The Farm Bill: A Citizen's Guide

By Daniel Imhoff and Christina Badaracco

The farm bill is one of the most important pieces of legislation the American president signs. Negotiated every five to seven years, it has tremendous implications for food production, nutrition assistance, habitat conservation, international trade, and much more. Yet at nearly 1,000 pages, it is difficult to understand for policymakers, let alone citizens. In this primer, Dan Imhoff and Christina Badaracco translate all the “legalese" and political jargon into an accessible, graphics-rich 200 pages.

Readers will learn the basic elements of the bill, its origins and history, and perhaps most importantly, the battles that will determine the direction of food policy in the coming years. The authors trace how the legislation has evolved, from its first incarnation during the Great Depression, to today, when America has become the world’s leading agricultural powerhouse. They explain the three main components of the bill—farm subsidies, food stamps or SNAP, and conservation programs—as well as how crucial public policies are changing.

With a new farm bill just signed into law, we all need to understand the implications of food policy. What’s the impact of crop insurance? How does SNAP actually work? What would it take to create a healthier, more sustainable food system? These are questions that affect not only farmers, but everyone who eats. If you care about the answers, The Farm Bill is your guide.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Island Press
• Release date: Jan 10, 2019
• ISBN: 9781610919753

Book preview

Front Cover of The Farm Bill

About Island Press

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Half Title of The Farm BillBook Title of The Farm Bill

Copyright © 2019 Daniel Imhoff.

First Edition, Food Fight: The Citizen’s Guide to a Food and Farm Bill, Copyright © 2007 Daniel Imhoff.

Second Edition, Food Fight: The Citizen’s Guide to the Next Food and Farm Bill, Copyright © 2012 Daniel Imhoff.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher: Island Press, 2000 M Street, NW, Suite 650, Washington, DC 20036.

ISLAND PRESS is a trademark of the Center for Resource Economics.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018946760

All Island Press books are printed on environmentally responsible materials.

Manufactured in the United States of America

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Keywords: agribusiness, Agricultural Adjustment Act, CAFO, commodity programs, conservation title, crop insurance, crop subsidies, ethanol, food stamps/SNAP, nutrition assistance, rural development

CONTENTS

Foreword, Marion Nestle

Preface, Dan Imhoff

Acknowledgments

PART I. Farm Bill Basics

Chapter 1. What Is the Farm Bill?

Chapter 2. Why Does the Farm Bill Matter?

Chapter 3. Who Benefits from the Farm Bill?

Chapter 4. How Does the Farm Bill Work?

PART II. The History of Food Policy

Chapter 5. Origins of the Farm Bill

Chapter 6. The Changing Face of Agriculture

Chapter 7. The Changing Face of Hunger

Chapter 8. The Conservation Era

PART III. Key Policy Issues

Chapter 9. Crop Subsidies

Chapter 10. Nutrition, SNAP, and Healthy Eating

Chapter 11. Agribusiness versus Family Farms

Chapter 12. Job Creation

Chapter 13. Trade

Chapter 14. An Alternative System

PART IV. Reforming the Farm Bill

Chapter 15. Opportunities for Change

Chapter 16. Public Health

Chapter 17. Food Security

Chapter 18. Ethanol

Chapter 19. Energy and Climate Change

Chapter 20. Conservation

Chapter 21. National Security

PART V. The Future of Food Policy

Chapter 22. Ecosystem-Based Agriculture

Chapter 23. Local Food

Chapter 24. A Citizen’s Farm Bill

Chapter 25. Twenty-Five Solutions

Chapter 26. A Vision of Sustainable Food

Activist Tool Kit

Notes

Glossary

FOREWORD

In 2011, I had the idea of teaching a graduate course on the Farm Bill to food studies students at New York University. As happens every four years or so, the bill was coming up for renewal, and I thought it would be useful for the students—and me—to take a deep dive into what it was about. I knew help was available. Dan Imhoff had laid out the issues with great clarity in his first book about this bill in 2007. I used that book as a text.

I wrote about this experience in The Farm Bill Drove Me Insane (Politico, March 17, 2016), which it most definitely did. The Farm Bill is huge, encompassing more than a hundred programs, each with its own acronym and set of interested lobbyists. The bill is unreadable, consisting mainly of amendments to previous bills; it is comprehensible only to lobbyists, a precious few congressional staffers, and occasional brave souls like Imhoff willing to take it on. It costs taxpayers close to $100 billion a year; most weirdly, 80 percent of this money covers the costs of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly food stamps), which is stuck in the Farm Bill for reasons of politics. The Farm Bill represents pork-barrel, log-rolling politics at its worst.

Imhoff explains the bill as a fully rigged system gamed by Big Agriculture in collusion with government. The public pays for this system thrice over: at the checkout counter, in subsidized insurance premiums, and for cleaning up the damage it causes to health and the environment. Despite these scandalous costs, the mere mention of the words farm bill makes eyes glaze over. Why? This is a forest-versus-trees problem. The bill—the forest—is far too big and complicated to grasp. We try to understand it by looking at the programs—the trees—one by one. Hence: insanity.

Imhoff’s approach to the forest is to focus on the overriding issues that Farm Bills ought to address. A rational agricultural policy should promote an adequate food supply while protecting farmers against uncertain climate and price fluctuations. It should promote the health of people and the environment and do so sustainably. And it should provide incentives for people to farm and ensure a decent living for everyone involved. Instead, the Farm Bills encourage an industrial agricultural system incentivized to overproduce corn and soybeans to feed animals and to make ethanol for automobiles, to the great detriment of public health and environmental protection.

Nowhere are these problems more obvious than in the debates about the 2018 Farm Bill. As I write these words, the House of Representatives is working on a bill that seems less protective of health and the environment than any previous version. To cut costs while maintaining support of Big Agriculture, the House aims to reduce SNAP enrollments, eliminate conservation requirements, and cut out even small programs that support small farmers or promote production of fruits and vegetables, called specialty crops in US Department of Agriculture parlance.

At this moment, the outcome of the 2018 bill is uncertain, but The Farm Bill: A Citizen’s Guide has a more generic purpose: to introduce readers to the big-picture issues. Imhoff relates the history of Farm Bills, their origins, and their subsequent growth. Imhoff describes the system: how Big Agriculture works, how food stamps ended up in the bill, what it all means for farming and food assistance, and what kind of legislation is needed to promote a healthier food system.

We should, Imhoff insists, rework the Farm Bill to promote public health by supporting an agricultural system that grows food for people rather than for animals and cars. We should legislate that crops be grown sustainably so as to reduce agriculture’s contribution to greenhouse gas emissions, soil losses, and water pollution. Imhoff suggests twenty-five solutions to current agricultural problems. These should be required reading for anyone who cares about what we eat, today and in the future. It is too late to fix the 2018 Farm Bill, but there is plenty of time and opportunity to make the next one a true citizens’ Farm Bill. To quote Imhoff, It’s time to question whether the industrial mega-farm model is the only way to feed a growing global population or whether it’s even possible for such a system to survive without costly government supports and unsustainable environmental practices. This book should inspire better, smarter solutions. Get busy.

Marion Nestle

PREFACE

In the late 1990s, I was particularly moved by a National Public Radio feature about US government programs that compensated farmers for maintaining unplanted fields. It was part of a concerted strategy to restore wildlife habitat across the country’s farmlands. With the help of a lead biologist at the Natural Resources Conservation Service, I traveled extensively looking for the best examples of these government efforts. I saw grassland recovery in the Prairie Pothole Region, bayou and black bear restoration in Texarkana, panther habitat in southern Florida, riparian rewilding in the Sacramento Valley, and bobwhite quail reforestation in North Carolina, to name a few. This reporting provided a firsthand introduction to the pros and cons of US agriculture policy and formed an important chapter in my book Farming with the Wild: Enhancing Biodiversity on Farms and Ranches.

A few years later, I found myself sitting in a conference in Sacramento prior to the debates around what was the forthcoming 2007 Farm Bill. Speaker after speaker gave an astonishing account of negative consequences of the tens of billions of dollars spent every year on US agricultural and food assistance policies. It was stunning testimony: impacts to Mexican corn farmers due to years of dumping, a decade of record payouts primarily to large corporate farms that were forcing small- and medium-sized operations out of business, the subsidization of monocultures over vast areas where crops repeatedly failed one of every two years, and a spiraling crisis of diabetes and obesity fueled partially by a diet of cheap processed foods.

It was clear from this conference that the Farm Bill was perhaps the most important legislation that most citizens had never heard of—and one that affected them three meals a day—so I volunteered to be its translator. It proved to be a humbling task. The scale of the bill is so enormous that it’s nearly impossible for one person to understand it all. A thick web of technical jargon and acronyms must be unraveled to break policies down to relatable concepts. Perhaps the short time frame was a blessing. It gave me little time to fret about what I had signed up for.

Food Fight: The Citizen’s Guide to a Food and Farm Bill was published in early 2007. As the policy debates continued into 2008, I made many dozens of appearances around the country helping audiences understand how Farm Bill policies affected their regions and communities. The book’s dynamic graphic approach gave readers easy access to extremely technical information. Food Fight was quickly adopted by university instructors and garnered wide mainstream media attention. It also directly inspired important efforts such as Wholesome Wave’s farmers market food stamp incentives, health impact studies within the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the City of Seattle’s Farm Bill Principles.

A significant revision of the book was undertaken in anticipation of the 2012 Farm Bill reauthorization, which stretched into 2014. Since 1990, the legislation has been renewed every six years, often with significant new directions. In 2016, Island Press approached me about reintroducing the book with an even more direct and accessible format. Thanks to a concerted effort by Christina Badaracco, graphic designer Timothy Rice, and the team at Island Press, we are pleased to introduce a completely updated and revised primer on this most critical and timely matter.

How can we use the Farm Bill’s precious funds to incentivize positive outcomes related to public health, a vibrant and regenerative agriculture, protection of wild nature, and the creation of landscapes resilient to climate change? We hope this book informs and inspires you to become a policy champion in your own life and community.

Dan Imhoff

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A book like The Farm Bill is only made possible with the careful management of a very large number of details and the help of true authorities in many wide-ranging fields. First, we would like to offer our sincere appreciation to Emily Turner and her team at Island Press. Emily was our editor and champion of this project, and her careful attention is evident throughout every chapter. Graphic designer Timothy Rice, a long-time collaborator, clocked long hours refining charts and illustrations. Many thanks go to Marion Nestle for her kind introduction to the book and many decades as a mentor, thought leader, and guiding voice for policies that promote public health, humane animal stewardship, environmental protection, and scientific and fiscal sanity.

We would like to particularly thank the following individuals, and we apologize in advance if we have somehow failed to acknowledge anyone’s contributions. Ferd Hoefner from the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition provided data about conservation programs. Timothy Wise from Tufts University offered continued support and insight about the impacts of NAFTA and corn dumping. Mary Hendrickson from the University of Missouri shared data and insight about consolidation in the livestock industry. Chris Brown and Patricia Carrillo guided us through ALBA’s impressive farmer incubation program. Javier Zamora from JSM Organics gave a most gracious organic farm tour. Elanor Starmer of George Washington University and Rose Hayden-Smith from the University of California, Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources, provided key background about the KYF2 (Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food) initiative.

Thanks go to Honor Eldridge from the Soil Association for her sidebar and international perspective on crop insurance. Tricia Kovacs from USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service offered information about USDA’s Local Food Compass Map. Scott Shimmin from USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) helped in acquiring data about beginning farmers. Letitia Toomer-Jones from USDA’s NRCS provided key information about conservation grant applications. Claudia Hitaj from USDA’s Economic Research Service (ERS) helped with data about agricultural energy usage, and Marc Ribaudo from USDA’s ERS provided data on nutrient management on croplands. Gary R. Keough and Rosemarie Philips from USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service shared a map of the distribution of beginning farmers. Brenda Carson from USDA’s Farm Service Agency shed light on agricultural disaster designations. John-Michael Cross from the Environmental and Energy Study Institute and Andy Olsen from the Environmental Law and Policy Center helped us better fathom the Farm Bill’s renewable energy programs. Karen Hansen-Kuhn from the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy contributed up-to-date data on corn dumping as well as the sidebar she cowrote with Sophia Murphy.

Lynn Henning shared her unique investigative skills on Farm Bill programs and concentrated animal feeding operations in Michigan. Thanks go to Craig Cox from the Environmental Working Group for reviewing our chapter about ethanol and to Dan Rubenstein from Princeton University, Garrett Graddy-Lovelace from American University, and Nina Ichikawa from the Berkeley Food Institute, who facilitated this collaboration between two authors. Martha Noble again provided her invaluable expertise. Last but not least, thanks go to the supporters of Watershed Media, who for so many years have made this critical work possible. We could not have done it without all of you, and for that we will be eternally grateful.

  PART 1

FARM BILL BASICS

1. What Is the Farm Bill?

The path to reform ultimately leads to government policy. As the adage says, we reap what we sow, and in that regard there may be nothing more important than the Farm Bill.

GOVERNMENTS HAVE LONG PLAYED a role in food systems. Thousands of years ago, the stockpiles in palace granaries were distributed during times of need. Such policies may have been more a matter of self-preservation than altruism; passing out free bread, rice, or other staples goes a long way toward preempting rebellion.

Today, most countries accept that governments need to be involved in food production and hunger prevention. Just as a strong defense is regarded as national security, a diverse and well-developed agriculture is regarded as food security. In the United States, the Department of Agriculture (USDA) is charged with this dual mission: support the creation of an abundant food supply and ensure that all citizens receive basic nutrition. A primary mechanism for achieving this mission is federal legislation passed every five to seven years known as the Farm Bill.

Unlike during the Great Depression, when the Farm Bill was first written, the United States is no longer a country interlaced with millions of small, diversified family farms set amid vibrant rural communities. Today the United States is the world’s leading industrial agriculture powerhouse, but a large share of production has shifted to nonfamily farms and larger family farms. About 1 percent of US farms are nonfamily farms that account for 10 percent of agricultural production. Large-scale and mid-sized family farms made up 9 percent of all US farms in 2016 but accounted for 60 percent of the value of US agricultural production. Small-scale family operations (less than $350,000 gross cash farm income) accounted for only 26 percent of production but represented 90 percent of US farms.¹

Feeding more than 320 million citizens is just one part of the contemporary job assignment. The American farmer is also expected to help counter the mounting trade deficit and feed the rest of the world (or so we are told) with a steady stream of exports. Then there’s the additional task of supplying feedstock for ethanol, bioplastics, and other products used as replacements for fossil fuels.

To promote this massive farm output, the government has embedded complex subsidies in various sections of the nearly 1,000-page Farm Bill. Land payments, crop insurance, research assistance, export marketing, and many other programs serve to maintain an ample supply of certain foods and commodity crops. The scale of government intervention is such that talk of free markets is merely rhetorical. Conventional farmers stay afloat by farming the system rather than growing what might best serve their particular tract of land for the long term or provide for more well-rounded, healthy diets. If the government removes all financial risks from growing corn, offers generous tax breaks to ethanol producers, and writes six-figure checks to feedlot operators, for example, farmers will plant corn and lots of it—even when the real winners are the agribusinesses and food manufacturers that buy it.

This scenario plays out each spring during what’s called the fight for dirt, when American farmers decide how much land to devote to each commodity crop. Corn wins easily and is grown on upward of 90 million acres of farmland, an area roughly the size of the entire state of Montana. Figure 1 highlights many of the effects of this massive production.

Then, because American farmers export 40 percent of the world’s corn and almost 40 percent of the soybeans, these choices ripple across global commodity markets.² Farmers who grow corn, cotton, wheat, rice, or soybeans in countries without strong subsidy programs can be severely disadvantaged. According to Tufts University agricultural researcher Timothy Wise, the dumping of subsidized US corn on the Mexican market, for instance, cost Mexico’s farmers as much as $200 per acre per year from the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994 until 2010.³ An estimated 2.3 million small farmers in Mexico were forced to look for other work in the burgeoning maquiladoras—manufacturing factories and sweatshops of US corporations in cities like Juarez and Matamoros—or in fields, orchards, vineyards, slaughter plants, and other sectors across the border to the north. At the same time, subsidization of corn for ethanol drove up prices of corn exports in Mexico, increasing food prices and resulting in food insecurity. Although Mexico grows predominantly white (food) corn that is distinct from American yellow (field) corn, their prices are closely correlated.⁴ Rising prices prevented further dumping in subsequent years, but recent evidence suggests that low prices are again driving US dumping in export markets.⁵

Massive farm worker migration is just one of the social costs of the government subsidizing an oversupply of corn. Others are harder to measure. For instance, most corn that American farmers grow isn’t eaten by people. Instead, it is fed to animals in livestock warehouses and feedlots. It is fermented into ethanol (with the residual grains fed to animals) or turned into sweeteners and hundreds of other manufactured food ingredients. It contributes to a food system that relies heavily on farm chemicals, processing, packaging, and fossil fuels.

The irony is that all this work conflicts with the government’s other major tasks in overseeing the food system: establishing healthy dietary guidelines and doling out nutrition assistance to those who are hungry. It might seem that subsidizing an industrial food system would make food inexpensive and abundant for everyone. The reality, however, is that enrollment in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP (formerly called food stamps), hit an all-time high of almost 48 million participants in 2013.⁶ In 2016, more than 41.2 million people were living in food-insecure households, implying that they lacked consistent and sufficient food for active, healthy lives.⁷

Figure 1

Taxpayer Subsidies. Direct payments and crop insurance totaling nearly $2.4 billion helped make corn the predominant crop in 2014. Many small- and medium-sized farmers depend on subsides to survive while large operators use subsidies to get bigger.

Corn Surpluses. 15.1 billion bushels were produced on more than 86 million acres in 2016. This created a surplus stock of 2.1 billion bushels. Very little of the corn is actually fed directly to humans. Most goes to animal feed or is processed into starches, corn oil, sweeteners, or ethanol for our gas tanks.

Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations. Confinement facilities, largely made possible and profitable through the low costs of subsidized feed, house tens of thousands of hogs, chickens, or cattle. Heavy concentrations of animal wastes, odor pollution, reliance on antibiotics, and dangerous workplaces are just a few of the many health concerns.

Food Deserts. Monoculture specialization of corn and other grains for export is the reason we see so much agriculture, so little food in farming areas. Impoverished inner-city areas, where access to supermarkets or farmers markets is limited or nonexistent, also become food deserts.

Dead Zones. Nutrient and chemical runoff from farms in the Corn Belt flow through the Mississippi River watershed and have created a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, decimating fish and other marine life. There are dozens of other agriculturally induced hypoxic zones, including in the Chesapeake Bay.

Food Miles. Processed foods now travel more than 1,300 miles and fresh produce travels more than 1,500 miles from farm to table. California, Florida, and a number of other states (and a growing number of countries) supply the nation’s supermarkets with fruits and vegetables. Relatively little of this specialty crop production is supported by federal programs.

Immigration. After the implementation of NAFTA in 1994, an estimated 1 .3 to 2.3 million Mexican campesinos were forced to leave their lands and move elsewhere in Mexico or in the US to attain employment. Subsidized US corn, combined with the NAFTA trade agreement, had a catastrophic effect on Mexican farmers.

Rural Exodus. The farmer replacement rate has fallen as the number of beginning farmers replacing aging farmers has decreased by more than 23% in the last five years. Farmers are now 17 years older than the average American worker, and we have more farmers over the age of 75 than between 35 and 44. Many wonder if the United States may permanently lose the skills and productive farmland to remain an agricultural leader.

Obesity Crisis. The proportion of Americans who are overweight or obese climbed to 70.7% in 2014 and the child obesity rate has more than tripled since the 1970s (now at 17%). Lack of physical activity and poor nutrition—linked to subsidized and super-sized processed foods high in sugar, fat, and sodium—lie at the root of the epidemic.

What’s more, all the mountains of cheap food haven’t made us healthy, either. Indeed, our epidemic of obesity hits the poor hardest. Fresh fruits, vegetables, and whole grains—the foods most recommended by USDA dietary guidelines—are largely ignored by Farm Bill policies. We have become overeaters of the wrong things, and many critics say that Farm Bill policies are at least partially at fault and can play a dynamic role in reversing this crisis.

Today’s global headlines reflect crops unable to adapt to rising temperatures, spiking health costs due to high obesity rates, food shortages in certain areas of the world, and disease outbreaks emanating from ever-larger meat-, milk-, and egg-producing animal factories. The number of people affected, and worried, about these problems is growing, and, increasingly, they are realizing that the path to reform ultimately leads to government policy. As the adage says, we reap what we sow, and in that regard there may be nothing more important than the Farm Bill.

2. Why Does