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  • From: Gene GeRue <genegerue AT ruralize.com>
  • To: Homestead <homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [Homestead] Small farms
  • Date: Sat, 4 Aug 2007 17:46:43 -0700

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



  • [Homestead] Small farms, Gene GeRue, 08/04/2007

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