MB Civic

Vegetables of Mass Destruction – Family Farms
by OrangeClouds115
Sun Jul 30, 2006 at 05:04:05 AM PDT

One of my favorite aspects of the Kos community is that various Kossacks occasionally end up at the right place at the right time to capture a unique perspective or hear an important speech or witness an event and they share it with the rest of us who couldn’t be there. Usually, I am not the Kossack who is lucky enough to capture such a special moment. Today, however, I am.

I attended (and am still attending as we speak) the summer meeting of the National Family Farm Coalition. I feel strongly that the issues raised here at this meeting should be taken up (or at least heard) by all progressives. You might not farm, but you eat. And you work. You participate in the same economy that the farmers do, and their issues affect every one of us.

I haven’t slept much and I’ve been walking all over cranberry marshes and dairy farms all day, so this won’t be the best write-up I’ll do of it, but it also won’t be the last.

If you do not plan to read the whole diary, skip down to the keynote speech given by former Rep. Jim Jontz

This diary is a bit of a brain dump of the events of the past day. I’ll briefly touch on each part of today’s agenda and then I’ll go into full detail on Jim’s speech. If you aren’t a regular reader of my diaries, I always post them around 6am-7am CST on Sundays and I encourage you to check back each week for follow-up diaries about this event.

About two weeks ago, a buddy and I stumbled into an invitation to attend the NFFC’s summer meeting, and we decided to almost at once to come. The meeting is in Tomah, WI, about 100 mi from our home.

Prior to two weeks ago, neither of us had heard of the NFFC. In fact, as recently as yesterday morning, I did not know what they stood for. (An intelligent person might point out that their website has a page on it titled “What We Stand For,” so I am sure as a determined and intelligent blogger I could have found out, but it’s sorta just been that kind of week at work if you know what I mean.)

This morning we piled into the car, stopped off at the Farmer’s Market to pick up our CSA box, and headed to Tomah. Everyone else here either works with a grassroots-type organization, farms, or does both. We’ve been telling people that we are here because we eat.

Cranberries
First up when we got here was a trip to a cranberry marsh. The marsh we visited is medium-to-large sized (I think she said 125 acres) and it has been family owned since its founding over 100 years ago. Only five states produce our nation’s cranberries, and Wisconsin took over the title of “leading cranberry producer” from Massechusetts a bit over a decade ago.

There’s quite a bit to be said about cranberries, but I’m going to have to save that for a later day because my head hurts and I want to get to Jim Jontz’s speech.

Dairy
After the cranberries, we visited a dairy farm and enjoyed some raw milk from grass-fed cows (yes, even me… if milk like this was available to me locally, I wouldn’t tell people I’m a vegan). I grew up hating the taste of milk, especially whole milk, but let me tell you that this stuff tasted great!

There’s a lot to be said about laws regulating raw milk but I don’t even know the half of it. I know that many people tout the benefits of raw milk, particularly from grass-fed cows, and it can be tricky to find a place to buy it, partially due to regulation of it.

At the dairy farm, we heard three speakers. The first spoke about biodiesel. Farmers have been hit particularly hard by the fuel prices. They are very innovative (out of necessity) and very practical. The general message was: biodiesel is cheaper than petroleum products, and it works. They weren’t talking lofty ideals; they were talking logistics.

I spoke to a farmer from Kansas who is organizing a motorcade of tractors going to DC for a protest on farm & energy issues and I plan to diary this as it happens. I’ll write more about farming and biodiesel and biomass at that time.

The second speaker told us about the formation of a dairy coop in Wisconsin. In the late 1990’s, about 16 dairy farmers got together to create the coop, Scenic Central. This has now ballooned out to 250 dairy farmers, with a waiting list to get in. The coop markets the milk to buyers around the state or nearby and gives as much money as possible back to the dairy farmers themselves.

An issue came up here that led to the third speaker. In Wisconsin there are several buyers for milk, but in many parts of the country there is just one. Here the farmers can bid up their price a little bit. Elsewhere, they cannot.

I want to dig deeper on the issue that the third speaker told us about, but I can tell you what I’ve got for now. The dairy farmers got the DpJ to look into industry consolidation. This eventually led to Dean Foods which had some connections through somebody to Bush, so the investigation came to a dead halt. The dairy farmers met with Arlen Specter and managed to get the investigation started back up again. I promise to look further into this and share it with you as I find out the details.

After the dairy tour we returned to our hotel to clean up and then we went for a locally-grown organic dinner. I think the only thing that came from outside of Wisconsin was the coffee – and even that was fair trade and organic.

Rep. Jontz’s Speech
I met Rep. Jontz earlier in the day, on the dairy farm. I didn’t know that he used to be in Congress then, so I started talking to him and didn’t realize it until later. I try to stay politically aware, but sometimes I really have my head up my ass like that.

George Naylor introduced former Rep. Jontz (at which point I realized that former Rep. Jontz was a former representative).

(Tangent: Another thrill from today was meeting George Naylor, the Iowa corn farmer from The Omnivore’s Dilemma. He seemed like a reasonable and intelligent guy from reading about him in the book, but I know that if he’s here at this meeting, then he’s one of the good guys.)

Jontz started out by asking us how the economy is going for us and for the people around us – friends, family, and neighbors. Bonddad can be proud that all of his talking points came up. Wage stagnation, current account deficit, personal debt, national debt, etc, etc. Several attendees were from Mississippi and their economic problems are in a whole different ballpark than those of the rest of the country.

Jontz is smart to start this way. He knew the answer to the question already but it made his entire speech immediately relevant to the lives of everyone in the audience. And it proved a point for him. The point was that candidates do not need to tell Americans how bad the Bush economy is. Americans already know. They live it.

If your name isn’t Paris Hilton, you get it. You don’t need a John Kerry to tell you how many jobs you’ve lost. You have eyes and ears.

What Americans need, Jontz said, is a vision of how the economy can be better. They need a yardstick to measure against. If you know the economy is bad and you are told over and over again “Get used to it, you’re lucky to have a job,” then what do you do? Vote on social issues. The economy is no longer an election issue. The issues are gay marriage, abortion, guns, etc. Jontz said this but believe me, there was participation too. Whatever’s the matter with Kansas, the NFFC crowd isn’t getting fooled by Rush Limbaugh or anyone else.

Jontz’s group is going to candidates with a very specific list of requests and asking them to take a stand. They aren’t saying “What’s your stance on NAFTA?” or “Are you for or against NAFTA?” They are giving them specific, measurable positions to take on issues, that we can track once these candidates are elected (if they are elected).

They are not doing this in the month or two before the campaign either. They are starting early. They are targetting races that they think are winnable, particularly when there is a significant difference between the two candidates (WI-08 is one that he mentioned).

His ideas reminded me of one of my college professor’s favorite things to say in clase. Part of leadership is communication. You need to put a vision of your goal in people’s heads. Make it very, very tangible – like when Kennedy spoke about going to the moon. If you heard Kennedy say it, you could picture exactly what the end result would look like.

I think this addresses something we do here, because we are very good at pointing out the flaws of the Bush economy. We can compress them into bumper stickers and talking points, and we can expand on them with numbers and economic theory. But what is our grand scheme for the ideal economy we are working towards? We need to articulate that in a way that people visualize.

To tie this back into farming issues, he brought up the minimum wage, which Americans overwhelmingly support increasing. He said we should make the tie in between the wage a worker makes and the price a farmer gets. To a farmer, price is wage. It’s the price tag that sticks on the hard work you do.

People understand the value (there’s that word again guys… values) that hard work should be rewarded. It is fair that someone who works their ass off gets compensated for it. Don’t let the idea of subsidies for agriculture obscure the issue. If the prices were fair, we wouldn’t need to have the subsidies. Subsidies help no one but Cargill, et al.

Cargill makes money from volume; farmers make money from price. The subsidy system promotes increased volume, which decreases the price. Cargill wins, the farmers lose, and the consumer loses too.

Let’s turn these moral values (the moral values that matter) into the election issue. Just to recap, here are your points:

1. The economy is bad, but if we don’t tell people it can and should be better then it won’t be an election issue.
2. Paint a tangible picture of your vision of an improved economy.
3. Get on candidates about this early and give them very concrete positions to take.
4. Progressives need to talk about values. Supporting fair prices for farmers is a value. This will get a response.

I’ll just add to this (these are my own words now, not Rep. Jontz’s) that family farmers are fighting corporate greed and corruption every day of their lives, and they are fighting an uphill battle. They need our support, because our well-being depends on their survival.