Locally Produced Fruits and Veggies are damn near illegal
What’s wrong with this picture? A local farmer in Minnesota wrote a great opinion piece in the NYTimes about his issues renting acreage to expand his high-demand locally grown organic fruits and veggies business. Problem is that the acreage he wished to rent had been dedicated to “corn base”. When farm acreage has been dedicated to a federal subsidy crop, it is ILLEGAL to plant anything else there except a rotation crop or nothing at all. The penalty is the value of the “illicit crop” plus a possible ineligibility for all subsidies in future, and since farmers don’t make huge amounts of dough, this could put a farmer out of business in a hurry. So what is this farmer to do? He has to either pay the vig to the people he rents acreage from, so they can pay the penalties, and so they aren’t hurt by his choice of crop, or he has to consider purchasing more land, which may or may not be available or affordable.
In addition, the bureaucratic entanglements that these two farmers faced at the Farm Service office were substantial. 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. My problems are just the tip of the iceberg.
Add to this the high cost of fuel to get those California and other Factory Farm produce to market, the CO2 hit our environment takes in its creation and transport, the pesticides and petroleum derived fertilizers that are raping the farmland on the Factory Farms, and the additional subsidies added for a crop like Corn from the biofuel fiasco, and it’s already creating a crisis in our food chain, and contributing to the Recession we’re entering. And those are our tax dollars being wasted and our environment being trashed in order to produce those subsidy crops, and those subsidies would be much better spent on healthy foods produced closer to home.
The few meaningful reforms to the Farm Bill have been stripped out. If we are to be sustainable as a country when Peak Oil hits, we need to fix this. Fast.
