Market Farming

[Leigh Hauter <bullrunfarm AT hughes.net>]

Title: Al Krebs, advocate for family farms, died.

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."