Saving the Family Farm
Written by admin on March 6, 2010 – 2:25 am -Dan Looker, Successful Farming magazine Business Editor
Politicians from rural states often extol the virtues of the family farm.
But what is it? And what can be done to save what sometimes seems like another endangered species?
Chuck Hassebrook, the executive director of the Center for Rural Affairs laid out a five-step plan for doing both when he delivered a keynote speech Friday at the MOSES conference in La Crosse, Wisconsin.
MOSES, or Midwest Organic and Sustainable Education Service, drew some 2,800 farmers and supporters of organic agriculture to its annual meeting to hear Hassebrook and attend 60 workshops on February 25 through February 27.
Hassebrook, who grew up on a hog and grain farm near Platte Center, Nebraska, said his nonprofit organization is based in Lyons, Nebraska, a town of 900.
"We don't just talk about rural issues. We live these issues," he said.
Hassebrook, who is also in his second elected term as a member of the University of Nebraska Board of Regents, said that in spite of technology that has brought many benefits to agricultural production, there is a sense of unease in rural America about declining rural population as farms grow ever larger.
Numerous studies by sociologists have shown that small towns surrounded by only a few very large farms tend to have a wealthy elite and no middle class.
"That, my friends, is not progress. It's social decay," Hassebrook said.
Hassebrook mentioned the public's support for locally grown food, more access to nature and "a yearning for greater authenticity and genuineness in America." All of these trends have contributed to the growth in demand for the organic foods grown by some in the MOSES audience. Yet, he said, he s not certain how much public sentiment alone will do to keep family farms in business.
"At the end of the day, it is up to us to take responsibility for our own destiny and to take control of our future," he said.
Hassebrook offered 5 ways to do that:
1. "We need to protect our authenticity," he said. Consumers may not know when they pay double the normal price for natural beef that it comes from a 50,000-head feedlot, he said. And he praised the work of activists who ve pressured USDA to enforce organic standards that require dairy cows to have access to pasture. Besides organic standards, "I think we need to build a family farm standard," he said. A family farm ought to mean that one that owns the means of production, makes management decisions and provides most of the labor, he said.
2. "We need to be entrepreneurial," he said, adding that small towns aren't going to be saved by recruiting large companies to locate there. Economic development in rural America has to be home-grown. And the organic and sustainable agriculture community needs good business models. "There's a lot of failures," he said, but two success stories are Organic Valley, the farmer-owned dairy foods co-op based in La Farge, Wisconsin, and Niman Ranch Pork, managed out of Thornton, Iowa.
3. "We all need to contribute to our community. Our farms have a symbiotic relationship to our community," he said. In Lyons, Nebraska, Hassebrook has worked to get buildings on its main street in the National Register of Historic Places, for example.
4. "We need to protect access to good germplasm," Hassebrook said. That means more than organic farmers having access to elite seed varieties that aren't genetically mondified, he said. It means more competition in the seed industry for conventional farmers. He said that he opposed the University of Nebraska's licensing of dicamba-resistant soybeans to Monsanto but was unable to stop it.
5. The bias toward large farms in federal farm policy needs to be reversed, he said. "We need to simply stop subsidizing the megafarms that are driving [family farms] out of business," he said. The Obama administration could have done that with a tighter USDA standard that requires active management of a farm to qualify for commodity program payments.
"It's very disappointing that the Obama administration that made this the centerpiece of farm policy in Iowa (before Iowa's presidential caucuses), they ve abandoned that," Hassebrook said.
Hassebrook said that the Center for Rural Affairs has begun a web-based campaign to urge the President and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack to keep that campaign promise to have tougher farm program payment limits. Click here for more information.
Tags: family farm, Farm Economy, farm subsidies
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