Joel Salatin discusses raw milk, farms, food freedom, and government intrusion with John Stossel. Joel Salatin is one of my favorite speakers and writers about both the culture of back-to-earth farming as well as libertarian philosophy.

Hemp for Victory was a 13 minute propaganda-esque film released by the United States Department of Agriculture in 1942, urging U.S. farmers to grow industrial hemp for the war effort. Of course, it was just five years earlier in 1937 when the anti-Cannabis campaign efforts of Harry Anslinger and the Bureau of Narcotics successfully culminated in the early stages of both hemp and marijuana prohibition. Because industrial hemp is immensely productive, the federal government recognized that it needed all the hemp it could get its hands on to get an upper hand in World War II.

Essentially, the message here is a product will be legal and production encouraged so long as the government can benefit from it during wartime. Otherwise, it’s the middle finger to the people and the economy.

Title screen of Hemp for Victory.

“We ask for too much salvation by legislation. All we need to do is empower individuals with the right philosophy and the right information to opt out en masse.” ~ Joel Salatin

Joel Salatin is recognized around the world as one of the leading voices for a return to common sense, earth-friendly farming. I had the opportunity to visit Salatin’s “Polyface Farm” this past March and walk around his beautiful land in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. Salatin’s books are fun reads and full of provoking and practical thoughts for farmers and non-farmers alike. If you are interested in localism, sustainable farming, and realistic ideas to become self-sufficient in a practical manner, there is no better place to start than with Joel Salatin’s work.

Joel Salatin endorsed Ron Paul for President in 2008 and 2012.

My uncle, Robert, interacting with the pigs at Polyface Farm.

Personally, I find “locavore” to be a limiting term. From my experience growing up in Nevada City, California, many people are interested in localizing their lives far beyond the food they eat. In lieu of the volatility and inconsistency of the U.S. economy, people are attempting to regain control over their finances and banks by joining institutions such as credit unions, which promise more local control and input compared to national corporate banks. It is possible that my perspective is slightly biased having grown up in an area with very independent individuals who seem to constantly investigate new possibilities of engaging in transactions with others. However, it is apparent that more businesses and institutions are succeeding based on their commitment to local ownership and transactions. Daniel F. Agan Jr., President of the Massachusetts Credit Union League, recently explained, “Credit union growth is being fueled by their commitment to the local community.” [i]

Despite the passion and claims of some, I do not believe the locavore or local movement in general will expand primarily because of environmental concerns. People’s environmental concern will play a role in it, but I have my doubts that environmentalism alone will lead to a sustainable route of localism. People have different ideas of what constitutes environmental sustainability and how to achieve those goals. Very few would state that the heart of the environmental movement comes down to the food that we choose to eat. Locavorism can play a major part in environmental awareness and concern, but environmental issues stretch beyond whether we buy our food from the farmer down the street or from farmers in South America. In other words, you are likely some form of an environmentalist if you are a locavore, but you do not have to be a locavore to be an environmentalist. Locavores will limit the potential of local food expansion if they publicize the movement largely on environmental grounds, because there are numerous other environmental movements competing for attention and support from the very same crowd.

Economic influences and preferences drive individual decisions more than anything else. People vote with their dollars and naturally support businesses and systems they value over other current options. For example, just because Wal-Mart offers the cheapest produce doesn’t mean that people won’t support a local farmer for a few extra dollars; if it is fresh, locally grown produce people value, they are probably willing to dish out some extra cash if necessary. Every action comes down to the personal value people place on something. This is what the movement of locavorism must publicize if they want to send a sustainable and lasting message to people. Preserving the environment is great, but if locavores can show people that they can preserve the environment and maybe save a few bucks by supporting local agriculture, the movement will have a much higher likelihood of sticking around for the long haul. If you don’t appeal to the economic interests of people, your movement will have a very difficult time sticking.

Through continuing economic difficulties, the desire for self-sufficiency will be the primary driving force behind increased local focus. This local focus won’t be based solely upon environmental or ethical values; it will simply be the practical and efficient thing to do. If the economy is seriously in the doldrums, it is sensible to buy food from a local farmer rather than rely on the global food market. The global food market faces many risks and variables in a healthy economy, but those risks are amplified in times of economic and environmental hardship. With a rapidly expanding national debt, steady monetary devaluation, and increased bureaucracy and centralization, I personally am not optimistic about the future of the U.S. economy and believe serious economic pain is ahead. People are forced to become creative and solve problems in new ways during an economic pinch, and this turning point will magnify the opportunities and benefits of localism.

A shift to localism will not happen overnight. It will slowly expand as people and communities tinker with different ideas (such as grocery store co-ops, credit unions, or local agriculture) and find alternative ways to efficiently provide needed services on a local level. People will recognize the importance of control and flexibility in food that comes on a local scale. Today, people are increasingly vulnerable to weather conditions on large-scale farms; freezes in Mexico this winter “damaged such crops as tomatoes, cucumbers and bell peppers, leading to shortages and price increases.”[ii] Within the spiritual cooperative community, Ananda, in which I spent my life growing up, community members are constantly starting small projects sparked with individual creativity and interest (such as raising goats, chickens, or bees). Localism and community lifestyle will find a place in “mainstream” thought as people begin to directly experience the benefits of engaging in certain operations, businesses, and projects on a local level.

Locavorism is a subset, not the cause of, localism. So long as locavores bundle the larger goal of localism within their movement, it will be a movement that can last for generations. Harsh economic times will push people to explore local alternatives and possibilities, particularly in areas such as finance and agriculture (two key components of a successful and flexible local economy). Locavorism will expand both indirectly and directly due to this exploration of localism; some will purposefully change their diet to eat a majority of local food, others will simply start eating homegrown food as local agriculture systems become more common and successful. Shaky economic conditions on a national (or even international) scale will prove to be the greatest jumpstart to the localism movement.

[ii] “Freezing weather knocks ‘T’ out of BLTs.” Karp, Gregory. Chicago Breaking Business. 15 Feb. 2011.
http://chicagobreakingbusiness.com/2011/02/freezing-weather-knocks-t-out-of-blts.html

A superior product in the marketplace should not require extra help from a government agency, whether it be in the form of a price guarantee for corn (the main substance fed to livestock in industrial facilities), legal code that mandates industrial farming (or heavily restricts other methods of non-industrial farming), or other government subsidies. The fact that industrial livestock facilities rely on government assistance for survival is a testament to their flawed, unnecessary, and undesirable business practices. (If they don’t require government assistance for survival, why continue providing subsidies and other competitive advantages to these corporate industrial livestock giants?) If people prefer to purchase industrial livestock meat over locally grown free range meat, there is no need for subsidies or other governmental involvement. Clearly, subsidies are needed only when a corporation or industry (such as industrial livestock producers) offers a lousy product that people won’t normally desire.

Government subsidies merely provide the illusion of cheap prices, which goes a long way in distorting the prices and actions of people in the marketplace. The fact that industrial meat is the cheapest does not mean it’s a better product or business model, particularly when you account for the government assistance needed to lower the price in the first place. Of course, it is us, the taxpayers, who are providing the subsidies, so the cost we pay for “cheap” food at the grocery store isn’t actually very cheap. We pay taxes to provide farm and grain subsidies, fund the bureaucracies who regulate and administer fines to farmers who don’t cooperate with the industrial system, among other taxpayer-funded programs.

Society is not bearing the cost of water pollution, of antibiotic resistance, of food-borne illnesses, of crop subsidies, of subsidized oil and water- of all the hidden costs to the environment and the taxpayer that make cheap food seem cheap. No thinking person will tell you they don’t care about all that. I tell them the choice is simple: You can buy honestly priced food or you can buy irresponsibly priced food. – Joel Salatin [i]

Clearly the industrial food system has government tilted in its favor; its products are cheap not because of their superior taste or flavor, but because they have managed to successfully crawl into bed with government to dismantle other legitimately competitive businesses. The philosophy of the industrial food system can be summed up in this statement: if people won’t buy your lousy, nauseating product, lobby government for subsidies and other protectionist interventions to dismantle competitors who actually offer a product desirable to the public.

In a true free market of limited or no government intervention and subsidies, a product only survives so long as it appeals to the demands of the general public. As soon as a company offers a product that people do not desire or demand, the company is hit with losses and will go bankrupt so long as it doesn’t change its practices. This occurs because other competitors can easily take the place of a lackluster company who fails to please its customers. Corporations in the industrial food system face no such market competition and customer input, because they are guaranteed government assistance regardless even if people resist their product. Industrial livestock corporations succeed financially based on how well they please government bureaucrats and follow government regulations, not how effectively they can please customers with a quality product. Are you beginning to see the apparent flaws in this industrial, bureaucratized food system of ours? Our current system has come at the demands of government bureaucrats and corporate lobbyists, rather than the demands of people in their local communities yearning for sustainable, clean, tasty food systems.

Industrial Cattle Feeding

The inherent immorality in our current food system is that individuals cannot simply choose to opt out of the system and be done with it. Sure, if a few million of us chose to never again purchase industrial-raised meat, some corporations would face a loss of millions or billions of dollars. However, what would be the corporate reaction? Would they actually change their business practices to match the public’s desire for a local, sustainable, earth-friendly food system? Or would these Agribusinesses lobby government for an extra several billion dollars in subsidies and beneficial regulations to stay afloat? Unfortunately, history has shown the latter is the opted path, as it is with all politically-connected corporations and industries, because it demands little change or adaption on the part of the corporation. As a result, today we are stuck with an uncreative, unsustainable, and frankly undesirable industrial setup that very few people would actually choose over a more natural local food system.

In a true free market system with open competition and no government assistance to businesses, I believe industrial livestock and food systems would be run out of the market within a matter of one or two decades. They would be forced to reallocate their resources to fit the demands of a local food system, or suffer the consequences of consistent losses and, eventually, bankruptcy. The free market is a powerful moral force, because it cumulates the demands and desires of the people by giving each individual the power of choice. The fact that we evidently don’t have a free market within the industrial agriculture system proves that the system must indeed be immoral, unsustainable, or impractical to at least some degree. If it was a moral, worthwhile system, government subsidies would not be necessary to sustain the practices of industrial livestock and agriculture.

The industrial livestock system in place today is not justifiable for one basic reason: it requires government subsidies to stay afloat. I find the greatest moral dilemma with the fact that the system brings in billions of dollars of government support whether customers demand such a product or not. Government’s involvement and propping up of the system has essentially eliminated the power of individual choice, leaving the public susceptible to the whims and desires of corporate lobbyists, government bureaucrats, and our oh-so-wise politicians. The treatment of the animals, the conditions of the factories, the wages of the workers are all secondary. If people are forced to participate in and fund a system they find morally or ethically reprehensible with no option of withdrawal, it is absolutely not justifiable. It is tyrannical.

Contrary to popular belief, the problem in the eyes of government and corporations was not high prices, it was low prices. Corporations blamed low prices on evils such as “unfair competition” and claimed their “profits weren’t protected.” In response to these complaints, Franklin Roosevelt started the first of many “New Deal” government interventions by creating the National Recovery Administration (NRA) in 1933. The first administrator of the agency, Hugh Johnson, called it “the greatest social advance since the days of Jesus Christ.”

The NRA essentially centralized businesses and industries into regulatory cartels. Large businesses suddenly had the power of law to declare “codes of fair competition” and eliminate “destructive competition.” This led to the formulation of price floors and minimum wage laws, meaning that if a business offered a lower wage to employees or lower price to consumers than the industry’s standards they would be fined and/or imprisoned. A famous example is that of Jacob Maged, a New Jersey tailor who charged 35 cents for pressing a suit, 5 cents below the 40 cent minimum established by the NRA. Only when he agreed to follow the NRA standards did he avoid a $100 fine and a 30 day jail sentence.

Such a law diminishes creativity in start-up businesses, provides a de facto monopoly to the larger players in an industry, and establishes what large businesses consider “fair competition”: no competition. Without free competition and fluctuation of prices and wages, the individual people are inevitably the ones who are most impacted in a negative way. Mandatory higher wages destroy jobs for lower-skilled workers, and mandatory higher prices obviously prevent people from buying goods they especially need during a depression. In other words, the NRA was preventing the market from readjusting its labor and goods to the productive areas of the economy in the name of “fair competition” and other terms created by businessmen looking to use government to protect their profits.

The NRA was just the beginning of the attack on low prices. Many farm goods such as wheat and cotton were experiencing large drops in prices as the recession and depression worsened. Government believed the problem was overproduction, which they then believed led to prices that were too low, putting a strain on businesses. It is worth noting that the economists who actually predicted the Great Depression strongly recommended against the policies pushed through by the Roosevelt Administration.

In an attempt to “stabilize” farms and food prices, the Agriculture Adjustment Act was passed in 1933. The basic goal of the newly formed Agriculture Adjustment Administration (AAA) was to pay farmers to reduce their crop area and output. This, the AAA and Roosevelt Administration believed, would bring stability to the economy by raising prices to their so-called appropriate level. Oklahoma is the initial setting of the Joad family in Grapes of Wrath, so we’ll stick with Oklahoma figures for now.

In Oklahoma in 1933, 87,794 cotton farmers plowed under acres of their already-growing fields for a total payment of $15,792,287 from the federal government.

In 1934, Oklahoma pig farmers received more than $4 million to slaughter a portion of their sows and younger pigs.

In 1934 and 1935 wheat farmers were paid nearly $14 million to reduce their acreage. What’s ironic is just years earlier in 1917, under the watch of Herbert Hoover at the Food Administration, the government paid farmers an artificially high $2-per-bushel of wheat to expand the production of wheat for the efforts of World War 1. First government subsidized the unnatural growth of wheat (causing a major wheat bubble and artificial reallocation of farmers’ resources in the Midwest), and less than 20 years later government was paying farmers to stay away from wheat and do absolutely no farming on their land.

In the entire U.S., production of other products like milk and butter decreased approximately 30% thanks to the new federal subsidies.

It was this process that played the single greatest role in landowners getting rid of their tenants in Oklahoma, not some far off mysterious bankers as Steinbeck portrays in Grapes of Wrath. Another major factor was that the federal subsidies did not reach the smaller family farms in Oklahoma, which provided a double-whammy to the small farms with the artificially higher prices that came with the food destruction. Basically, large farms were paid to do nothing and even destroy their crops, which increased prices and diminished competition artificially, which in turn led to the eventual decline of small farms (who were often bought by the larger subsidized farms) as well as the removal of many tenants of the larger farms.

These fatally flawed policies monopolized large farms and forced many farmers to leave the state, most choosing to go to California and the Southwest. Steinbeck places the majority of the blame on corporations, but he failed to see that the corporations would have been powerless without the force of government. Both the NRA and AAA were ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1936, but many similar policies have remained in place up to the present day.

Basic economic common sense tells us that you cannot create wealth by destroying wealth. If this were the case you’d have Apple destroying most of its iPods, Chipotle would demolish its burritos, and more businessmen would probably be following this practice. However, it is plain common sense that assures and convinces us that you cannot expand your wealth by voluntarily destroying your goods. This is what Steinbeck blames California farmers for doing, but there is no historical evidence that suggests farmers sprayed kerosene on their oranges and dumped their potatoes in the rivers. The only examples of farmers destroying their crops are those who were paid to do so by the federal government.

A question is worth asking: if, as Steinbeck wrote, farmers did destroy their oranges and potatoes because no one could afford to purchase them, why not sell them for even 1/2 cent a piece? The loss would be far less than actually paying people to harvest the goods, only then to proceed to physically destroy them all. Such a bogus event would not benefit the farmer, the workers, or the consumers. The farmers would be better off not growing those crops at all or simply giving them away, rather than expending even more resources on hiring guards and people to destroy the food.

John Steinbeck is a fantastic writer but, as with many writers, he has a flawed or incomplete view of the real economic world. People are not helpless peons when given the ability to make their own choices, start their own businesses, and live their lives as they see best. The attempt at a planned economy during the Great Depression did not reduce unemployment or diminish the impacts of the economic correction as expected or hoped. It is a prime example and vital reminder of the destruction that is bound to occur when a select few are empowered to control, manipulate, and implant their vision of a perfect society on the rest of the people.

“A farm includes the passion of the farmer’s heart, the interest of the farm’s customers, the biological activity in the soil, the pleasantness of the air about the farm – it’s everything touching, emanating from, and supplying that piece of landscape. A farm is virtually a living organism.” – Joel Salatin

The deepest experience and impression of nature only arises on an individual level. There are many different stages of awakening awareness in nature, the most basic being the food we eat on a daily basis. Consider the packaged, wrapped, dehydrated, heavily processed food people commonly purchase. From the very beginning, people eating a majority of food of this sort are likely to be detached from nature, not to mention unhealthy. Modern industrial farms have concentrated themselves into a centralized business model relying on packing animals into small cages, spraying fields and crops with chemical pesticides, all of which is propped up through bureaucratic regulations that destroy local farms. My belief is that the nature experience, on a most basic and individual level, begins with local farms. People will have a much greater respect and understanding of nature when they regularly eat and observe whole, natural foods that come from a local source.

“Part of our responsibility as stewards of the earth is to respect the design of creation… That’s something you can devote your life for.” – Joel Salatin

Operating the Polyface Farm on 550 acres of land in the Shenandoah Valley, Joel Salatin is defying just about everyone when it comes to producing organic food. Salatin describes himself as a “Christian-libertarian-environmentalist-capitalist farmer,” and has focused his career on sustainable, environmentally-friendly, animal-friendly organic farming. One of the many unique aspects of Salatin’s approach is that he only sells food to individuals, restaurants, and other outlets within a four-hour-drive radius of his farm, in an effort to encourage people to purchase their food from local farms in their area.

“We think there is strength in decentralization and spreading out rather than in being concentrated and centralized.” – Joel Salatin

Salatin’s “secret” is feeding livestock a rich and diverse mixture of grass, which is supported with no pesticides or chemicals whatsoever. The cattle freely roam among the fields, restrained only by a portable electrified fence that can be easily moved in less than an hour with one or two people. The farm’s chickens are housed in portable coops that are transported with tractors. Salatin maintains a rotation of sorts by first letting cattle graze a portion of the field, and then letting the chickens roam that same area the following day. This simple process provides an easily maintained and renewable source of daily fresh grass for the cattle, gives the animals freedom to move around without much restraint, and it leads to incredibly tasty meat and eggs.

“I appreciate the fact that you obviously love life and the living.” – Polyface Farm customer

“You, as a food buyer, have the distinct privilege of proactively participating in shaping the world your children will inherit.” – Joel Salatin

This is a breath of fresh air compared to the industrial meat facilities today. In these facilities cattle are heavily restrained, the farmers hardly interact with the animals, and a huge portion of the cattle is fed corn (which is often grown with questionable techniques using pesticides and GMOs). Salatin has a tremendous respect of and connection with his animals; a connection that cannot come through the detached and horrific slaughtering processes in industrial meat facilities today. Clearly there is an importance in the environment animals are raised in and its impact on the taste and vibration of the food. Salatin sees and treats animals as free creatures, not soulless drones waiting to be eaten.

“I am a caretaker of creation. I don’t own it, and what I’m supposed to do is leave it in better shape for the next generation than I found it.” – Joel Salatin

The greatest gift Joel Salatin is giving to the world, however, is not his food. He is showing people that there is an alternative. What kind of impact would Salatin have if he simply held signs and protested to a corporate or government building? What effect would he have if he simply lobbied government to mandate his farming beliefs? Probably none at all, and no one would remember him for it. Salatin is taking action. He is not waiting around for someone else to implement his vision; he is taking initiative and proving that low-tech, sustainable, organic, animal and environmentally-friendly farming is not a lost cause. He is a living example that it is actually a tremendous success.

“I see myself today as Sitting Bull trying to bring a voice of Easternism, holism, community-based thinking to a very Western culture. If we fail to appreciate the soul that Easternism gives us, then what we have is a disconnected, Greco-Roman, Western, egocentric, compartmentalized, reductionist, fragmented, linear thought process that counts on cleverness. Now, how’s that for a mouthful?” – Joel Salatin

Joel Salatin’s relentless pursuit of self-sufficiency has given us a remarkable example of how to happily and prosperously live in tune with the environment. All the buildings on his farm are constructed with lumber from the forest resting on his land. His animals are fed natural grass. The land is irrigated by its own ponds. He prospers through a local customer base who jump at the opportunity to support such a venture. Salatin’s achievements are laying the groundwork for the future of localism: respecting and appreciating the beauty and freedom of nature, working sustainably with animals on a very personal level, supporting both inner happiness and the local community, all through operating a profitable business. With individual initiative and creativity, nothing is impossible. Such is the story of Joel Salatin.

“How much evil throughout history could have been avoided had people exercised their moral acuity with convictional courage and said to the powers that be, ‘No, I will not. This is wrong, and I don’t care if you fire me, shoot me, pass me over for promotion, or call my mother, I will not participate in this unsavory activity.’ Wouldn’t world history be rewritten if just a few people had actually acted like individual free agents rather than mindless lemmings?” – Joel Salatin

Today “Cap and Trade” and limiting carbon emissions is a top priority for Barack Obama and many politicians. To dismiss claims that this legislation would hurt the economy, corporate leaders are stepping up to the plate to support the legislation. In fact, quite a few major corporations have supported legislation of this sort over the past decade, such as Dupont, Dow Chemical, and Caterpillar. These corporations must be fighting for the noble cause, right? Not entirely.

What we hear is the supposed benefit of the government regulating carbon emissions in the name of the planet. What we don’t directly see is who pays for those regulations and how they pay for them. Regulations are not cheap to enforce or to comply with. What’s key to understand is that large corporations, who have more money and manpower than their competition, will not have a tough time working with the regulation.

But what about the smaller businesses in the marketplace? Clearly regulations that cost several million dollars per year will effect a $500 million company more than a $50 billion company. When you take this into account it is quite simple to see why many corporations are pushing for more regulation: it stifles the competition, who are forced to allocate more manpower and money to meet regulation. That money will come away from product development, wages, production, etc., and things of that sort, while forcing businesses to either raise prices or scale back on other areas of business that made them competitive in the first place.

When government pops a new regulation on the market, it requires money from the taxpayers to enforce and money from the businesses to comply with. Always take it as a danger sign if large corporations are supporting or actually encouraging government to pass new regulation. They see that more regulation means less effective competitors; history has not shown it any other way. If the corporations really felt that strongly about limiting emissions, absolutely nothing is stopping them from voluntarily doing it right now. At the heart of it, regulation often represents an indirect subsidy to corporations.

In the early part of the 20th century, hemp was a major competitor to many different industries: fuel, paper, clothing, among many others. William Randolph Hearst, a wealthy businessman who owned vast amounts of timberland used to create paper, saw hemp as a major threat to his position in the paper industry (given that hemp was a much more sustainable source for paper). Similarly, Dupont would have had a tough time had hemp plastic been allowed to compete with its plastic made from oil and coal. Hearst, Dupont, and other corporate interests fought to criminalize hemp through government in 1937. Hemp was thrown in with the government’s scare campaign against marijuana and cannabis merely because very powerful interests were fighting for it. Because of this, one of the most remarkable and efficient plants is still illegal to grow in most states.

Regulation has this effect both at the state and federal level. Within the past year, my home state of California passed an act in the name of “animal rights.” I am a staunch believer in the humane treatment of animals, but this regulation will hurt smaller farms most (who usually treat animals better than the large-scale corporate farms) who do not have the resources to comply with complex laws. While the thought behind the regulation may have been good, it will simply give the corporate farms (who often treat animals far less humanely than smaller farms) a competitive advantage over smaller and more sustainable farms.

The problem with government regulation is that it actually takes power away from individuals, consumers, and the local level. This is precisely because it is the smaller businesses who suffer from government regulation the most, and that government regulation will increase the inefficiency of competition in favor of larger corporations. By indirectly shifting the advantage through regulation, government decreases choice, limits competition, thereby increasing prices and hurting consumers the most.

Quite simply, government regulation decreases the regulatory oomph of the individual. As more regulation and laws are constantly being proposed and passed by politicians, the fate of a business lies increasingly on pleasing government, not the individual. The power tilts to government force rather than voluntary exchange.

Unlike government regulation, in a true free market consumer regulation is indifferent to the size and power of a business. In a true free market, a business must serve the interests of the individual, not government, to survive. In a true free market, individuals searching for the best product or best service at the best price outweigh the regulatory ability of government bureaucrats.

Regulations do not fall out of the sky and suddenly make things better. They have a cost, both in the short-term and the long run. With government regulation, effective competition is decreased because of lack of resources to comply with the regulation. With a free market, competition is decreased because of nonproductive practices. Government regulation does not discriminate between productivity and wealth. In a true free market, productivity, not wealth, is rewarded regardless of size.

More cries for government regulation will often come from individuals, corporations, and politicians alike. What must be realized is that as the regulatory power of the government increases, especially so on the federal stage, the regulatory power of the people and the market decreases. Government regulation might be seen as the attractive option in the short-term, but it is only the individual’s regulatory power that can shift the economy and society in a sustainable direction over the long run. The demands of the people, not bureaucrats, pave the road of true security, freedom, and liberty.

The Agriculture Adjustment Act greatly helped large farmers through the subsidies. Smaller farmers were run out of business and hired by the larger landowners, while customers took on higher prices. Even though this initial legislation proved to be very unpopular with the people of the U.S., today the federal government is still heavily involved with farm subsidies, encouraging larger farms, and disregarding the laws of the free market.

Over the past several years ethanol subsidies have come into the public eye. The federal government has been pumping billions of dollars into ethanol for years, and all we’ve had to show for it are record high corn prices worldwide, a ballooned and inefficient corn production, and yet ethanol still has made no headway as a viable energy alternative. Corn is connected to countless key food products, whether it be cattle feed or a primary food staple, but this has been totally disregarded in an effort to promote an unsustainable, inefficient, and costly energy source. The government subsidizes this irresponsible ethanol program while heavily limiting foreign, and possibly more viable, ethanol sources from being imported into the country.

Recently a new bill has popped into view and generated some buzz with the farm community. H.R. 875, The Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009, was introduced on February 4, 2009. The bill aims to create a Food Safety Administration (FSA) within the Department of Health and Human Services. The bill is quite complex, but I’ll do my best to break it down a bit here.

The FSA would be responsible for creating a national food safety system and enforcing it on “food establishments” through all the stages of food production. To ensure that the new safety systems are being followed, the FSA would create and implement a national system of “regular unannounced inspections of food establishments”. The FSA would design new regulations in order to have “minimum standards related to fertilizer use, nutrients, hygiene, packaging, temperature controls, animal encroachment, and water” in “growing, harvesting, sorting, and storage operations.”

What’s especially vague in the bill is the definition of the “food production facilities” who would be subject to the new agency and regulations. From the bill: The term ‘food production facility’ means any farm, ranch, orchard, vineyard, aquaculture facility, or confined animal-feeding operation. The FSA would have the authority and ability to regulate state farms and commerce, areas previously largely out of reach of the federal government. Essentially all local, state, and inter-state food operations would be placed under the jurisdiction of the federal government, through the FSA. One thing that is clear about the bill is that it would greatly expand the regulatory powers of the federal government to unheard of levels in U.S. farming history.

You would think that the principles of the free market and individual responsibility would be respected a little bit more than this. The FSA would be able to enforce laws and bans that previously the FDA has not been able to, such as banning the sale of raw milk. Enacting national standards for all farms, large and small, would be disastrous for local farms. Local, smaller farms do not have the resources to go through such a regulated, bureaucratic, biased system. Just as the initial farm subsidies in the Great Depression eliminated many smaller farmers to the advantage of the larger ones, the FSA would create such a legal hoopla of new laws and regulations that it would be next to impossible for smaller farms to continue operations.

Whether it be through subsidies or increased regulations, these interventionist policies from the federal government always benefit the larger farms and their often unsustainable farming practices. Larger farms generally have a difficult time operating and surviving without using harmful pesticides and farming techniques that hurt the environment and decrease food quality. The FDA’s regulations and restrictions, as well as the subsidies from the federal government, promote larger farms, the unsustainable and inefficient farming practices they employ, while bogging down the local farmers who are often growing healthier food with more sustainable and environmentally-friendly farming methods.

I see farm subsidies as an attack on smaller, local farms. As the farms get larger, supported by subsidies and regulations that stifle the competition, the focus of the people drifts away from the local level. When this is done artificially through the support of the federal government, you get what we have today: large farms with unsustainable farming techniques, heavily processed food, and a system that would most likely be worthless were it not for harmful pesticides and preservatives. I would not argue against this nearly as much if it was a decision reached freely by the people through the free market. Food is one of the necessities of life, and when the government starts interfering with it and manipulating farms in favor of the larger businesses, the economy as a whole will be built on an artificial, unsustainable basis.

The consumer should be the most powerful regulator in a society, but that has been taken away first and foremost with the intervention in food industries. If we can’t make our own decisions about what we eat, can we seriously expect to make decisions about anything else in our personal lives? The federal government is not the regulator we need. Rather, we should be empowering people to make their own decisions through their local economy, community, and government. Local farms are the heart of local economies; discourage them and you build the foundation for nationalization, greater federal intervention into all industries, and a people who are no longer able to make their own decisions.