[Market-farming] Al Krebs, advocate for family farms, died.

Leigh Hauter bullrunfarm at hughes.net
Sat Oct 20 01:33:39 EDT 2007


I don't know how many people on this list knew Al, but he was a great 
advocate for small farmers and a walking encyclopedia of the history 
of family farming in America.  His death is a great loss to us all. 
Here is the obit that appeared in yesterday's Washington Post.

Albert V. Krebs Jr.,  Journalist Championed Family-Owned Farms

By Matt Schudel
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 19, 2007;

Albert Valentine "Al" Krebs Jr., 75, a journalist who investigated 
corporate farming and was a determined voice for small farmers and 
rural communities, died Oct. 9 in Lynnwood, Wash.

Mr. Krebs began to cover agricultural issues in the 1960s, when he 
was a freelance journalist in California covering a farm workers' 
strike organized by labor leader Cesar Chavez. He devoted the rest of 
his career to investigating agribusinesses and to projects benefiting 
small farmers and rural areas.

After working for the National Sharecroppers Fund in New York, Mr. 
Krebs came to Washington in 1971 as corporate research director and 
later co-director of the Agribusiness Accountability Project, 
investigating and documenting the role of agribusiness in the farm 
economy. He contributed to several books on agriculture and corporate 
farming.

"The passion of his life was family farm agriculture," John Hansen, 
president of the Nebraska Farmers Union and a former Washington 
colleague of Mr. Krebs's at the Agribusiness Accountability Project, 
wrote in an e-mail. "He was a walking family farm agriculture 
historian who chose to defend our traditional system" of family-owned 
ranches and farms.

Mr. Krebs worked for a consumer action group in San Francisco in the 
mid-1970s and published an independent newsletter, the AgBiz Tiller, 
examining corporate accountability in agriculture.

In 1979, he returned to Washington to lead a three-year project 
investigating agribusiness for Rural America, a nonprofit group 
dedicated to rural organizing and advocacy. From 1982 to 1989, he was 
a freelance journalist in Washington, writing about agricultural 
issues. He then spent three years on the staff of Ralph Nader's 
Center for Study of Responsive Law.

 From 1993 to 1995, Mr. Krebs worked with PrairieFire Rural Action, an 
education and organizing group based in Des Moines.

Since 1995, he had lived in Everett, where he was director of the 
Corporate Agribusiness Research Project until his death, monitoring 
the effects of corporate farming on rural life. He was the editor and 
publisher of the project's newsletter and a regular contributor to 
Progressive Populist, and he had more than 1,000 subscribers to his 
weekly e-mailed discussion of issues affecting rural America.

He also revived the AgBiz Tiller as an online periodical, in which he 
stated his vociferous opposition to corporate agriculture:

"Whereas family farming/peasant agriculture has traditionally sought 
to nurture and care for the land, corporate agribusiness, exclusive 
by nature, seeks to 'mine' the land, solely interested in monetizing 
its natural wealth and thus measure efficiency by its profits, by 
pride in its 'bottom line.' Family farmers, meanwhile, see efficiency 
in terms of respecting, caring and contributing to the overall health 
and well-being of the land, the environment, the communities and the 
nations in which they live."
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