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.