New Ag...
The battle lines between “old ag” and “new ag” are becoming clearer.
Three Senators, Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, Pat Roberts of Kansas and John McCain of Arizona, recently fired a salvo at Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack over the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food (KYF2) initiative. That initiative, launched last year by Vilsack’s Deputy Secretary Kathleen Merrigan, seeks to connect the people with the farmers that supply their supper Righteously outraged, the three Senators warned Vilsack that KYF2 only supports “small hobbyists and organic producers,” rather than production agriculture.
“The federal government cannot afford to spend precious Rural Development funds on feel-good measures which are completely detached from the realities of production agriculture,” the trio admonished Vilsack.
Ignore, for a moment, the fact that Sen. Chambliss is the leading defender of the cotton subsidy program that cost $2.7 billion in taxpayer dollars in 2009, or that Sen. Roberts is the champion of the wheat support program which we all supported to the tune of $1.3 billion in 2009. Now, the trio of Senators were outraged that the USDA initially directed $65 million to support marketing resources available to “localvores,” “hobbyists and organic producers.”
There’s a strong irony in this outrage: A prevailing complaint that leaders of conventional agriculture shared with their farm audiences over the past decades was that “consumers don’t know where their food comes from.” Farmers frustrated by the low market prices could seemingly take consolation from the thought that the buying public didn’t have a clue about the difficulties of getting products from the farm gate to the dinner plate.
But a growing number of consumers are now looking into the realities of food production, and that has the leaders of conventional agriculture even more worried. Deputy Secretary Merrigan’s KYF2 initiative is focused upon making it easier for those customers to connect with the farmers and ranchers who supply their supper.
The problem for conventional agriculture is that the customers who really want to know where their food comes from aren’t very supportive of a production system that relies on synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, growth hormones, antibiotics, irradiation and genetic engineering.
I’m just waiting to go to my first farm meeting where a local politician stands up to exhort the crowd with, “The problem in agriculture today is that the consumer knows exactly where his food comes from.”
