It it the Farm Bill or Food Bill???

            The next time you hear about the U.S. Farm Bill, pay attention.  Many do not like to listen to anything close to being agricultural related.  It does not surprise me when after a hundred years of agriculture legislation, people do not know where their food comes from because when it comes to farming, agriculture, and the country, people tend to turn a deaf ear.

            I say that everyone should know where their food actually comes from, because agriculture equals food.  Food equals life.  People need to listen to the farm bill.  Michael Pollan, the author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and In Defense of Food, says that it shouldn’t be called the Farm Bill, it should be called, “The Food Bill.”

            There is a new movement in the United States, it involves people who are tired of eating unhealthy food and want to make a difference in their community by providing farm fresh food to locals.  No more shipping food from other countries to eat, these people want real food.  From Community Supported Agriculture to Farmer’s Markets, the slow food movement is in with almost no help at all from the government.  Up until recently, the organic food movement has had no help at all to get on its feet.

            Let’s talk about the Farm Bill.  It is created by an agricultural committee made up of politicians and agribusiness lobbyists.  Now before you go pointing fingers at the lobbyists, remember that when you point a finger, you have three pointing right back at you.  The leading agribusiness lobbyist in the nation is Farm Bureau Insurance.  I am a member of Kentucky Farm Bureau.  The only problem with this picture is the fact that the entire farm bill is made to support commodity farms in an industrial model.  What is that model? CAFO’s, corn, and soybeans.  Come on people, there is more to farming and growing food than that.

            What do corn and soybeans do for farmers? It is a crisis in the U.S. that dates back to the forties.  Farmers produce so much corn and soybeans that they flooded the market with it.  This drove the prices down so much that farmers couldn’t make a profit anymore.  The government then began to subsidize farmers for their products.  Soon, farmers found that the more they grew, the more subsidies they got.  So now they grow more and more and drove the price of grain lower and lower in the market.

            Of course, for the owner in the CAFO business, this is a dream come true.  Confined Animal Feeding Operations can now buy their animal feed at such a low price they can afford to waste it.  So with that expense out of the way, who’s to say that a CAFO manager is not going to spend his extra money on more animals to increase the profits?

            The end result? A cheap one dollar commodity hamburger made from cheap commodity corn and soybeans.  Where do you get it?  McDonalds and every other fast food chain in the nation. Folks, this isn't food, in fact it's the most unhealthy item ever created by man.

If it were not for the government putting millions of dollars into it every year, industrial agriculture would fall flat on its face. Its time for reform in America. It's time for sustainability. It's time for the government to stop pumping money into an economy and to start helping the economy to sustain itself. It’s time for people to remember what agriculture really is for: food.