homestead] Small farms

Gene GeRue genegerue at ruralize.com
Sat Aug 4 20:46:43 EDT 2007


For the record, I am against subsidies for small farmers as well as  
for any other sized farmers, and as well for non-farming businesses.  
Good farmers are good businesspeople. If they deserve to succeed they  
will. But subsidies stack the deck against them.



Hurting A Small Farm Near You

Sunday, August 5, 2007; Page B08

If you've purchased organic produce at Ukrop's, Giant Food or Whole  
Foods, you may well have eaten some of the fruits of my labor.

My farm, nestled in the Appalachian mountains of southwest Virginia,  
is about a six-hour drive from the nation's capital. Here, in the  
land of coal and tobacco, a momentous shift is taking place: Dozens  
of former tobacco farmers are raising certified organic produce, free- 
range eggs and other healthy products that we are selling to nearly  
600 supermarkets in a five-state region.

We've built this system, which includes 60 farmers and a packing and  
grading facility, from the bottom up. But we have had help from our  
fellow taxpayers, in the form of a grant from the Agriculture  
Department's Community Food Projects Competitive Grant Program. That,  
along with considerable investment from the Virginia tobacco  
commission, has allowed us to create a healthy food system that is  
once again making farming economically viable while helping to  
improve the diets of thousands of consumers.

For these reasons, we are unhappy with the direction of the current  
farm bill, which the House passed on July 27. Efforts such as ours,  
and many others across the country, prove that investments in local  
food systems and ecological farming are cost-effective in the short  
run and good for rural communities and the land in the long run. The  
same can no longer be said about subsidies focused on a handful of  
crops for a handful of large farmers in a handful of states.

There is something wrong with a farm bill that continues to miss  
three-fourths of the nation's farms; that subsidizes agribusiness and  
the food industry, enabling them to produce cheap foods that aren't  
very good for us; and that is reducing its commitment to conservation  
precisely at a time when climate change, water shortages and  
increasing urban pressure on the landscape make healthy soils and  
farms more critical than ever.

We've created a locally rooted, healthy, conserving farm and food  
system here in tobacco country. If you can do it here, with a little  
bit of help from the federal government, you can do it most anywhere  
in the United States.

-- Anthony Flaccavento

Abingdon, Va.

The writer is executive director of Appalachian Sustainable  
Development and a Food and Society Policy Fellow. He will be online  
to answer questions on at 1 p.m. Thursday on washingtonpost.com.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/03/ 
AR2007080301569.html?tid=informbox


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