From the Farm to the Table, Through Capitol Hill

Karen Lehman is the director of Fresh Taste, a funder collaborative formed to advance the growth of diverse local agriculture and healthy eating in Chicago and across Illinois. Lehman’s food system work spans three decades, beginning with an award-winning PBS documentary on women’s leadership in farm movements. She directed both the Local Food and Regional Economy programs at The Minnesota Project, co-founded the Youth Farm and Market Project in Minnesota and directed the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy’s Food and Agriculture Program.

As rural populations decline and urban populations grow, how do these patterns affect the relationship between food production and energy conservation?

Local food markets offer the biggest benefit for farmers near urban areas and in places like southwest Wisconsin where the landscape is unsuited to large-scale commodity agriculture. I think there are a lot of young people who have gotten interested in agriculture because it is no longer just commodity agriculture. Though some young people are taking over their family’s grain and livestock farms, as well. There are local food markets where you can do some really interesting, artisan production and direct marketing.

Another trend is that many of the farmers of the future are going to be immigrant farmers. You see this when you visit lots of farmers’ markets. The USDA recognizes this and has programs for immigrant farmers. I think we need to take advantage of the skill sets of immigrants who farmed in their home countries and have now come to the United States.

How will moving America away from a production system that relies heavily on fossil fuel fertilizers affect the affordability and availability of food, especially for Americans already struggling with food insecurity?

Food prices follow energy prices. The more we can create efficiencies in the system, the less effect energy prices will have on the price of food. However, most of the energy is not actually in the transportation. It is in the production of food. If you’re not going to use fuel and petroleum based fertilizers, you’re going to use more hand labor.

This raises a whole series of questions around equity. How are the workers compensated? Do they have ownership? Do they have benefits? The way we answer these questions will have an impact on food prices. We have been externalizing the costs of food production. Society as a whole bears the cost for environmental degradation caused by too much petroleum use. The cost on low-wage workers and their families is huge. As we internalize the real cost of food production, we are going to face some real challenges.

I think we should focus on employment and economic development so that people will have jobs that allow them to buy food, which will become more expensive. We should also build skills in food production, processing, planning and even cooking.  We need to prepare more produce than we did in the past and use meat more sparingly. There’s an element of this which is not just about food costing more: It’s about how we think about the price of food, and whether we’re prepared to pay for good food and then use it in a way that makes it more affordable.

How has food policy changed over the last three decades?

To really understand current policies, you have to go all the way back to the 1930s and look at the policies that were put in place to take the volatility out of agricultural markets. At harvest time, prices would fall because the supply was at its highest. The federal government allowed farmers to borrow money so they could hold their grain off the market until the prices rose.

However, in 1973, the Nixon administration established something known as the “target price.” When this price dropped below the loan rate, rather than lend farmers money, the government paid the difference in what came to be known as a “deficiency payment.” So, a system that had been invented to take volatility out of the market became a subsidy program.

During the 1980s the sustainable agriculture movement started gaining traction as “back to the land” farmers began implementing the organic and sustainable production methods first popularized by Rodale Press and their magazines, Organic Gardening and The New Farm. This movement continued to grow and all of a sudden it was necessary to craft policies focused on agricultural techniques that protected the environment. At this point, there still wasn’t a lot of collaboration between environmentalists and agriculture groups. In the 1990s that changed when farmers and environmentalists came together around the National Campaign for Sustainable Agriculture, which tried to secure more provisions in the Farm Bill that would protect the environment, but not harm farmers’ livelihoods.

In the 1990s the negotiation of NAFTA was taking place as well as the GATT re-negotiations that would lead to the development of the World Trade Organization. In many parts of the world, agriculture policy had been structured to promote domestic food security. All over the world these policies were dismantled as free trade agreements were introduced. There was almost a 180 degree turn in agriculture policy away from domestic food security to a free trade system.

How have sustainable agriculture and the obesity epidemic changed the way policymakers approach food issues?

We also began to trace obesity and chronic disease back to poor dietary habits, which were tied to the fact that we were subsidizing the wrong kinds of foods and promoting the wrong type of foods in our dietary guidelines. Those recommendations were influenced by the large commodity lobbies.

Over time, there was a convergence of different sectors and movements around food. Finally, over growing concern about obesity, health advocates converged around food. Right now, local food and good food are at the top of many people’s agenda but not always for the same reasons. This is good because the more that people educate themselves, the more policy makers will be asked to make decisions, the more likely it is that we will continue to make progress on delivering good food to people who need it and want it.

How do current farm subsidies help or harm local farmers? Is access to capital a challenge for farmers?

The issue with commodity subsidies is that they lock farmers into growing commodities. In order to participate in the program, a farmer has to establish what’s called their “base acres”—the acreage that they are going to plant with commodity crops. If they plant something else on their base acres they lose their base and their ability to participate in the subsidy program.

One way to improve the Farm Bill would be to have some planting flexibility in the farm programs so that farmers can take crops out of the corn and soybean program and put them into other crops without penalty. Of course, farmers would not receive a subsidy if they rotated the crops out, but they would also not be penalized for making that kind of a transition.

In your opinion, what is the most interesting thing happening right now in the world of food policy?

I think the most interesting thing going on right now is the development of different kinds of enterprises and networks to aggregate and distribute local foods. There are incredible pressures from the commodity food systems but what we’ve seen is that more and more consumers want to know where their food came from, how it was produced, how it was processed. That demand is creating business opportunities.

We need to recreate the kinds of smaller enterprises that composed the food system prior to consolidation, which was actually not so long ago. We need to redesign some of our curriculum in community colleges and universities for the food business. I think there’s a real opportunity for business and job development in the connective tissue that gets food from the farm to the table.

Feature photo: cc/Andrew Stawarz