Straight from the TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield, a new internet-based project to greatly expand the CSA [Community Supported Agriculture] movement into places where it hasn’t been before. It’s a project designed to connect community organizers – volunteers with a group of friends and neighbors who want to get in on farm fresh produce and other fresh foods – to buy in to local suppliers in the usual CSA manner and set up a drop-off point in their area for deliveries and for members to pick up their weekly food items. The company, farmigo, acts as the middleman to negotiate directly with growers, coordinate deliveries and scheduling, and handle the nitty gritty of the business end. It also maintains the web-based platform for people to manage their accounts, order food, and pay the fees. To support this effort, farmigo receives a 2% fee on food sold and collects this from the producers rather than from the customers.

The idea isn’t entirely new, as CSAs in some regions have already set up their local businesses through websites, and even pooled with other suppliers to make for convenient ordering of variety items and coordinate deliveries. Farmigo is pretty much the same type of thing, but on a much larger scale and including big city dwellers. The farmers, fishermen, butchers and bakers who offer products through the service still get to set their own terms and commitment periods. When you check into the website you can click on a map to receive a list of suppliers in your area with links and information on already established drop-off sites.

Farmigo also facilitates one-time ala carte purchases of things like eggs, flowers, meats, seafood, baked goods and other things that will be delivered to the drop-off point on your usual days, so the customer isn’t limited to whatever crops are being harvested at any given time on their CSA’s farm, but isn’t corralled into long-term purchase contracts with those other suppliers. This also saves the member/customer the trouble of driving around to several different drop-off points to get their food allotments. Some suppliers will even deliver to your home, depending on where you live and the nature of your orders.

Those of us who do our own organic gardening, participate in local tailgate farmer’s markets, trade with our neighbors for crops we aren’t growing ourselves, and who have turned the art of wholesome organic foods, fresh air and hard work into a regular way of [homesteading!] life, of course recognize the value of any system designed to facilitate wider participation, cheaper prices to the customer and better premiums for the growers. As CSAs and the local food movements grow, more and more people will participate, everyone will be a bit healthier, and groups of neighbors working quarter-acre or less sized organic gardens can get together and plan who grows what, pool the results together, and create their own supplier CSA group!

Because I am lucky enough to have spent the past 20 years on my little mountain homestead growing food and “fitting in” with a local culture that was here long before I was, there would be great interest in a community organizer to make the contacts with various farmers producing a single crop or two of staples like corn and wheat and oats, things many CSAs don’t produce in bulk, but which most people consume regularly as part of their normal diets. Whole and milled grains, dried beans, cornmeal (grits, hominy, whatever) in bulk would be a sure seller. Value-addeds for those non-subscription purchases, such as compotes and jam, ciders and juice made from locally grown fruit. Pickles, hot sauces, vinegars, sun-dried tomatoes and other dried foods… the possibilities are practically endless. Not to mention those free-range eggs and honey for those who keep bees – which will hopefully be me by this time next year.

The primary requirement for suppliers is that their products be grown naturally/organically. USDA organic certification is not required, but this means no GMOs, no petrochemical fertilizers or pesticides, etc. Most small farmers and backyard gardeners don’t use such things anyway, as the whole chemically-based food production system was invented for big Agribiz where the economies of scale (like 5 square miles’ worth of corn) and government subsidies disguises the true cost of the foods produced. There are farmers in my area who have rotated 40 acres in beans, corn and wheat all their lives and never managed to destroy the productivity of their land with chemical adulterants they’ve never actually needed.

I don’t know if something like farmigo would make much of a dent in my region, where local farmers and producers have been participating in CSAs since somebody first thought them up, and where local farmer’s markets are easy to find any day of the week in cities, towns and villages throughout the countryside. But this type of modern organizing and management would be a good thing even here, so there is much to learn. The more people who abandon our American Industrial Food System the better, and again with enough organized coordination those economies of scale can ultimately lower the price of good, wholesome food so that more and more people can avail themselves of it. Win-win situation, so do check around and ‘borrow’ some ideas from those who are pioneering the food wilderness.

Link:

farmigo – Locally Grown & Fresh.

Sigh. As the Kabuki in D.C. continues into yet another week/month of grandstanding on the budget and raising the debt ceiling, a good many of us homesteaders are watching our state governments engaging in the same kind of bad budgetary theater as summer hits hard (and early). This year it looks a lot like neither the weather nor government policies care to offer any help to rural America, where the ‘Great Recession’ is a whole lot more like a Great Depression.

In Washington the drastic budget cuts are of course not hitting ADM or Cargill or any other giant Agribiz subsidies – mostly used to grow bioengineered corn, soy, etc. for animal feed. Rather, cuts in the USDA, EPA and FDA budgets are targeted at conservation, extension, research, renewable energy and rural development programs. Less money for inspections and enforcement, less for policing big livestock operations, less for wetland set-asides, etc., etc., etc. The slashing goes on and on, and bodes ill for just about everything that counts in this world. As if this wholesale gutting of all programs geared towards sustainable agriculture, responsible land use, regulation of pollutants and development of alternative crops isn’t bad enough, they’re also slashing food assistance programs like WIC and food stamps.

The Rodale Institute has a very good overview of how the Republican’s scorched earth policy is targeting small-scale farmers, organic growers and specialty farm/homestead programs that have been important to those of us actually engaged in trying to live sustainably on the land. With $39 billion in cuts to conservation programs aimed at protecting environmentally sensitive areas and $350 million for the Organic Transitions Research Program, it seems quite obvious that today’s politicians don’t have much of an appreciation of what it takes to grow and market nutritious food.

Meanwhile, here at my homestead where the summer crops were planted late due to too much rain and some concern about fallout deposition of cesium from Fukushima (which was high in this area), the rain finally did slack off. To nothing. Haven’t had more than a few drops in over a month, and issues with the cistern have us on water rationing in the household – there’s nothing to irrigate with. That hasn’t been an issue most years given that average rainfall here is ample, but this year’s shaping up to be hellishly hot and dry. I can do nothing but wait and see which crops make it through to the next rainy spell, keep some potted seedlings in reserve to plant REALLY late if need be. If it’s to be a super-hot summer, it could last well into November. That’s enough time for most things, even if planted late.

Below are some good articles and resource collections so that we who will be most affected by what Washington (and our state governments) do about the coming second dip of the Great Recession. I urge all my readers to educate themselves to what’s happening nationally and locally, and get involved. Call your representatives. Write letters to the editor. Bring up the important issues at the farmer’s market and at church and at any other community meetings where people who are also affected can be found. Money is just paper and computer data these days. Wall Street’s paper is even less than that. But everyone has to eat, and if there are no food producers people will starve. Our land, our labor, our crops are much more imp We must speak out. We must speak loudly. And we must enlist all the help we can get.

Links:

Agri-Pulse Communications
Rodale Press
Rural Resource Guide [NC]
American Farmland Trust

Never heard of anything called “agroecology?” Don’t feel alone, it’s not a very familiar term. Yet it could as easily be called “organic” or just plain “sustainable” and we’d easily recognize it.

Olivier De Schutter, UN special rapporteur on the right to food, has a nice website explaining what agroecology is all about and how it’s being put to work in the developing world to help people supply food for their families and communities in a sustainable way. Working WITH nature, not against it.

Jill Richardson also has a great report on agroecology on Alternet, New UN Report on How to Feed the World’s Hungry: Ditch Corporate-Controlled Agriculture.

Those of us who are just starting – or always expanding – our means of doing for ourselves should pay serious attention to the many projects all over the world attempting to empower people to do the very things that we’ve decided to do. Big Changes – and let’s face it, we all know that Big Changes are in the offing for the future if humanity is to have any future – are coming. We’re on the leading edge for reclaiming the “mysteries” of life that the modern industrialized world tried so hard to breed out of us. They can start small, just as we’ve been beginning for ourselves. Bottom-up will be the only way sustainable changes can come unbeholden to multinational gigacorps and Big Biz. Monsanto’s World Vision isn’t a world I’d like to leave to my grandchildren.

So do check out the links for agroecology. Then, if you’re already somewhat established, look around for some of the latest regional doings related to agritourism. I’ll have more of that in future posts, so stay tuned!

Links:

Oliver De Schutter SRFood

New UN Report on How to Feed the World’s Hungry: Ditch Corporate-Controlled Agriculture

Agroecology.Org

The Obama administration’s director of the USDA (Tom Vilsac) approved the open marketing and planting of Monsanto’s genetically modified alfalfa and sugar beets last week. To the widely expressed outrage and downright confusion of organic growers and consumers everywhere. Now, sugar beets are a food production crop as valuable and as intensively, unsustainably, chemically farmed as sugar cane, so one could imagine a desire for them to be resistant to the herbicide glyphosate (Monsanto’s RoundUp), as are many other of Monsanto’s proprietary GMO crops. So much of our junk foods and soft drinks are sweetened with GMO corn syrup, that a little GMO sugar in candy bars probably won’t bother most people. Those of us who do care can easily grow our own sugar beets and make sugar out of them, so there should still be organic sugar available.

But I admit to being stumped by the alfalfa thing. I mean, here’s a hay and fodder crop that is highly nutritious, grows thickly across America’s managed pasturelands, and is perennial – as cattle fodder or hay the ground isn’t tilled and a new crop planted in its place every year. Never heard of anybody spraying herbicides on it, as alfalfa grows thickly enough to displace even the most stubborn weeds. Except pigweed, of course, which is already glyphosate resistant via transgene contamination. So other than Monsanto being able to claim the seed is proprietary because it contains their easiest transgene complex, there simply is no reason to have RoundUp Ready alfalfa.

The alfalfa is going to present a significant issue for organic producers, however, because it is open pollinated and will contaminate regular and organic alfalfa fields and pastures. For no reason anyone can fathom, aside from gifting Monsanto’s Patent Protection Goon Squads [PPGS] with thousands of new victims for their notorious lawsuits. Just can’t wait for the first suit to come to trial against a dairy farmer who hasn’t actually planted alfalfa since long before Monsanto got into the game. Once the crop is cross-pollinated and producing RR seed, Monsanto gets to own the farm. Ah, the wonders of modern agricultural insanity as government policy.

For those of us more into sustainable farming practices and organic foods, I will soon have some posts about the alternatives to standard processed sugar presented by heirloom sugar beets and sorghum. Probably still need to take that extension service beekeeping course, but I’ve gotta get some bear-proof fencing first. Maybe next season…

Most environmentally aware people try to keep up with the science, the debates, and the drafting of policy that will hopefully address Global Climate Change (a.k.a. Global Warming). The hope is that we can diminish human contributions to greenhouse gases before the planet becomes unlivable. Things like developing energy sources that don’t require raping the earth or poisoning the air and water (Mountaintop Removal) or never-ending oil wars, conservation at home and at work, switching urban transportation fleets to biodiesel, purchasing hybrid cars, commitments to rebuilding infrastructure such as the electrical grid so it doesn’t ‘lose’ nearly half of our generation capacity, ending the decimation of tropical rainforests, etc.

And many of the people young and old who are paying attention and doing what they can to mitigate their own carbon footprints are also well aware that with some tweaking of our antiquated agricultural policies that were originally designed to ‘beat’ the Soviets in some kind of mock Cold War game of who can produce the most corn, we could be saving 20% of our fossil fuel consumption simply by switching the nation’s primary shipping systems – trains, ships and semi fleets – to biodiesel made with alternative feedstock crops. Along with our agricultural machinery. A combine can run just fine on biodiesel – or, with a pre-heater refit, straight vegetable oil.

Yet there’s a huge contributor to climate change that people don’t seem to be particularly aware of or take seriously as far as choices they could make to lessen their own impact. It’s not about carbon dioxide, which is the primary focus of most attempts to mitigate Global Warming, but about other greenhouse gases like nitrous oxide and methane. For these the agricultural sector is again the most significant contributor, and it all revolves around our hard-to-kick habit of eating way too much meat.

Meat production accounts for a majority of the deforestation both in the tropics and temperate regions. Researchers from Johns Hopkins published a paper in the journal Public Health Nutrition last year examining the shortcomings of media reporting about agricultural (thus food choices) contributions to climate change which illustrates why this aspect of the issue is escaping so many otherwise concerned citizens.

According to the United Nations meat production accounts for 9% of human CO2 production. Yet meat production accounts for 65% of humanity’s contribution of nitrous oxide, which has nearly 300 times the greenhouse impact of carbon dioxide! Meat production further produces 37% of the methane contribution (a gas 23 tomes more greenhouse potent than CO2) and 64% of ammonia – a potent contributor to acid rain. Land use dedicated to livestock production includes 30% of the planet’s entire land surface and 33% of global arable land just for growing food for those cattle, swine, chickens and such. Together, livestock production accounts for a fifth of all global emissions. Which is higher than all transportation sources combined.

Truth is that feed enough to produce a single pound of steak could provide adequate nutrition for 5 humans. Not to mention livestock production’s contributions to water shortages and pollution loads, epidemic obesity in the population that for some reason believes it needs meat 4 or 5 times a day, thus serious contributions to the notably lousy health of our population across the board – and cost of health care for so many obese, sickly meat-eaters.

Beef and lamb are the most inefficient and most polluting meats, pork is a bit more GHG efficient (but not less polluting per water quality and usage), chicken is lowest. By simply not eating meat during one meal a day, we could cut our GHG emissions overall by more than 10%. Individuals could still maintain their weight problems, hardened arteries and high cholesterol levels just fine despite skipping the bacon or strip steak once a day. If they chose to eat meat only once a day, they might lose some weight and find themselves in better overall health while lessening their personal contribution to global climate change by half!

Chances are that the world’s governments aren’t going to do enough in the next decade or two to delay or prevent massive global climate change and all the deadly consequences of that to humans and the rest of the life we share this planet with. Chances are that individual people’s diet and lifestyle choices will kill them sooner than they might have liked no matter what governments do or don’t do in the future. For those of us who have made serious lifestyle choices to become more responsible and more aware by doing as much as we can for ourselves, we’ve a big investment is staying healthy and active, in wholesome food production and preservation, and in educating our children, friends and neighbors toward healthier lifestyles and smaller footprints on the face of the earth.

Everyone dies in the end, all generations. The questions today are how much of the world will we take with us when we go, and how much will we leave to future generations so they have a chance to experience life too. We faced a similar dilemma with our vast arsenals of WMDs a generation ago, and while it still plays a role in international tensions, we no longer live our lives under Damocles’ Sword threatening to make us extinct 400+ times over just because we can. A decision was made in the ether of humanity’s collective consciousness to have a future, to allow life to continue its evolutionary journey on this rock. We could make such a decision again, without too much sacrifice and both we and future generations would be much healthier and happier for it.

Pick a day and go meatless. Pick a meal and skip the meat in it every day. Switch to chicken and stop eating beef or pork or lamb apart from holidays once or twice a year. If enough of us did just that much we might buy the future some time, and time is a precious – but diminishing – commodity right now.

Here are some links to sources readers may find helpful in educating themselves about this aspect of global climate change, and possibly for help in making the right choices…

WaPo: The Meat of the Problem

AAAS: Climate-Friendly Dining … Meats

IA State: Food, Fuel and Freeways

Why is the Media Afraid to Tackle Livestock’s Role in Climate Change?

Cornell: Food for Livestock or People

Most committed modern homesteaders try to keep up with the many issues of concern to us personally, our country, and our chosen way of life. Things like rural development policies, governmental agricultural and energy policies, self-sufficiency (and roadblocks to that), management of forests and water sources, etc. It’s because we care that we are who we are and do what we do. And a good many of us try to keep up daily or weekly with the best sources of information we need to keep abreast of those issues.

One of my favorite sources is the Organic Consumers Association [OCA], which is tireless in its efforts to follow and disseminate necessary news and useful resources for homesteaders like us. If you haven’t signed up yet for their newsletters, go on over to OCA and do so. You sure won’t be sorry!

In my newsletter this week I was again informed that OCA’s website has been under sustained hacker attack, operatives for the ‘usual suspect’ [Monsanto] notwithstanding. Somebody out there doesn’t want us to have the good information OCA delivers to us for free, and is actively attempting to thwart the effort. Show ‘em some love if you’ve got some love (or money) to spare!

One of the issues OCA is on top of that should be of serious concern to all of us who grow organic fruits and veggies or raise free-range chickens, grass-fed beef or offer organic dairy products is the Obama administration’s alliance with Monsanto in matters of developing policy. The new proposals for “food safety” have proven positively draconian for small value-added producers, many of whom are having their farms raided by gestapo-type goon squads and their equipment, animals and food products seized, and are facing astronomical legal bills all in the name of corporate agribiz profits and total control of the food supply. I mean, it’s not like these people care about toxic substances, unsustainable practices, mad cows or melamine in baby formula or anything. What they want to eliminate are your choices, access to markets, and ability to make a living by sustainably tending and preserving the land instead of raping it wholesale.

Knowledge can be our most effective weapon beside our commitments to the land, our families, our way of life and our hard work to make it work. If readers have more sources for keeping up, please offer them in the comments and I’ll check them out and report back.

In these times of Wall Street collapses, banking bankruptcies, massive unemployment, homelessness and increasing deprivation, we in the rural sector are already living in Great Depression-II even as the city folk and DC denizens keep talking about mere recession. We have a new President who has promised “hope” to Americans, and who appointed a Monsanto apologist to be Secretary of Agriculture, thereby slapping every struggling small farmer and ardent homesteader in the face.

Hope is all very nice in a made-for-TV movie or light novel, but we all know you can’t eat it, live in it, pay your doctor with it or drive it to a day-job. We’re going to need more than hope and slaps in the face to get through all this piper-paying. And despite Obama’s lousy choice for SecAg, there are some people in DC who do seem to understand that while cities are where the bread and circuses are distracting the population from their deprivations, if we allow the rural backbone to disintegrate people won’t just be deprived. They’ll be starving to death.

Many of us modern homesteaders came to our lifelong labors of love from those cities and megaburbs, once living large with boom economy jobs and the whole rat race. Then gave it all up very much on purpose so we could build new lives for ourselves and our families that really mean something. Those of us with college degrees (some quite advanced), may have even taken a few courses in basic business management and/or economics and/or marketing to help us get those city jobs we left behind when we moved to the hinterlands where the farmers live.

As the various tentacles of the economic stimulus package reach into the states, some state legislatures are working hard to earmark some of the funds for rural business development. Rural, farm-based businesses that produce not just raw materials but finished (or partially finished) products for sale are what is called Value Added Agriculture.

Value added agriculture makes a different kind of business out of the usual small farm business of growing basic commodities and then selling them to buyers representing big food producers and conglomerates. It’s not just selling milk from your cows to the local dairy, but making cheese out of the milk and selling that to grocery stores, restaurants and sometimes directly to retail customers. Instead of just being the raw resource miner, the farmstead becomes the producing ‘middleman’ in the chain of getting raw resources processed and to consumers all over the world.

State land grant universities in all states are beginning to offer these business management courses through their agricultural departments to farmers and homesteaders. Some extension agencies are also offering classes free or very cheap, so a farm family can learn the details and develop their ideas over time while still maintaining their dirt-based day jobs.

Some of the better resources I’ve found out on the web to help homesteaders take this next step toward better income and community job resource come from various sustainable agricultural organizations. Keys to Success in Value-Added Agriculture is a 20-page booklet that offers a very good overview of the issues and solutions involved in adding value to your commodities. The USDA’s Rural Development branch has information and applications for their value-added producer grant program to provide funding for farm-based entrepreneurs.

The Ag Marketing Resource Center, a national partnership of land grant institutions and state departments of agriculture, offers a portal to their gathered resources for those interested in value-added agriculture. These include market research, business development grants and success stories from all over the country.

So if your family would like to expand your homestead’s horizons this year, check out these resources and don’t hesitate to use them as portals to more information and more help in getting started. It’s our lives and chosen lifestyles on the line, and none of us should lose these to the failure of political and economic leadership in recent years. If readers have their own success stories or ideas to share, please do!

Links:

Disconcerting: Tom Vilsack at USDA
Legislation introduced to invest money in ag industry
USDA: Value-Added Producer Grants
Agricultural Marketing Resource Center

As President-Elect Barack Obama has been very busy selecting key cabinet people and meeting with House and Senate leadership to ensure everyone’s ready on January 20th to begin implementing the Changes he promised, some of us out here on the active lifestyle progressive fringe are not happy with a few of the important choices.

By appointing Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack to head the USDA (Department of Agriculture), committed homesteaders, small landholders and organic farmers like me now have to be concerned that efforts by our own government to make us extinct may NOT change when the leadership in DC changes hands.

In the diary Tom “I Heart Monsanto” Vilsack, This One’s For You, kossack OrangeClouds115 lists everything that’s wrong with GMOs and Monsanto Corporation’s tireless efforts to own and control every aspect of agricultural production in the world. Note I said “world,” because it’s not just Big Corn Country like Iowa and Nebraska and Indiana that Monsanto seeks to own with its grotesque genetically-altered cultivars. It’s everyone’s ability to obtain seed and farm the land, from the US to Canada and South America, Africa, Europe and Asia as well as Australia. They want it all, they don’t need it all, and right here in Homesteading-USA we are the front and foremost line against this obscenity.

I know (or hope) that all my readers feel as strongly about organic standards, scientific assessment of all GMOs – including for potential long-term health effects as well as cross-contamination of organic crops – and protections for small farmers and their markets as I do. So I’ll ask all of you to please sign the Food Democracy NOW petition to President-Elect Obama outlining our important policy goals and making alternative suggestions for appointment choices in this department.

No matter what an individual appointee’s past positions may have been, he or she will be working for the President and carrying out the policies of his administration as dictated by him. Which would serve to put some hefty shackles on Vilsack’s probable desire to walk his favorite corporation’s self-serving desires past any and all proper overview and alignment.

US agricultural policies in coming years can make or break our entire back-to-the-land, organic, sustainable living efforts entirely moot if we don’t stand up immediately for what WE want and need in the way of support from our government and its agencies. So get on it, dear readers, and don’t forget to add your own comments to Obama so that he knows exactly where we stand and how important we’re going to be if those GMO monoculture, chemical-intensive crops ever fail.

And Happy Holidays to every single one of you and those you love. Throw an extra log on that Solstice bonfire for me, we’ll be celebrating our Solstice Baby’s birthday with a big one right here on the homestead.

Links:

Food Democracy NOW petition
Flashback: Blue Jersey interviews Tom Vilsack
AgSuck: Looks like Tom Vilsack to head USDA
Tom “I Heart Monsanto” Vilsack, This One’s For You

Here we are nearly halfway through 2008, and the 2007 farm bill is slowly but surely making its way through House and Senate disagreements on its way to the chamber floors for vote this week or next. The final compromise, USDA chair Ed Schafer bluntly informs us, will be vetoed by President Bush.

If farm legislation doesn’t directly affect many of us rural and semi-rural homesteaders, it’s a sure bet that it will affect our neighbors who do farm on a commercial scale. Thus it’s something we should be paying attention to. According to lawmakers nearly 3/4 of the spending in this bill over the next decade will be for feeding the needy. Another 16% goes toward commodities, crop insurance and disaster relief. Increasing nutrition spending (feeding the hungry) 8+% over the previous farm bill is reasonable given the worsening food crisis both in America and world wide.

This farm bill addresses biofuels diversion of food crops (like soy and corn) by providing more than a billion dollars to expand alternate use of biomass (like switchgrass and algae) and crop by-products (cornstalks, wheat straw, etc.) rather than diverting the grain itself. It also tightens payment limits, eliminating the “three-entity rule” that the previous bill contained as justification to funneling most ag payments to huge agribusiness concerns rather than smaller farm cooperatives or family farms. It limits subsidies to anyone making more than $500,000 in non-farm adjusted gross income [AGI] per year, and entirely ending direct payments to anyone with an AGI of more than $750,000 from any source. This will effectively put Big Agribusiness in the business of actually doing business instead of simply sucking up free corporate welfare as smaller family farms disappear.

New homesteaders usually aim to grow an increasing amount of their own food, as this is part of the whole homesteading impetus in the modern world. Those who have been at it for awhile – and have managed to secure ~10 or more acres for their homestead – are increasingly producing food for local markets and even joining the CSA movement by allowing individuals and families to “buy-in” to the season’s crops. The nation’s farm bill policies (the 2002 bill expires on Friday, May 16th) usually don’t affect what homesteads of 50 acres or less produce, and nobody from the government tries to tell them what they can or can’t grow. And as long as production remains tied to the local/regional market the government isn’t likely to interfere.

So why, one might reasonably ask, has President Bush promised to veto the legislation? First, he’d wanted a $200,000 AGI cap on ALL farm subsidies, essentially getting the government fairly well out of the business of subsidizing agriculture altogether. The politicians claim their $750,000 figure is more realistic as a way of weaning farmers off support payments. Which under the present soon-to-expire bill allows an AGI of $2.5 million. Surely then the higher cap is reasonable as a step-down without throwing US agriculture into total turmoil just when food is becoming a precious commodity.

And while the amount of money American taxpayers must provide to farmers in order to have a safe and ample supply of food is certainly too much in real terms under the 2002 bill, that’s not the most controversial aspect of the 2007 bill. That would be the “commodity title” – the program through which the government tries to smooth out the financial uncertainty of farming itself. Bush wants those out altogether because they’re a sticking point in global trade deals (and, presumably, because we don’t have any money left from his oil wars in Afghanistan and Iraq). These payments usually go to the biggest farming concerns, so serious economic recession should be a factor in their continuance.

However – and most important to rural homesteaders producing or planning to produce within the next few years food for local/regional markets – this bill contains $5 million in annual mandatory funding for “Community Food Projects [CFP]” over the next 10 years. The bill also allows public school to favor local farms in bids for school food supplies, and this can significantly improve both local markets as well as school nutrition in general. It eliminates a major barrier for schools and will make Farm to School programs much easier to establish county-wide or even regionally. This will help producing homesteaders significantly.

While schools are still limited to spending a mere 70¢ to $1.00 per day per student for food, communities could get creative with other subsidies and program funding that would pay local farmers a decent price for their produce (including meat, dairy and chicken/eggs). The Conservation Title in this bill will tend to reward small farmers and producing homesteaders for their land and water conservation efforts too, and since we’re doing it anyway it’s nice to think that we could enjoy a small stipend to maintain the practice.

There are significant boosts in funding for organic agriculture, including a quintupling of payments to cover the heavy price of organic certification, and a seven-fold increase in funding for organic research and extension. It’s not a lot (and nowhere near the cash devoted to industrial-scale agribusiness), but it’s something. Something is always better than nothing, particularly since most of us homesteaders are growing food anyway.

I’ve been encouraging homesteaders to network with their neighbors and communities in a number of ways, and food production, distribution, nutrition programs in schools and for the needy in our communities are important aspects of local governance and planning homesteaders can contribute much to. We don’t HAVE to be paid by the government to love where we live and do what we do, but if our areas can manage to lasso some help from the big guys then we should be attempting to get all we can. Farm and rural policies are important even though we are striving for independence. So keeping up with what affects farmers in our areas is very important.

Links:
Farm Bill Heads for Congressional Passage
Farm Bill Conferees Near Goal Line
Congress (almost) passes a farm bill