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Politics : Rat's Nest - Chronicles of Collapse -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (6475)	9/25/2007 5:16:48 PM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24235

Federal bill helps huge farmers, not California's innovative ones Carolyn Lochhead, Chronicle Washington Bureau Sunday, September 23, 2007 Dale Coke ponders the perils of farming from his small organic farm in San Benito County near San Juan Bautista. An organic pioneer operating for 25 years, Coke invented the spring mix lettuce now a staple in every grocery chain - an invention born of necessity when he wound up one year with too many different varieties left over to sell individually. But this year has been tough. He ran out of water on part of his 250 acres. He faces costly new food safety rules because of last year's E. coli outbreak in bagged spinach. There's a quarantine on the light brown apple moth in Monterey County, where he also leases land, and a looming immigration crackdown could force him to fire many workers. And this season hasn't been all too good for growing leafy greens, organic or not. The market is flooded, prices have crashed, and Coke can't recover his harvest costs on radicchio, frise and escarole. He is mowing them down. Even so, he wouldn't want any of the billions of dollars that go to farmers of corn, cotton, rice and a handful of other crops subsidized or protected by the government since the 1930s to shelter them from risk. "It's part of the cycle," Coke said, fingering some of the shallots and cippolini onions that will cushion the blow. "We brought it upon ourselves. I should deal with it." Besides, he said, "I think there are better things the government could do, like provide education. Or how about health care? Especially if we're having farm programs that encourage production of the kind of food that helps cause people to become diabetic and obese ... health care, that would be way more important than subsidies for anybody." In the upside-down world of farm programs, California produces twice as much food as any other state, but mostly without crop subsidies because fruits, nuts and vegetables are ineligible. Fresno County alone produces more food than South Dakota, but South Dakota gets more than 10 times as much federal crop money. That's the way it's been since the 1930s, and that's pretty much the way it would stay under the $286 billion farm bill that passed the House in July and the Senate is now considering - yet another five-year plan for agriculture, billed as a temporary remedy for stricken farmers 75 years ago, renewed by Congress as farm income breaks U.S. records. Within a 200-mile radius of San Francisco are some of the most innovative farmers in America - conventional and organic - in a region that has become the hotbed of a movement beginning to reshape American farms and food. It aims to bring the forces of creative destruction to agriculture - to displace the industrial model of factory farms and processed foods with a web-style network that reconnects small, local farmers directly with consumers. more sfgate.com === Coastal farmer gives a big raspberry to 'chemical strawberries' sfgate.com ==== Yes, San Francisco is in the land of cotton subsidies sfgate.com