Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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My Forbidden Fruits (and Vegetables)
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/01/opinion/01hedin.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
By JACK HEDIN
Published: March 1, 2008
Rushford, Minn.

IF you’ve stood in line at a farmers’ market recently, you know that the 
local food movement is thriving, to the point that small farmers are having a 
tough time keeping up with the demand.

But consumers who would like to be able to buy local fruits and vegetables 
not just at farmers’ markets, but also in the produce aisle of their 
supermarket, will be dismayed to learn that the federal government works 
deliberately and forcefully to prevent the local food movement from 
expanding. And the barriers that the United States Department of Agriculture 
has put in place will be extended when the farm bill that House and Senate 
negotiators are working on now goes into effect.

As a small organic vegetable producer in southern Minnesota, I know this 
because my efforts to expand production to meet regional demand have been 
severely hampered by the Agriculture Department’s commodity farm program. As 
I’ve looked into the politics behind those restrictions, I’ve come to 
understand that this is precisely the outcome that the program’s backers in 
California and Florida have in mind: they want to snuff out the local 
competition before it even gets started.

Last year, knowing that my own 100 acres wouldn’t be enough to meet demand, I 
rented 25 acres on two nearby corn farms. I plowed under the alfalfa hay that 
was established there, and planted watermelons, tomatoes and vegetables for 
natural-food stores and a community-supported agriculture program.

All went well until early July. That’s when the two landowners discovered 
that there was a problem with the local office of the Farm Service 
Administration, the Agriculture Department branch that runs the commodity 
farm program, and it was going to be expensive to fix.

The commodity farm program effectively forbids farmers who usually grow corn 
or the other four federally subsidized commodity crops (soybeans, rice, wheat 
and cotton) from trying fruit and vegetables. Because my watermelons and 
tomatoes had been planted on “corn base” acres, the Farm Service said, my 
landlords were out of compliance with the commodity program.

I’ve discovered that typically, a farmer who grows the forbidden fruits and 
vegetables on corn acreage not only has to give up his subsidy for the year 
on that acreage, he is also penalized the market value of the illicit crop, 
and runs the risk that those acres will be permanently ineligible for any 
subsidies in the future. (The penalties apply only to fruits and vegetables — 
if the farmer decides to grow another commodity crop, or even nothing at all, 
there’s no problem.)

In my case, that meant I paid my landlords $8,771 — for one season alone! And 
this was in a year when the high price of grain meant that only one of the 
government’s three crop-support programs was in effect; the total bill might 
be much worse in the future.

In addition, the bureaucratic entanglements that these two farmers faced at 
the Farm Service office were substantial. The federal farm program is making 
it next to impossible for farmers to rent land to me to grow fresh organic 
vegetables.

Why? Because national fruit and vegetable growers based in California, 
Florida and Texas fear competition from regional producers like myself. 
Through their control of Congressional delegations from those states, they 
have been able to virtually monopolize the country’s fresh produce markets.

That’s unfortunate, because small producers will have to expand on a 
significant scale across the nation if local foods are to continue to enter 
the mainstream as the public demands. My problems are just the tip of the 
iceberg.

Last year, Midwestern lawmakers proposed an amendment to the farm bill that 
would provide some farmers, though only those who supply processors, with 
some relief from the penalties that I’ve faced — for example, a soybean 
farmer who wanted to grow tomatoes would give up his usual subsidy on those 
acres but suffer none of the other penalties. However, the Congressional 
delegations from the big produce states made the death of what is known as 
Farm Flex their highest farm bill priority, and so it appears to be going 
nowhere, except perhaps as a tiny pilot program.

Who pays the price for this senselessness? Certainly I do, as a Midwestern 
vegetable farmer. But anyone trying to do what I do on, say, wheat acreage in 
the Dakotas, or rice acreage in Arkansas would face the same penalties. Local 
and regional fruit and vegetable production will languish anywhere that the 
commodity program has influence.

Ultimately of course, it is the consumer who will pay the greatest price for 
this — whether it is in the form of higher prices I will have to charge to 
absorb the government’s fines, or in the form of less access to the kind of 
fresh, local produce that the country is crying out for.

Farmers need the choice of what to plant on their farms, and consumers need 
more farms like mine producing high-quality fresh fruits and vegetables to 
meet increasing demand from local markets — without the federal government 
actively discouraging them.