Change I might eventually come to believe in

Saucyman – How do you think food policy will change in the Obama Administration?

Michael Pollan will not be taking to NPR airwaves to decree a ban on corn syrup and announce a tax credit for people who go to farmer’s markets (1). Nor will other sensible ideas, like consolidating all relevant agencies into a Department of Food, be seriously proposed let alone enacted. Tom Vilsack, Secretary of Agriculture designate, is no reformer rather the former Governor of Iowa - a commodity crop state. While radical change isn’t in the air, the fact that people who care about food, jobs, the environment, clean water, small communities, wasteful government spending and other issues in the matrix of farming policy care and keep informed offers the hope for change.

Whatever change in policy happens won’t take place in a big dramatic showdown between the forces of Monsanto and Greenpeace testifying at the next farm bill. It will be something far more subtle but downright subversive - returning farmers to the land. The US needs a new generation of farmers. Roughly a half a century ago the population of the US lived on 10% of its land. After more than doubling its population in those 50 years, anyone want to guess how much of the land we are taking up now?

Wrong direction, it is 2%. Or as Robert Bruegmann posits in his book, Sprawl, all 300 million plus people in the US could reside in the state of Wisconsin. That isn’t a nightmare 3rd world scenario of overcrowding either, that is using the current population density. Well it is nightmarish in the sense Milwaukee would be the cultural center of the country, but its not Blade Runner/outskirts of Istanbul/Mexico City type of thing. The problem of the last 50 years has not been suburbanization, it has been the deruralization of the country. Once healthy communities based on farming no longer exist. Those who are able flee as soon as they can and this brain drain in communities coupled with the death of vocational family farming makes impossible for a rural economy to support non-farming professionals like doctors, accountants or even schoolteachers. That and the dangerous implications of having an increasingly smaller, aging, hired work force trying to increase yields on megafarms owned by corporations is frightening.

Nearly two generations of centralized farm policy designed to grow cheap food based on cheap petroleum (both fertilizers and binging the food to market) will decline. It won’t be dramatic like a casino implosion, but if you listen closely you can hear the sound of gradual change taking place. As state and federal administrators who have been inspired by Pollan, Wes Jackson and others begin to ascend into policy positions there will be sexy conversations about tax credits for land stewardship projects, no interest loans for purchasing land in places like western Kansas, free tuition at Ag and land grant universities – all of which will lay the groundwork for Future Farmers of America – so much so FFA jackets won’t just be for skinny urban hipsters anymore.

The importance of younger, newly trained farmers in the field is an opportunity for the bottom up management of food production. Peak oil, water scarcity, and climate change – incremental or sudden are all going to fundamentally change the way food is produced. Having 10s of thousands of new farmers - essentially conducting workshops, sharing information and figuring out what works is the best is an opportunity to address the new demands of food production, create new green jobs and grow both sustainable food and communities.


(1) I respect and admire Michael Pollan – he is a journalist in the most complementary sense of the word – his research, knowledge and synthesis of food policy has help inform a larger group of citizens who would have never otherwise cared about how food arrived at the table. Just as reading Team of Rivals doesn’t make you a Lincolnologist any more than reading Undaunted Courage on a plane mean that you have read the source materials of the Lewis and Clark expedition. These are all popular works that should either inspire a person to do deeper research on the subject or leave the reader better informed. Reading a Pollan book does certify you as a policy expert, at least grow a garden before spouting off.