Get Ready for a Food Fight!!
The 2007 Farm Bill and why you need to care

My senior project is to spread awareness of how important the 2007 Farm Bill is to everyone, not just farmers. I created this 45-minute presentation to highlight the diverse ways in which the different titles of the Farm Bill affect our food, fuel, and landscape. Below the slides is the script for my presentation. Enjoy!

1. To give you a sense of the broad scope of the farm bill, I’ll tell a few more stories. Right now, Mexican corn farmers like this fellow are competing with American corn farmers and losing. I’ll get into the reasons behind this a little later.

1. This is a shot of a farmers market in Washington, D.C. Folks there are now able to use food stamps like WIC at the farmers market for fresh fruits and vegetables.

1. Huge ethanol plants like this one are popping up all over the Midwest, many are set to come online this year in Minnesota. Each ethanol plant will have a huge affect on the rural communities around it.

1. Prairies and forests are being replanted on marginal farmland each year—we’ve got the Farm Bill to thank for that.

1. In an effort to keep prices low, fruit and vegetable farms hire undocumented migrant workers to pick each season. They technically don’t exist, so the government technically doesn’t have to factor them in when calculating the risks of pesticides applied in the fields. Where do these folks come from and why? The Farm Bill affects this as well.

1. Public schoolkids across the country eat federally funded meals, many of them for a reduced fee or no fee at all. The main ingredients for many of these meals are surplus commodities and high in added fat and sugar. The Farm Bill regulates the funding for this program as well.

1. As you can see, the 2007 Farm Bill should really be called the 2007 Food, Fuel, Public Health, and Farming Bill. The last one we had was in 2002, and it’s set to expire this September. Even though it’s less than 1% of the federal budget, it really isn’t an exaggeration to claim that this bill shapes the way we, and arguably the world, eats more than any other piece of legislation. It’s a piece of omnibus legislation, meaning is has a whole slew of legislation within it. The current Bush administration farm bill proposal is 183 pages long, filled with jargon and acronyms like EEPs, LDPs, FGPs, PCPs, DCPs, CCCs… you get the picture. It’s huge and it’s complicated and very intimidating to understand. What I’ve tried to do is wade through the information and pull out what I like to call the sexy parts of the Farm Bill.

1. But before we get into that, let’s get a picture of what American agriculture looks like today. When the general public thinks about farms, this is obviously an exaggeration of a farm scene but it might actually be pretty similar to what they imagine. That’s not a surprise, since less than 3% of the population farms anymore. And, even if you were a farm kid or had grandparents who farmed, farming even back in the 1950s was far different than it is today. Here on old MacDonald’s farm there are lots of different kinds of animals, trees, pasture, and judging from the tractor (I love how it’s smaller than the cow) and the grain bin, some sort of row crop planted.

1. Although this certainly isn’t what all farms look like, this is definitely a more accurate depiction than the puzzle. No wonder we give our kids toys and puzzles that look like (this) instead of (this). Can you imagine it? Your kids playing with little plastic manure lagoons and pesticide sprayers and confinement barns? These days, the Old MacDonald song would be very short. “Old MacDonald had some pigs, e-i-e-i-o. Old MacDonald had…some more pigs…” Since the 1950s when tractors, fertilizer, pesticides, and hybrid seeds all came into common use at the same time, farming has gotten bigger, more specialized, more mechanized, more dependent on outside sources of food, fertility and pest control. Along with all these developments have come some serious problems.

1. Animal welfare is a huge concerns. For reasons I’ll get into in a minute, it’s much more profitable to cram tons of animals into a barn and feed scientifically proportioned feed to get maximum growth. The wellbeing of the animals isn’t necessarily a primary concern, and many animals die as a result of the living conditions. These operations are called CAFOs, confined animal feeding operations.

1. In terms of crops, it would be almost impossible to grow corn or soybeans on a 350 acre farm and make it in today’s global market, so corn and bean farms have become massive. Agriculture has also become a very concentrated sector—75% of subsidies go to the largest 10% of producers, and 3/4ths of farmers don’t receive any subsidies at all. This is supported by the design of government subsidies as I’ll explain in a minute.

1. Modern agriculture is also a huge source of greenhouse gas emissions in many ways. In fact, a researcher from the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy has stated that “When all of the energy demands of these systems are aggregated, agriculture is likely to emerge as the single largest source of global greenhouse gas emissions, and by a substantial margin.” Big farms require big machines to cultivate and harvest crops and they guzzle fuel like nobody’s business. Also, the process to make chemical fertilizers requires immense amounts of heat and pressure and hydrogen gas, all of which come from some form of fossil fuel. (Interesting side note: The guy who developed the method of fixing nitrogen and converting into a usable form in 1909, a German Jewish chemist named Fritz Haber, also developed some of the poison gases that were used in concentration camps. Another interesting war connection is that we started using fertilizer in the US after world war II, because we had a lot of leftover ammonium nitrate, a key ingredient in explosives. And don’t even get me started on the links between pesticides and chemical warfare in world war II!) And you normally don’t think of strawberries when you think of global warming, but to get fresh produce in Minnesota in the dead of winter it requires an enormous amount of fossil fuel energy for growing and transporting fresh food. A strawberry, for example, only has five calories of energy in it, but can take an average of 435 calories to get to your local Cub foods.

1. And then there are the environmental and health problems related to pesticides and fertilizer. It shouldn’t surprise us that when we douse the farmland all around us with poisons it gets into our groundwater, our cells, and even human breastmilk. Remember the deformed frogs? The EPA found that atrazine was the culprit. Atrazine also happens to be the most widely used pesticide in the US.

1. And as if this part of the country wasn’t already having enough problems, there is a huge area of hypoxia where the Mississippi River drains into the gulf of Mexico called the Dead Zone, which pretty much sums up what it is. Farmers up here till up the land, the wind comes along and whips the soil and whatever other fertilizer is in it into the river, and we send it on down the Mississippi. And these are just some of the environmental problems. I could also get into not only soil erosion but the erosion of rural populations, not to mention the erosion of good thinking.

1. Of course, agriculture didn’t have to turn out like this. It happened by design. Back during the Great Depression, FDR and his secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace created a system to stabilize the highly volatile grain prices. The design, called the Ever-Normal Granary, was simple and elegant. Here’s how it worked: Say the prices the year before had been very low due to an excellent growing season and huge surplus. The USDA told farmers how much land to plant to prevent another round of surplus yields. If the prices were still below the target price set by the USDA at harvest time the farmer had two choices—he could sell on the market and get that low price for his corn, or he could get a “nonrecourse” loan from the USDA and give the government his harvest as collateral. The nonrecourse loan is the amount of money the farmer should have gotten if the market price met the target price. The farmer then had money to feed the family and keep machinery intact, etc. He watched the market, and if it looked like it was going to surpass the target price, he took the grain back, sold it on the market, and then repaid the loan with a bit of interest. If prices stayed low, he just kept the money and gave the government his grain. The government would put the grain in the Ever-Normal Granary, which it used to stabilize prices by letting grain onto the market if prices got too high. In this policy everybody won—the farmer got a fair price for his grain, the government either got the grain or earned a little money on the loan interest, and food prices stayed stable for consumers.

1. Then 30 years later, along came Earl Butz, Nixon’s secretary of agriculture. Earl Butz became Secretary of Agriculture and set out to topple the entire system. In the early 1970s, a huge shipment of American grain (30 million tons!) to Russia and a coinciding drought in the Midwest caused something of a shortage, boosting farm prices to historic heights. Food prices had increased to the point where housewives were boycotting meat and there was turmoil in the suburbs. Angry consumers make for a nervous president, so Nixon instructed Butz to get prices down no matter what it took. What followed was a complete transformation of the role of farmers in American society. He instructed farmers to think of themselves as businessmen, to plant corn “fencerow to fencerow,” to “get big or get out,” and to “adapt or die.” Mr. Butz was not at all worried about the drop in prices a surplus of corn would cause; in fact, that was his goal. To keep farmers happy, he created the “direct payments” system. Farmers grew as much corn as they could and then sold it on the market for a price that had dropped far below the cost of production. To bring the voice of an economist into the room, no rational firm would produce more and more while operating at a loss for the long term. This wasn’t a problem for farmers, because the government, i.e. taxpayers, made up the difference. If the target price was $3/bushel and the market price was $1/bushel, the government would pay that farmer $2/bushel. Therefore, it made no difference how low the prices got, they were getting the same amount of money anyway, and even more money if they expanded their production. This costs you and me billions of dollars every year (an average of $19 billion per year), and essentially these billions subsidize corporations like Cargill and Archer Daniels Midlands. Sidenote: Earl Butz was fired in 1976 for saying “desire of black Americans to have "good sex, comfortable shoes, and a warm place to go to the bathroom."

1. So, what were the results of this overhaul of subsidy policy? Well, this picture sums it up. We were left with mountains of cheap corn. This gigantic pile of corn is about 2.7 million bushels stacked up 60 feet high. That is a hell of a lot of corn right? Yes, but in 2005 corn farmers grew about 11 billion bushels total, which would mean about 4070 more piles this size. That same year the government subsidized these piles of corn to the tune of $24.3 billion dollars, quite a jump up from only $7 billion in 1995. Why the huge jump? The 1996 Farm Bill finished what Earl Butz set out to do—it removed the last supply management tools, which were methods like requiring farmers to set aside acres to balance supply with demand. They did this do try to reduce subsidies, but prices collapsed by 40% as excess corn flooded the market, and then the government had to pay $20 billion in emergency bailouts. Big whoops.

1. So, what do we do with all this cheap corn? One thing that cheap corn has encouraged is the production of meat in CAFOs and feedlots. Many farmers used to grow corn and other grains to feed their animals, but once feed became so cheap CAFOs started popping up and made it economically impossible for a midsized farmer to raise livestock and crops. Cows, in particular, are fed scientifically proportioned feed consisting of corn, alfalfa hay, silage, beef tallow, synthetic protein essentially made from natural gas, antibiotics, synthetic estrogen and vitamins. The protein used to come from ground up waste cow parts, but the FDA banned that due to mad cow disease issues. Now they can use ground up waste chicken parts and feces. Oh yes, and the chicken have been fed ground up waste beef products. And we wonder why we have so many food safety issues… We can thank Earl Butz for those. But beef, chicken and hog producers only use up about 3/5ths of the corn. What else do we do with it?

1. Humans can only eat so much corn and meat in a day, so food processing companies and fast food chains try to trick us into eating more of it. This is where corn syrups and a myriad of other food additives come in. In 1971, the year that Japanese scientists discovered the procedure to convert corn starch into high fructose corn syrup, all soda was made with cane and beet sugar and many foods didn’t have the added sugar present today. HFCS was six times sweeter and 20% cheaper than sugar, and also gave farmers something to do with the surpluses of corn that came as a response to the aforementioned restructuring of agricultural policy. It also was easier to transport than raw corn, and was also kind of a wunderadditive. It prevented freezer burn when added to TV dinners, prolonged the shelf life of processed foods, and even gave baked goods the perfectly browned look while maintaining their softness. These days, it’s everywhere your taste buds want to be: soda, candy, breads, jams, sauces, jellies, even ketchup.

1. Not surprisingly, all this added sugar and fat makes us.. well, fat. The low cost and flexibility of HFCS as a sweetener completely changed the way Americans eat. Instead of adjusting for lower production costs by decreasing the price to the consumer, food companies have responded by increasing serving sizes, fulfilling the desire to “get more for less.” In turn, the relatively low cost of processed food high in HFCS and fat sold at fast food restaurants have lured Americans out of their home kitchens and into the booth at the neighborhood burger joint. As you can see here, high fructose corn syrup consumption really took off in the last half of the 70s. This graph shows that the average American was getting a tenth of their daily calories from HFCS.

1. Since this cheap corn product along with soybean oil made processed food dirt cheap, you can see the price comparisons here of processed food and fruits and veggies. In fact, a researcher from the U of WI found that with one dollar he could buy 1200 calories of cookies and potato chips but only 250 calories of carrots. For drinks he could buy 875 calories of pop but only 170 calories of orange juice. Our farm policy effectively makes the least nutritious food the cheapest food, which brings up serious social justice issues. As Michael Pollan says: “A public-health researcher from Mars might legitimately wonder why a nation faced with what its surgeon general has called “an epidemic” of obesity would at the same time be in the business of subsidizing the production of high-fructose corn syrup."

1. On the next slide here you can see that, not surprisingly, consumption of fats, oils and sugars took off by 1980. So, what happens when you subsidize something? It becomes more widely used and lowers the price of the product. And what happens then? People eat more of it because it’s cheaper. And what happens then?

1. Well, then you’ve got an obesity epidemic on your hands. The obesity epidemic has been caused by a whole range of forces: an increase in sedentary jobs, cuts in PE at schools, the rise of the fast food industry, and the general lack of public transportation. However, one third of adults are obese as well as more than 1/6 th of kids. I think the scariest thing I’ve seen in the last few years was the following headline on CNN.com in March of 2005: Report: Obesity will reverse life expectancy gains.” A quote from the article: “[T]oday’s generation will have shorter and less healthy lives than their parents for the first time in modern history.”

This graph shows the increase in obesity since 1960. Again, note the increase in rates for all but one of the age groups increase in the last half of the 70s.

Similar patterns huh? So, even after corn goes to livestock and Cargill makes it into high fructose corn syrup, there is still cheap corn leftover. This is sold on the global market, and sometimes it is dumped.

1. Dumping is when a country sells it’s grain below the cost of production, and it’s illegal by World Trade Organization standards. It’s also something that the U.S. does routinely. To expand export markets, our farm policy keeps prices artificially low. Farmers around the world have to try to keep up, so grain dumping causes a race to the bottom in terms of prices. This is bad for everyone involved besides agribusiness corporations and export companies, but it hits the developing world especially hard for two reasons. First, the dumped grain sold in a developing country is often cheaper than the grain grown locally, which causes many farms to go under. Second, if a country is trying to export its grain, they receive prices that are kept artificially low thanks to the US. Like I said before, this is illegal. But when pressured by the WTO to change, the US acted like a little baby and simply refused to report domestic subsidies. Dumping, in combination with the North American Free Trade Agreement or NAFTA, has been a real crap of a deal for rural Mexicans. After NAFTA went into effect, Mexico had to lower its tariffs against agricultural commodities. The wall came down and cheap American corn flooded in. As I described earlier, the US corn was cheaper than the Mexican corn, and as a result, over 2 million farmers went bankrupt. And where do you think many of those 2 million farmers ended up going? Exactly. And now that the ethanol boom has pushed the price of corn to a record high, the price of tortillas soared because they had fewer corn farmers to supply corn domestically at a more reasonable price.

1. Speaking of ethanol, the Farm Bill has an entire title for energy this year. Politicians from George W. Bush to Barack Obama have been falling all over themselves, trying to show that they’re on board with ethanol. Production has spiked in the last few years, more than doubling since 2001, thanks to legislation that established tax breaks and other incentives for ethanol plants. Ethanol has its benefits: It doesn’t come from the Middle East. It emits fewer greenhouse gases. It supports American farmers supposedly. However, ethanol’s cons certainly outweigh the pros. For every one gallon of ethanol we produce, we still have to use 8/10ths of a gallon of gas. Growing corn requires some of the worst pesticides, including atrazine, the one related to those frog deformities, not to mention tons of fertilizer. In 2005, we turned around 15% of the corn crop into ethanol and substituted it for about 1.72% of our gasoline usage. If we would have converted the whole crop of corn into ethanol, it would have only meet 12% of the national gas demand. To substitute just half of the imports, only the imports, which would translate into about 27% of the total demand, we’d have to plant 140 million acres of corn. The USDA is predicting that 87 acres of corn will be planted in 2007, which is the highest acreage since 1946. And that’s a conservative estimate. (By the way, I’m pulling most of these numbers from a study our very own Professor Jason Hill published!!) Also ethanol production uses copious amounts of natural gas and water. Obviously, ethanol derived from corn is not the answer. There is another option. Through a different chemical process, ethanol can also be produced from the cellulose found in all sorts of feedstocks, like switchgrass, fast growing trees, corn stalks, and all sorts of other plant wastes. Plants like switchgrass don’t need cultivating, fertilizer or pesticides. Since they are perennial tilling and thus soil erosion would be out of the picture. Biomass can be grown all over the country, not just in the Midwest, and it can even sequester carbon. There’s also much more space to grow it too. In 2001, there were 578 million acres of pastureland and 433 million acres of cropland, all of which have the potential for growing biomass. All it needs now is more research and development, and the 2007 Farm Bill energy title will determine how much funding it gets.

1. The Farm Bill also reauthorizes food aid programs. US Food Aid started in the cold war era, partially to increase good will in emerging countries but also to train new mouths to enjoy the taste of a wheat and meat diet so that the US could widen its export market. (I’m not making this up) Don’t get me wrong, US Food Aid feedings starving people and saves lives, but the fact is that it could save millions more lives. Right now the US government funds over half of the international food aid, but it only buys food from US growers. In fact it also requires that 75% of the processing, fortification, bagging and shipping be done in the US or by US companies. This means that even if there is plenty of rice to buy in Asia already, the US insists on buying US rice and shipping it all the way across the globe, which is as you can imagine, slow and inefficient. In fact, the Bush administration estimates that it could spend just 25% of food aid dollars on local procurement it could feed a million more people for 6 months and save an additional 50,000 lives in emergencies. There are several other practices in the Farm Bill that have been targeted, but they involve taxpayer funded export credits and monetization, so they’re a little dry to get into right now.

1. We’ve been focusing on a lot of the things that are wrong with American agriculture and our international trade, but the Farm Bill has some truly and exciting programs in it. Among them are a whole slew of conservation programs, including ones that we have benefited from here at St. Olaf. Although funding is sporadic and of course highly political, the Conservation Reserve Program is a Farm Bill program. The Conservation Reserve Program was established in the 1985 farm bill and pays farmers to convert erodible farmland into perennial and permanent cover for a certain length of time, usually 10-15 years. Thanks to Gene Bakko, back in 1988 St. Olaf was able to put 23 acres into CRP, and since then has enrolled a total of 113 acres, and St. Olaf still receives payments on 30 acres of CRP land. Since its inception, 34 million acres have been enrolled and an estimated 440 million tons of soil have been conserved. The newest conservation program is the Conservation Security Program, which was created in the 2002 Farm Bill. It’s a voluntary program that doesn’t take land out of production. Rather it’s kind of a subsidy program for stewardship. Farmers can get into one of three tiers of funding if they have good soil and water quality management plans, wildlife habitat and good tillage and crop rotation practices. It’s not perfect, but it’s a step in the right direction.

Dayna Burtness -- Senior CIS Web Portfolio -- 2007