Category — food policy

This poster was made by Veritable Vegetable for the Wild Farm Alliance.

It’s a spoof on food safety regulations that make it very difficult for growers to maintain ecologically sound growing practices (like buffers and vegetation that might provide habitat) and nudge them towards less desirable habits — like using fences, traps and poison to keep wildlife away — that undermine biodiversity and may not actually have the desired effect on food safety.

If you can’t read the tiny print. The top three read left to right: “Toxic Pesticides, Toxic Fertilizer, Fueled by Fossil Fuels” “Unknown Food Value” and “Unknown Pathogens”

The blue part says “Please grow only between the red and yellow flags. The food is patrolled for the safety of YOUR food system.”

To read a great article on alternative strategies to improve food safety while maintaining biodiversity and supporting small farms with good stewardship practices, check out this awesome report by Food and Water Watch.

If you care about the issue and want to act, consider calling your senator and asking s/he to support Senator Stabenow’s Food Safety Training bill that would help deliver training and technical assistance to small farms to help them provide safer food.

Funny how much the poster reminds me so much of these (real) signs in Singapore. But I’ll have to leave those thoughts for another post!

I’m not sure who to blame for my historic lack of interest in politics or public policy. I’m loathe to admit that until (very) recently I contributed to the dismal statistics of “young apathetics.” Like many, the 2008 election piqued my interest, but the effect was dampened by distance and humidity — watching events unfold from rural Cambodia just wasn’t the same as dancing in the streets in the Mission in SF.

But now, I’m starting to understand and really care. I’ve seen small policy take shape first-hand and it’s exciting. And I’m starting to see how much policy matters in the issues that move me.

While on the farm, Peter and Susan invited me to come along to a meeting of the Agricultural Resources Committee — a group which advised the County government on agricultural policy. The ARC was discussing farm intern policy in response to a situation in which the Washington State Department of Labor and Industries (L&I) began to audit local farm’s internship practices. The state’s labor law does not currently recognize farm internships as a valid worker category unless interns are registered students at a recognized educational institution.

Thanks to work by local farmers and activists, that first conversation eventually developed into a bill sponsored by Senator Kevin Ranker, a major small farm advocate in the state. The bill will establish principles for small farm internships in the state, and will allow farms to offer internships at less than the minimum wage, given specific requirements including an internship agreement signed by the farmer and the intern which includes some sort of record of the educational/vocational component of the arrangement.

The law will make it possible for small farms to continue to hire and train a new generation of young farmers without undue financial burden. This is not meant as a way for farms to dodge the law or gain unfair advantage, but rather as a way for them to provide a much-demanded public service of educating young would-be farmers.

Now, the bill’s having its public hearing:

“Senator Ranker’s SB 6349, establishing a farm internship program, has been scheduled for public hearing before the Labor Commerce & Consumer Protection Committee on January 28th at 3:30 pm. The Senator hopes that he has several farmers and interns at the hearing. The latter will be critical in order for the bill to pass. Please pass this along to stakeholders and those who are willing to provide testimony during the public hearing.”

The tool stand in Synergy Farm’s barn

I can’t make it to Seattle, but I did write a letter of support:

Dear Senator Kohl-Welles,

I am writing in support of Washington State Senate Bill 6349, the proposed law on farm interns. As a farm intern in the San Juan Islands, I participated in the early stages of development of the bill within the San Juan County Agricultural Resources Committee and am very excited to see it move forward in the Washington state legislature.

From April to September of 2009, I apprenticed on Synergy Farm on San Juan Island with Peter and Susan Corning. During my six months at Synergy, I gained hands-on experience and knowledge about sustainable farming, plant cultivation, and the business of running a small farm.

I came to my interest in agriculture through work in Cambodia, and the experience at Synergy has been an invaluable step in my career and personal development. Now I plan to return to graduate school to study sustainable business, with an emphasis on developing local economies and food systems. I would eventually like to run my own farm and value-added food business, very likely in Washington State. The season I spent at Synergy laid a strong foundation to pursue these goals and strengthened my desire to farm in the region.

This bill would make it possible for small farms like Synergy to continue to offer hands-on technical training for a future generation of farmers and I hope you support it in the upcoming hearing.

Very sincerely,

Jess Daniel

In this entry, I started off on the similarities between a trend in the food industry toward smaller, alternative food & farm businesses and changes in the music industry that resulted in part from the growth of the internet.

I made a brief analogy between the effect of the internet on the music industry and the effect of new information and a shifting culture on the food industry and these comments drew the comparison out further.

I like this comparison. In both cases, there are some seriously established players (“new oligopoly” perhaps?): the major labels and and the major food corporations — who currently control a large part of the market and have a stake in seeing that things as they are don’t change. And in both cases, as a result of a new technology and new information and a changing ethos, consumers demand a new way of doing things.

In the case of the music industry, the game changed when internet technology made it possible to upload and download files. When industry decided to ignore this game-changing innovation and stick to business-as-usual, pirates moved in to fill the gap; eventually some legitimate businesses followed (Apple & iTunes). There were lawsuits, there was upheaval. I’m not sure if the major labels actually lost marketshare, though overall rate-of-growth in the industry supposedly slowed. But in general, it seems to me that consumers and small artists ended up much better off since we now we have all sorts of new and legitimate ways to find out about new music (LastFM, Pandora, cheap iTunes singles available for download) and they now have more avenues to get noticed.

In the food industry, there aren’t really “pirates” yet, since generally food isn’t considered intellectual property** but certainly the big players (and there really are only a few, just like worry that profits will be dispersed as modes of distribution become more varied and specialized, as consumers become more informed and their preferences change and the advantage of scale becomes less important.

In the case of music, large scale players might be frightened by the idea that the internet allows people to find out about an artist online rather than only in a record store. As Janis Ian argues in this article in 2002, music downloads may hurt huge artists and labels, but help almost everyone else, consumers who wouldn’t be exposed to so many new artists and new and small artists, for whom exposure is everything.

In the case of food, large scale players might lose part of their advantage when individuals or policies calculate the true costs of food production (social, environmental) and impose penalties for negative externalities, when sustainable farming and food processing and distribution becomes more efficient with time**, and when society pays attention to other elements of value (taste, nutrition, uniqueness or variety, etc) and not just cost.

So what are some things we could learn?

1. Big companies who are making a lot of money don’t want that to change.
2. Change that may hurt large companies may benefit individual consumers and smaller players, not necessarily financially (lower costs, increased profits), but also in other measures of value — more access to a broader range of music, better access to healthier food that’s better for the planet.
3. Consumer knowledge and behavior can force a change to totally new types of business models.
4. Anything else?

* Monsanto’s patents on certain seeds are a notable exception!
** Some would argue that efficiency isn’t important in the world of organic farming, but I think that’s a romantic and backwards notion. Yes, efficiency isn’t everything, and a quest to produce more, more cheaply can’t completely sacrifice taste, nutritional quality, and the social good, but few would argue with the benefit of finding new appropriate technologies to help make healthy food affordable and accessible to more people.

…and thy progressive foodiness!

I was already pretty impressed when my adopted city’s Board of Supervisors voted in favor of mandatory composting last month. And now, an executive order by Mayor Newsom is making a big statement in favor of small, local, sustainable farming.

“[Newsom is] ordering all departments to survey the land under their control in order to create an inventory of land that can support community gardens. All city-purchased food for city meetings, schools, jails or homeless shelters must be grown locally with sustainable farming practices. Food vendors with city permits must also meet these requirements.” — from Tilde Herrera at Greenbiz.com

Wowsers! What a coup for food advocacy organizations and local Bay Area producers, and how tremendously apt for the region that gave rise to the term “locavore.”

I wonder how they are going to define “local” for these purposes, and what percentage of the food will have to adhere to this definition? This kind of policy is really only feasible in a place like SF, where fresh food is available year-round. But what about harder-to-procure stuff like grains and spices?

I assume this decision is also going to create more demand for services like this cool online startup to help city departments and food vendors to handle procurement more efficiently than juggling daily phone calls with dozens of small providers.