Peepli Live
The new film Peepli Live is touring the US right now and looks like it could be a great way for people to learn about the huge issue of farmer suicides in India (and many other parts of the globe) due to the stranglehold of corporate agricultural businesses on local and international food economies (In 2009′s season alone 1,500 farmers in the Indian state of Chattisgarh committed suicide).
Check out the trailer here:
and an interview with the filmmaker here:
Notes of a midwestern farm
I’m considering the summer weather right now. Pondering when and with what effect it will inevitably shift, as low fifties are predicted for these coming weekend nights. Terra Brockman composes lovely writings of certain ecological imperatives, including life on her brother Henry’s farm. Their roots are of Illinois, family, and farming. In mid August, Terra wrote of a heat inextricably woven into both day and night while considering those that toil within this realm. This particular piece is a part of her weekly food and farm notes series and to read about the extreme heat, just click on August under blog archive. Terra shares various descriptions of life on this midwestern farm as well as information on the vegetables grown and of course, suggestions on how to prepare items such as daikon, salsify, and purslane.
Mess Hall Presentation in Chicago on 9/12/10
I will be giving my first public lecture focused on Farm Together Now in just a few weeks in Chicago at the experimental cultural center Mess Hall. Their sunday skillshare series is intended to be a Messhall contribution to the new Glenwood Sunday Market taking place in the neighborhood. Please come by if you want to learn more about Farm Together Now and help me brush up on how to talk about this big ‘ol project.
Farm Together Now trip plan for summer 2009
p.s. Mark your calendar’s for the FTN release party here in Chicago on December 1st at 6pm (downtown, exact location TBA).
What:
Sunday Skillshare Series: Farm Together Now–a portrait of people, places and ideas for a new food movement w/ Daniel Tucker
Where:
Mess Hall is in the heart of Rogers Park, Chicago, our address is:
6932 North Glenwood Avenue Chicago, IL 60626It is very easy to get to our space via the CTA Red Line, get off at the Morse stop.
When:
Sun, September 12, 10am – 1pm
Description:
In 2009 Daniel traveled the U.S. with his collaborators Amy and Anne visiting twenty different inspiring activist-farmers. The result of this process is a book (To be released on Chronicle Books Dec, 1 2010). He will share a slide-show preview of the book and explain some of what he found out from these 20 inspiring projects. more info @ http://farmtogethernow.org/
*Mess Hall opens @ 10:00 for coffee & presentation begins at 11:00am.
More information at http://messhall.org/
Trying to understand the farm bill
The current farm bill expires on 09-30-2012. The writing of the new bill will begin in early 2011. We have less than a year to tell our legislators what we want the farm bill to be.
The farm bill designs the funding structure for commodity programs, agricultural research, nutritional programs, conservation programs, rural development, and more.
Food stamps, school lunches, and other nutrition programs account for about half of the farm bill spending. Support for commodity crop farmers accounts for another 35%. The rest of the funds are divided among conservation, environment, forestry, renewable energy, research and rural development.
About one quarter of U.S. farmers receive commodity subsidies and out of these, the top 10% receive 75% of all funds. Most payments go to the largest farms because commodities subsidies are paid to the producers of corn, soybeans, wheat, rice and cotton. The top 10 % receive two thirds of the payments. Very little of what is subsidized is actually edible to us humans.
Farmers who grow “specialty crops” or vegetables, fruits, and flowers are currently ineligible for these subsidies.
We need to make sure that the subsidies being legislated are in the interest of our nation’s health.
The farm bill is historically complex.
With roots in the New Deal, Agriculture Acts were once designed to help the struggling farmer by imposing restrictions on the amount of land that could be farmed to balance surplus and maintain stable prices. Trade was booming in the 1970s and farmers were encouraged to produce as much as possible, intending the surplus for export. During the 1980s, the global price of commodities collapsed and U.S. farmers dependent upon exporting were hit hard.
Jump to 1996 and the “Freedom to Farm Act.”– this marked the end of policy meant to control supply and stabilize prices. In 1997, Congress authorized the use of emergency payments to farmers and in 2002, Congress voted to make these emergency payments permanent.
Daniel Imhoff, a researcher who has spent nearly twenty years concentrating on issues related to farming, insists, “we must put an end to commodity subsidy programs that simply encourage over production and insurance of cheap ingredients for industrial foods. What we subsidize should contribute to an all around healthier food system.”
The House Agriculture Committee has been holding public hearings on the 2012 Farm Bill this summer. To keep up to date on the farm bill and other agricultural news, check out FarmPolicy.com, an Internet based newsletter that provides a daily summary of news relating to U.S. farm policy. And while you’re at it, read Michael Pollan’s You Are What You Grow, an article written the last time we were faced with the construction of our current farm bill. As Pollan states, this could be “the year when the farm bill became a food bill, and the eaters at last had their say.”
The Youngest CSA
There is plenty of fluffy writing these days about food and gardens but I cannot help but be inspired by this piece in Tonic about the 11 year old Katie Stagliano from South Carolina who started her own garden CSA. Katie obviously has a good publicist, as reflected by her recent video appearance on CNN.com. It is too bad that so much media attention is given to this one young person and not spread around to the folks who are experienced enough to really have a vision for how to change the food system as we know it, but this is one situation in which I am tempted to say that any press is good press when it comes to stories about people producing their own food.
Gavin Raders of Planting Justice
In an earlier post, I wrote about the workshop that I attended in Detroit during the US Social Forum. Check out this series of seven videos posted by the Permaculture TV free video cooperative, featuring Gavin Raders of Planting Justice speaking at that workshop.
This is from the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, who feature in Farm Together Now because of their collaborations with the Hunger Coalition in Atlanta. They are a really unique and important group to follow:
For Immediate Release:
July 21, 2010
Contact: Ralph Paige
404 765 0991
Federation of Southern Cooperatives/
Land Assistance Fund
Www.federation.coop
The Federation Sends Letter to USDA Secretary Vilsack
Regarding Sherrod’s Forced Resignation
ATLANTA….On July 19, former Federation staff member and head of the USDA’s Rural Development Office in Georgia was asked by the USDA to resign her post. The reason was because of the ramifications of a distorted video from a March 2010 speech she gave at the NAACP in south Georgia that was publicized by Fox News. In response to this the Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund has sent the letter below to Thomas Vilsack, Secretary of Agriculture.
July 21, 2010
The Honorable Thomas Vilsack
Secretary of Agriculture
Washington DCDear Secretary Vilsack:
We at the Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund are writing regarding your decision to ask Shirley Sherrod to resign. We think you must reconsider and immediately reinstate her as Georgia USDA State Director of Rural Development.
Your decision to force Ms. Sherrod to resign was taken in haste without a thorough and complete review of the facts, context and circumstances of her actions. We feel you were unduly influenced by distorted and edited videotape that completely misrepresented a speech Ms. Sherrod made to the NAACP in Georgia.
It is a sign of leadership to admit to mistakes and quickly corrected them. We feel you as Secretary of Agriculture must quickly correct this injustice committed against Ms. Shirley Sherrod and the people she has struggled for years to serve. This is the transformative awareness and enlightened judgment we are expecting from you.
We note with interest that your concern is to move forward to solve the problems that USDA has had in the past in terms of its sad record on civil rights. Yet your decision to fire one of the few persons in the country who could likely do the most to help achieve that goal stubbornly negates your stated interest of moving forward toward equal access and equality of opportunity at USDA with integrity.
At the NAACP gathering in March this year, Shirley was sharing with the group her experience in the 1980′s of assisting the white farmer Roger Spooner. She, in fact, was instrumental in helping to save his farm. She describes the process of getting beyond her assumption that whites didn’t need services and assistance. She realized that being white did not make anyone immune to the problems of and to the lack of access to services. She realized rather that it was a matter of who has and how does not. This was a life changing experience for her. Her message was that all of us need to get beyond race and assist each other whether black or white.
Another of your interests we know is to finally resolve the lawsuits against USDA. Lack of access to services at USDA is the basis for the Pigford lawsuit. In addition to securing the necessary funding for settling Pigford from Congress to finally resolve this injustice to individual farmers, we know that another essential step in moving forward is to assist and assure farmers have access to the USDA programs. Programs, in fact, that are supposed to be available on an equitable basis to all farmers.
Shirley Sherrod in her remarkable career has been one of the most active practitioners in assisting untold numbers of black and white farmers to access the credit, conservation and other programs at USDA. Shirley has essentially been an ambassador for the USDA in her work at the Federation of Southern Cooperatives and as Georgia State Director of Rural Development. If anything, she deserves to be honored for this work and not falsely condemned and forced to retire in disgrace.
We find it ironic that in the one hundred years of USDA’s history of discrimination, not a single white person has been dismissed for discrimination, however, a Black women who is doing her job well is falsely accused of discrimination in an altered video and you decide that she can no longer do a credible and nondiscriminatory job of dispensing USDA rural development programs and must resign.
Once Shirley is restored to her position, we feel it would enhance USDA’s goals by utilizing her as an ambassador for USDA. She could offer USDA staff throughout the country training and teaching about transformation on the issue of race and what it means to offer service to all farmers with justice and integrity regardless of race.
In summary, the inference that Shirley Sherrod is a racist is beyond comprehension. For you to make a decision without consideration of Shirley’s long and impressive work in civil rights is uncalled for. It is not only an insult to her, but also to the communities she has worked for and with all these many years as well as our organization that has for decades fought against racism and injustice in the rural South
We ask that you immediately reconsider your decision to fire Shirley Sherrod, apologize to her and consider instead the tremendous asset she has been and could continue to be for the USDA and rural America. We urge you to learn from this disagreeable incident and make it a shining example of a true change of heart and direction at USDA toward a brighter day of racial reconciliation and justice for all.
Cooperatively yours,
Ralph Paige
Executive Director
Antibiotic use in animal production
Antibiotics have been used in industrial animal production for over fifty years. Recommendations to reduce or eliminate the use of antibiotics in animal feed have been made repeatedly over the last thirty years. The widespread use of antibiotics to accelerate growth among livestock and to compensate for the unhealthy conditions found in confined animal feeding operations (CAFO) has led to an increase in antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria.
The Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act H.R. 1549/S. 619 means to limit the use of antibiotics in food animals. The latest version of this bill was introduced last year by Rep. Louise Slaughter. Earlier this month, the third and final Congressional Hearing was held on antibiotic resistance. Dr. John Clifford, Deputy Administrator for Veterinary Services for the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Services (APHIS) stated in his testimony that it is likely that the use of antibiotics in animal agriculture does lead to some cases of resistance in both humans and animals. The FDA has recently stated that using antibiotics for animal production purposes is not in the interest of protecting and promoting public health.
The FDA’s approach to Antibiotic Regulation is explained here by the Union of Concerned Scientists. While the Center for a Livable Future submitted a written statement to the House Committee in which to make recommendations for Congressional action. CBS evening news recently reported on this issue, included are clips from the Congressional Hearing. Katie Couric reports that the FDA, CDC, and the Department of Agriculture are all now urging farmers to stop the feeding of antibiotics to healthy livestock.
It is estimated that food animals consume almost 70% of the antibiotics administered in the United States–almost 25 million pounds per year. PAMTA would ban the non therapeutic agricultural use of antibiotics that are particularly beneficial to treating human illnesses. Over 300 health, consumer, and environmental organizations nationwide support the passage of this bill.
PAMTA is pending in Congress.
Endpapers
Here are the endpapers designed by Brian Scott of Boon Design firm in San Francisco who is the mastermind behind the layout of Farm Together Now. These papers will open up the book and give readers a taste of all the amazing people we met on our trip across the U.S. (All photos by Anne Hamersky):
Sell Sheet for FTN
Here is the promo “sell sheet” for Farm Together Now, just in from our publisher Chronicle Books:
