For those who fight for access to organic goods, it is a relief that at last the USDA Organic label on our milk will mean that the cows had more than just ‘access’ to pastures. The requirement that organic livestock be provided access to pasture had often been abused by large dairies as a poorly written loophole. But the passage has been updated to specify the terms of access. As The New York Times reported February 12,

“The new regulations, which go into effect in June, are much more specific. They say that animals must graze on pasture for the full length of the local grazing season. The season will be determined by local conditions and agriculture authorities, like organic certifiers or county conservation officials, not by the dairy alone. While the grazing season must last at least 120 days, in many areas it will be much longer. The rules also say that animals must get at least 30 percent of their food from pasture during the grazing season.”

All in all, it is a victory for organic. Large dairies will now have to do what small dairies were often already doing and consumers can have a bit more confidence in the organic label. But one thing left unmentioned by both the Times and Marion Nestle’s victorious entry for The Atlantic  is the role these local “agriculture authorities” will actually play. Of course the nature of these bodies will vary depending on location but just to offer an example of what agriculture authorities may entail and the incredible extent of poorly written legal documents, I would like to draw your attention to Ohio. The voters of Ohio recently approved a constitutional amendment creating the Ohio Livestock Care Standards Board. This board was presented as a humanely-minded regulatory body that would improve conditions for farm animals. And who wouldn’t vote for that, even if it is in the rather extreme form of a constitutional amendment? Fortunately, the more sinister details of the issue have begun to enter the public debate. To start, the body is not an elected one. It is comprised of the state department head of agriculture as well as ten individuals appointed by the governor meant to represent family farms (left undefined), consumers, veterinarians, and “someone who is knowledgeable about food safety.” These individuals are then given the authority to set the standards of care. The constitutional article tries to include details that would deflect criticism aimed at the reach of the Board with notes like, “The state department that regulates agriculture shall have the authority to administer and enforce the standards established by the Board.” I’m not sure how comforting that should be when the head of that same department sits on the Board. Fortunately, there is a move to put this amendment back on the ballot because, even if the Board does not become a reflection of big agriculture business, there is no accountability or opportunity for citizen participation.

This is not to say the new USDA requirements are not a victory. They are/ It is just to point out that phrases like “the season will be determined by local conditions and agriculture authorities, like organic certifiers or county conservation officials, not by the dairy alone” should be considered carefully. County conservation officials sounds good. As do livestock care standards. But the mechanisms are intentionally obscure to deter individual resistance. Inform yourself about your local management bodies.

Read Up:             http://www.legislature.state.oh.us/res.cfm?ID=128_SJR_6 http://food.theatlantic.com/nutrition/organic-milk-loophole-closed.php http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/business/13organic.html?scp=1&sq=pasture%20rules&st=cse

Discriminatory land use policies have left a legacy of inequality that has yet to be rectified. Though the labor of slaves and later sharecroppers helped support American agriculture, African Americans were often denied access to land as well as to many of the processes of wealth accumulation that allowed the concentration of capital necessary to support a farm. For example, practices of red-lining, managed by the Homeowners Loan Corporation, ranked neighborhoods and prevented the black homeowner from acquiring the same line of credit and advantageous mortgage terms. On top of this economic isolation, racially restrictive covenants maintained a physical separation. Many deeds still include clauses on race, specifically forbidding black, Jewish, or Asian families from owning the home. These are the mechanisms that met black migrants moving from the South to the North in order to escape the oppression of sharecropping. Northern manufacturing cities actively recruited young black males. Once in these cities, they were pushed into poorly maintained parts of the city. For decades, the presumed inability of blacks to assimilate and follow the concentric model of social mobility by which other minorities began life in the inner city but steadily moved out toward the suburb, was blamed on the black population and a “culture of poverty.” It wasn’t until a 1945 publication entitled Black Metropolis by Drake and Cayton that scholars began to acknowledge the institutionalization of racism that created both economic and geographic inequities. Not only did the government have its hand in persistent poverty but it, along with big business, also had its hand in dispossessing African Americans of land.

The National Black Farmers Association is still fighting to gain recognition for the discrimination faced by the black farmer. In what The New York Times calls the “biggest civil rights settlement in American history,” black farmers won a settlement of $2 billion as payment for subsidies and loans that had been denied them due to racism. That class-action suit was in 1999 and the payments have yet to be made. President Obama has requested that payments be included in the new budget and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has stated his commitment to righting this wrong. But, as the February 7th New York Times editorial details, this same budget proposal was included and denied last year. The National Black Farmers Association is trying to make sure that doesn’t happen again. Its president, John W. Boyd Jr. led a rally in Washington D.C. today as the end of a string of rallies held across the South. He is asking that the outstanding $1.15 billion be included in the budget.

Clearly, the struggle for civil rights is far from over. The phrase “forty acres and a mule” stands as a reminder of our unfulfilled promise. It is a promise of a land that is my land, your land. It is a promise where the mountaintop meets the farm.

This isn’t going to be a post going “line by line” through the President’s State of the Union address delivered one week ago. Though every columnist needed to find important things to talk about, and sometimes those things really were there, we all know that the State of the Union speech barely has a chance to walk on its own, constantly being pushed about on the wave of instant feedback by standing crowds and murmuring justices. But, at its best, the speech can force us to remember that these are our representatives and they should be talking to us. I don’t see this demand as being ‘populist,’ though that word is fashionable now, it is simply more efficient to solve problems when we talk to each other.

Which is why I must applaud Secretary of Agriculture Vilsack’s Op-Ed column in the Des Moines Register on January 31. Entitled “Rural America is in need of renewal,” the article argues that the country must appreciate the sacrifices of its farmers, recognizing that decades of a push for productivity have not served the majority of farmers well. Vilsack recommends six steps to this renewal paraphrased below;

Expand exports, promote biofuel, link local farmers to local consumers through the creation of local processing plants, provide broadband to rural areas, encourage natural recreation activity, and lastly, make the ecosystem profitable through the Ecosystem Market Office. This will create a renewal that creates a “rural America that provides safe and abundant food for us and the world, puts America back in control of its energy future, and preserves and conserves our precious natural resources.”

So compare that to the 50-Year Farm Bill of Wes Jackson and Wendell Berry (a soil scientist and a farmer). The idea that we can both preserve our natural resources and benefit from markets “that exist for water, wetlands preservation, carbon and habitat enhancements” would not find its way into that 50-Year Farm Bill. The idea may not be that sinister, tax incentives to conserve water would help encourage responsible behavior, but the discourse being created and sustained is a dangerous one that tries to impose a supply and demand theory onto the ecosystem. Jackson, in fact, argues for the opposite approach, using the ecosystem to provide us with a new way of thinking of economic growth. And furthermore, Vilsack’s resources remain poorly defined and their defense is unspecified. So we can promote biofuel production without understanding how these monocrops damage our soil.

And what of these expanded exports? It worries me when I hear talk of our duty to help rebuild Haiti with shipments of fertilizer and seeds for cash crops (see the Monday editorial “Thinking About a New Haiti” in The New York Times). At home we promote, or at least Vilsack says he does, linking farms to local consumers but in underdeveloped nations we envision an agricultural system growing only coffee to supply global markets but not themselves. The presence of our exports feeds directly into this process of creating dependent developing nations. When Obama mentioned his commitment to the Doha trade agreements in order to bolster rural jobs in America, he talked about our trading partners playing by the rules. But what are those rules? A 2006 document published by the Third World Network Director Martin Khor details the obstacles of international trade negotiation and the damage they do to underdeveloped economies. “The WTO’s Doha Negotiations and Impasse: A Development Perspective” discusses the funny business of subsidies; Blue, Green, Amber, Trade-Distorting, or Non-Trade Distorting. In short: Blue Box subsidies are considered trade-distorting and set limits on production, Green Box subsidies are considered non-trade distorting and provide things like “payments to farmers to protect the environment,” Amber Box subsidies are considered trade distorting in that they regulate prices, and lastly, “de minis support” provide trade-distorting government support. In short, the Western parties at the World Trade Organization push developing nations to cut and minimize subsidies even as the E.U. and United States provide subsidies for their farmers. “Thus the developed countries will be able to continue to dump products that are subsidised at artificially low prices onto the poorer countries that cannot afford to subsidise.” Of course, the W.T.O. does not act alone and has been aided through World Bank programs in the past which provide conditional loans to developing countries mandating that they privatize and limit government capabilities. The issue of increasing exports must be understood in this context. If we want to help rebuild Haiti, perhaps we should consider rewriting trade policies.

And I don’t think I need to tell the Slow Food crowd that biofuel production, while potentially important, cannot come above our commitment to local, sustainable farm communities. Perhaps it is Vilsack who needs to better understand and appreciate the incredible impact a farmer can have on the environment, on his or her community, and on the geopolitical global stage.

Read it for yourself: http://www.desmoinesregister.com/article/20100131/OPINION01/1310318/-1/politics/Vilsack-Rural-America-is-in-need-of-renewal