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Farmers On The Climate Frontline

July 5, 2022

When The Progressive magazine asked me to write about how farmers are addressing climate change, it posed an interestings challenge: Farming practices are both an accelerant and a retardant of a warming Earth.

Factory-style farming gets the blame. As I explain in the April-May 2022 issue:

“Corn is the problematic linchpin of factory farming. It is the nation’s biggest cash crop, and it dominates the richest farmland in the Midwest. Heavily dependent on synthetic nitrogen fertilizer, corn poses a major water pollution problem. Researchers blame nutrient-rich runoff, draining through the Mississippi River from the Upper Midwest, for a vast ‘dead zone’ in the Gulf of Mexico.

“The Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit research organization, did the accounting and found that the federal subsidies for corn production totaled an astonishing $116.6 billion between 1995 and 2020. This is a testament to the powerful agribusiness lobby to which both Democrats and Republicans pledge fealty.

“Only 10 percent of the annual corn crop actually becomes human food; even then, it’s mostly sweeteners and refined oils used in making highly processed items. About another 40 percent feeds cars and trucks in the form of federally mandated corn-blended ethanol—a “renewable” fuel whose purportedly favorable environmental impact is fiercely disputed.

“The rest of the corn becomes livestock feed and is mostly consumed in huge factory-style farms called CAFOs, or concentrated animal feeding operations. This is how most of our beef, pork, and milk is produced, and these industries cause huge environmental problems of their own.”

The bulk of the story deals with what farmers are doing right.

If you know the issue, you won’t be surprised to learn how Wendell Berry, the great chronicler of rural life, points the way. To learn more, please follow this link.

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Categories: Local Food, Organic Farming/Local Food, The Progressive
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The Crisis In Organic Farming

April 6, 2022

I’ve been writing lately on farming for The Progressive magazine. This story appeared in the December 2021/January 2022 issue. (Yep. I’m late in posting it.) It details how the organic industry is overpowering the organic movement, which I argue is bad news for duped consumers and hardpressed family farmers.

The irony is that core problem traces back to the creation of the National Organic Program (under the U.S. Ag department) in 1990. A 12-year battle ensued over what exact criteria had to be satisfied for a farm to be federally certified as organic.

I write:

“Those certification standards—barring the use of pesticides, antibiotics, and other synthetic inputs; requiring pasturing for farm animals; establishing a three-year protocol for converting conventional farmland to organic status; and a lot more—were nothing less than transformative.

“What had been a growing but idiosyncratic and fragmented movement—at least twenty-two states had their own rules for organic labeling—became a single national market with standardized rules. This led foreign farm operations to seek USDA certification so they could sell their goods stateside.

“Organic food sales exploded. By 2011, sales hit $25.1 billion, and by 2020, sales had more than doubled to $56.5 billion. In 2021, the USDA counted more than 28,000 certified organic businesses in the United States. Another 17,000 foreign operations were certified as USDA organic.

“But far from it being the glory days of the organic food movement, this is a time of maximum danger. A perfect storm of problems is challenging organic’s primacy in producing healthy food. And organic food, once a culty and idealistic passion for both farmers and consumers, is increasingly just another cog in the agribusiness behemoth.” 

To read more, please go here.

Categories: Local Food, Organic Farming/Local Food, The Progressive, Uncategorized
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Organic Valley At The Crossroads

July 28, 2015

The Organic Valley farmers coop has been a huge success. With national sales hitting almost $1 billion, this upstart challenger of conventional agriculture has helped create a massive consumer market for chemical-free farming. Small family farmers in Wisconsin and across the nation have gone organic because of the premium prices their milk, eggs and meat attracts in the organic marketplace. But in researching this story for The Progressive magazine I found the coop in a surprisingly precarious position. I write:

Surging consumer demand for organics has created supply shortages for dairy products, and immense opportunities for profit. That has attracted some of the nation’s largest American food corporations to step up an already sizable investment in organics. These aren’t people motivated by protecting the environment, says David Kaseno of the National Farmers Organization. They are “people who think: ‘Hey we can make a lot of money in organic milk.’”

The $46 billion merger of Kraft Foods Group and the H.J. Heinz Co. in March will prompt its rivals to bulk up by buying fast-growing organic food labels, both The New York Times and Bloomberg News predicted. The food giants already produce a stunning 70 percent of the items stocked in a typical co-op grocery, says Philip Howard,a Michigan State University professor who tracks corporate consolidation in the organic world.

For organic industry observers, this poses stark questions for Organic Valley: Is it smart enough and big enough to compete with the corporate giants? Will it yield to the temptation to compromise organic standards to maintain market share? More to the point, will it hold on to its all-important dairy members, who have been abandoning the co-op for the significantly better pay offered by some Organic Valley competitors?

This is the paradox of Organic Valley: At a moment of great success, it faces something of an existential threat.

To read more, please go here.

I interviewed a ton of people for the story, including Organic Valley CEO George Siemon. Some of this views can be found in the story. I wrote an online sidebar that touches on other matters. I suspect that some people will be surprised at his positive impressions of Walmart. You can read about it here.

I also wrote about the Organic Valley coop for Isthmus. You can find those earlier stories from 2007 and 2008 here and here and here.

Categories: Development, Local Food, Organic Farming/Local Food, The Progressive
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John Kinsman Remembered

January 22, 2014

John Kinsman,  Wisconsin farmer and social justice advocate, died  yesterday (Jan. 20, 2014), at the age of 87. In my life in journalism, he  ranks with Jim Graaskamp, the great UW-Madison  professor, as the person I’ve admired the most. John was a classic Wisconsin progressive. He battled for the rights of the weak and the dispossessed all his life, sometimes traveling to the far ends of the world. Somehow he also managed to raise ten kids with his wife Jean,  and  run a small farm near Lime Ridge in central Wisconsin.

Here’s what I wrote about John in a 2012 story in The Progressive Magazine:

On a winter afternoon, Kinsman is just another Wisconsin farmer as he walks his 150 acres. He and Jean bought the worn-out, rock-strewn farm in the early 1950s not far from where his parents farmed. An early run-in with chemical pesticides put Kinsman in the hospital and converted him to organic farming. He points to the results.

Here are the pastures on which he rotationally grazes his milking herd of thirty-six Holsteins, the forested hills where he’s planted, literally, tens of thousands of trees, and the stand of fruit trees and bushes he’s grown around his house. And that patch of cacti—the prickly pear—was no exotic transplant but a stubborn native remnant from a warmer geological age in Wisconsin. Sort of like Kinsman himself.

Kinsman is a fourth-generation Wisconsin family farmer. His grandmother Samantha, who died at the age of ninety-seven in 1944, saw General Ulysses S. Grant when he visited Sandusky, Wisconsin. His dad was a “dyed-in-the-wool Republican who would vote for a dog if he were a Republican,” he says with a laugh.

To read more, please go here.

Categories: The Progressive, Uncategorized
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John Kinsman, the Family Farm Defender

May 30, 2012

Interviewing John Kinsman, the farmer activist  from Lime Ridge, was easily one of my more enjoyable assignments. The guy is fascinating, uniquely American in his personal history and  in committment to holding our country to its ideals. Here’s how the story in The Progressive magazine begins:

What could be more rare than cactus in a Wisconsin farmer’s wintry backyard? That would be the farmer himself if it’sJohn Kinsman. At age eighty-five, Kinsman has lived a singular life of activism.

This modest farmer from the Dairy State boondocks has traveled the world to stand with small farmers and indigenous people.

“You have to put your whole self into it,” he says of his approach. “You have to live what you’re saying.”

Kinsman has certainly done that. He’s locked arms with Native Americans like Winona LaDuke in their struggle. He founded the activist group Family Farm Defenders in 1994. He marched with his friend the French farm leader Jose Bové of anti-McDonald’s fame in “The Battle of Seattle” in 1999. He’s even sailed with Greenpeace.

How he managed all this while running a dairy farm in central Wisconsin, near tiny Lime Ridge, and raising ten children with his wife, Jean, may be the most improbable thing of all about Kinsman.

On a winter afternoon, Kinsman is just another Wisconsin farmer as he walks his 150 acres. He and Jean bought the worn-out, rock-strewn farm in the early 1950s not far from where his parents farmed. An early run-in with chemical pesticides put Kinsman in the hospital and converted him to organic farming. He points to the results.

Here are the pastures on which he rotationally grazes his milking herd of thirty-six Holsteins, the forested hills where he’s planted, literally, tens of thousands of trees, and the stand of fruit trees and bushes he’s grown around his house. And that patch of cacti—the prickly pear—was no exotic transplant but a stubborn native remnant from a warmer geological age in Wisconsin. Sort of like Kinsman himself.

Kinsman is a fourth-generation Wisconsin family farmer. His grandmother Samantha, who died at the age of ninety-seven in 1944, saw General Ulysses S. Grant when he visited Sandusky, Wisconsin. His dad was a “dyed-in-the-wool Republican who would vote for a dog if he were a Republican,” he says with a laugh. His own political awakening began in World War II, when on an Army train through Mississippi, he was upbraided for waving to the black people along the track.

To read more, please go here: http://www.progressive.org/family_farm_defender.html

Categories: Labor, Organic Farming/Local Food, Politics, The Progressive
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Eating Locally In Eau Claire

December 15, 2010

On occasion, I write about good news. That’s what took me to Eau Claire earlier this year to chronicle the rise of the local-food movement in western Wisconsin for The Progressive magazine.

I was impressed.  Sacred Heart Hospital has pioneered the use  of locally grown food in its dining operation and is recognized as a national leader.

Here’s how the story begins:

HOSPITAL FOOD: THE VERY term conjures up the most bland and unappetizing images. But that’s changing in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, population 65,000. Sacred Heart, the smaller of Eau Claire’s two hospitals, has committed to spending 10 percent of its food budget on tasty local produce and meat.

By big-city standards, this does not amount to much—about $200,000 a year. But cracking the institutional market is one of the trickier challenges facing food system reformers, and this 334-bed hospital in western Wisconsin is showing the way.

By its nature, institutional food service is cost conscious and lends itself to the efficient, standardized approach of mass production. If you have hundreds, if not thousands, to feed daily, purveyors like Sysco, Aramark, and Sodexo are experts at delivering food product in the perfect portion size.

“We were used to placing an order and having everything come in the door exactly how we wanted it,” says Rick Beckler, Sacred Heart’s director of hospitality services. “We didn’t have a clue where it was produced or who grew it. We didn’t know even what continent it came from.”

Sacred Heart’s kitchen now serves greens from Pam Herdrich’s Flower Farm south of Eau Claire, meatloaf made of hamburger from Vic and Mary Price’s Out to Pasture Beef in Fall Creek, chicken from Eileen McCutchen’s Angel Acres in Mason, pork from Jim and Alison Deutsch’s Family Farm near Osseo, and lots of other locally sourced items.

To read more, including the Deutsch family’s  inspiring story, go here. Note that Sacred Heart recently increased its  purchase of local food to 15% of its total food budget.

HOSPITAL FOOD: THE VERY term conjures up the most bland and unappetizing images. But that’s changing in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, population 65,000. Sacred Heart, the smaller of Eau Claire’s two hospitals, has committed to spending 10 percent of its food budget on tasty local produce and meat. By big-city standards, this does not amount to much—about $200,000 a year. But cracking the institutional market is one of the trickier challenges facing food system reformers, and this 334-bed hospital in western Wisconsin is showing the way.

By its nature, institutional food service is cost conscious and lends itself to the efficient, standardized approach of mass production. If you have hundreds, if not thousands, to feed daily, purveyors like Sysco, Aramark, and Sodexo are experts at delivering food product in the perfect portion size.

“We were used to placing an order and having everything come in the door exactly how we wanted it,” says Rick Beckler, Sacred Heart’s director of hospitality services. “We didn’t have a clue where it was produced or who grew it. We didn’t know even what continent it came from.”

<a href=’http://www.progressive.org/adserver/www/delivery/ck.php?n=aca0f3e5&cb=INSERT_RANDOM_NUMBER_HERE’ target=’_blank’><img src=’http://www.progressive.org/adserver/www/delivery/avw.php?zoneid=1&cb=INSERT_RANDOM_NUMBER_HERE&n=aca0f3e5′ border=’0′ alt=” /></a>

Sacred Heart’s kitchen now serves greens from Pam Herdrich’s Flower Farm south of Eau Claire, meatloaf made of hamburger from Vic and Mary Price’s Out to Pasture Beef in Fall Creek, chicken from Eileen McCutchen’s Angel Acres in Mason, pork from Jim and Alison Deutsch’s Family Farm near Osseo, and lots of other locally sourced items.

Categories: Organic Farming/Local Food, The Progressive
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Questions for Michael Pollan

April 7, 2010

My interview with Michael Pollan is another piece from the recent past that I wanted to post here. We talked at his home in Berkeley for an hour plus. He is impressively, almost frighteningly,  articulate. But that should be no surprise to his readers. The story ran in the November 2008 issue of The Progressive. It begins:

Michael Pollan has got people talking. His recent books, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals and In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, have captured the public imagination, setting off countless coffee shop discussions, dinnertime arguments, and oh-so-many blog posts.

Even more impressively, his exploration of modern-day agriculture and the dysfunctional American diet has prompted his readers to look at their own eating habits with a new sense of understanding and often a desire for change.

Read more here.

Categories: Organic Farming/Local Food, The Progressive

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