Commodity Farming and Subsidies Benefit Big Agribuisiness by Sura, March 4
“According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, in 2005, farms with average household incomes of $200,000 per year accounted for 9% of all farms but received 54% of government payments.”
My Forbidden Fruits (and Vegetables)
A couple of excerpt from the NY Times article:
[C]onsumers who would like to be able to buy local fruits and vegetables… will be dismayed to learn that the federal government works deliberately and forcefully to prevent the local food movement from expanding.
The commodity farm program effectively forbids farmers who usually grow corn or the other four federally subsidized commodity crops (soybeans, rice, wheat and cotton) from trying fruit and vegetables.
The federal farm program is making it next to impossible for farmers to rent land to me to grow fresh organic vegetables.
Why? Because national fruit and vegetable growers based in California, Florida and Texas fear competition from regional producers like myself. Through their control of Congressional delegations from those states, they have been able to virtually monopolize the country’s fresh produce markets.”
That’s unfortunate, because small producers will have to expand on a significant scale across the nation if local foods are to continue to enter the mainstream as the public demands.
Ultimately of course, it is the consumer who will pay the greatest price for this — whether it is in the form of higher prices I will have to charge to absorb the government’s fines, or in the form of less access to the kind of fresh, local produce that the country is crying out for.
Farmers need the choice of what to plant on their farms, and consumers need more farms like mine producing high-quality fresh fruits and vegetables to meet increasing demand from local markets — without the federal government actively discouraging them.
4 Mar 2008 | 1:06 pm | Economic Development, Environmental Sustainability
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