On the farm
Toolbox
Published: November 14, 2008
Vermonters care about food. More than residents of most states, we live within a working agricultural landscape, and we know where our food comes from. Agriculture here is dominated by dairy, but increasingly Vermonters are producing a wide range of organic and nonorganic cheeses, vegetables, fruits and other foodstuffs.
Our president-elect, on the other hand, is one of the first presidents in decades to come from urban America. One does not associate Barack Obama with a searching discussion of food policy. Obama, like Michael Dukakis before him, was more likely to invite ridicule with offhand comments about arugula or Belgian endive.
But among the changes that Obama could bring about are changes in U.S. food policies that have created a food system that is becoming a health, environmental, economic and energy disaster.
Author Michael Pollan has become one of the most incisive critics of the American food system, and in a recent article in The New York Times Magazine he had some suggestions for the next president.
Pollan argues that U.S. agriculture is now built to turn fossil fuels into cheap calories that are making Americans sick, despoiling the environment, and changing the climate. In the post-World War II period, American farmers relied on fossil fuels for fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides, and fuel to create vast monocultures devoted largely to corn or soybeans. These products are then used to feed meat animals that are now raised in massive, industrial-style feedlots or are turned into high-fructose corn syrup, which is the basic ingredient in many processed foods.
It is a style of agriculture that depends on cheap petroleum, and so it is threatened. Pollan argues for a form of agriculture that is based on a different fuel source: the sun. Farmers would do what they have done for generations — grow cover crops to enrich and conserve the soil; raise a diversity of products, including meat, fruits and vegetables, for local markets.
The present system is the product of specific government policies subsidizing commodities such as corn and soybeans in order to keep the prices low. What we get are chips, soda, fast-food burgers and other foods that are creating an epidemic of obesity, with attendant conditions such as diabetes and heart disease.
Pollan points to one policy that could be changed. Farmers who receive corn subsidies are not allowed to grow other crops, which ensures that vast swaths of rural America grow corn but not food. This provision was included in the legislation decades ago to placate growers of fruits and vegetables who did not receive subsidies.
Pollan recommends a variety of policies to encourage production and consumption of local foods and a renaissance of agriculture, which might be more labor intensive but less petroleum intensive. It is not likely that Obama spends a great deal of time thinking about these issues, except during Iowa caucus season, when he and other candidates have generally bowed to the parochial demands of Iowa corn growers.
But if he listens to leaders such as Sens. Tom Harkin of Iowa and Patrick Leahy of Vermont, he might take American agriculture in a direction that will make it more sustainable and wholesome.
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