Another day, another pathetic sputter from our stalling economy. July's jobs report found that only 18,000 jobs were added to our national roster in June, down from several hundred thousand per month in the first three months of this year. In her aptly titled "Below the Beltway" blog for the Chronicle, Carolyn Lochead pours salt on the wound by noting that the people who are working must work far more hours now than they did a generation ago -- 26 percent more than in 1975 -- in order to maintain the same standard of living.
If Obama is looking for a win next November, this doesn't sound like a recipe for success.
But recipes, as it turn out, may hold one key to success. More specifically, the stuff that goes into recipes. I'm talking about food. And not about using it to expand our waistlines, but to expand employment.
Here in the Bay Area, we like our food. We're especially big fans of all things local, sustainable, and -- if we're lucky -- sourced from farmers that we actually know. But if you've ever searched the supermarket for a grass-fed steak, greens that weren't bagged on a conveyor belt by a robot, or eggs that didn't come from a factory farm, you know that they're not always easy to find. Even our beloved Berkeley Bowl looks a little less bountiful when you learn that one company is behind four of the egg brands the store offers, and that "cage free" only means they are free to roam around a giant factory barn with thousands of their brethren.
So when it comes to demand for local foods in the Bay Area, there's no shortage. What about supply? That's where things get a little weird. Despite the growing interest in, say, grass-fed beef, California has lost half of its small and midsized family cattle ranches in the last 20 years. Gone under. Kaput. Mid-sized farms -- those that grow enough to supply a supermarket or a school but that aren't doing it industrial-style -- are similarly absent from the scene. Our food landscape looks a lot like an upside-down bell curve, with a whole lot of tiny farms selling to CSAs or farmers markets and a whole lot of massive farms producing on a large scale and exporting many of their products. In the middle, there's nothing.
That's the hole that innovative policymakers should try to fill with jobs.
Starting with California native Walter Goldschmidt's groundbreaking work in the 1940s, studies have repeatedly shown that communities with many small and midsized farms are better off in terms of education levels, poverty rates, wages and other socioeconomic indicators than are communities dominated by industrial farms. (Here's a 2002 Missouri study with the same conclusion.)
The state of our food system looks particularly terrible in light of those findings.
The midsized family farms that used to dominate U.S. agriculture are disappearing, and with them, the jobs they once brought on and off the farm. That's largely a consequence of the fact that over the last few decades, the number of companies that buy food from farmers, process it, and distribute it to consumers has shrunk while the size of the few left has grown dramatically.
The handful of massive companies that remain -- think Tyson, Kraft, Cargill -- have gone all Wal-Mart on family farmers, pushing down the prices that farmers get for their products and signing preferential contracts with the biggest producers. Hey family farmer, can't make a living selling your crop for a loss? Tough luck.
That's why farm families get most of their income from off-farm jobs. According to the research of Tufts University's Timothy Wise (report here, or watch a great short video on the research here), the average midsized family farmer in the United States makes a mere $19,000 a year from farming full time. And nearly half of that $19,000 is government payments! Yes, as much as we may dislike subsidies, without them those family farmers are looking at $10k a year from a full-time farm job. Talk about having to work hard to make a decent living.
That sucks for consumers too, who want to be supporting family farmers when we plunk down our money at the store. Unfortunately, the share of our food buck that makes it back to the farm is at an all-time low -- only 15 cents out of every dollar. The rest goes to giant processors, marketers, and retail chains.
Ok, so a few things are clear. Bay Area eaters want more local, sustainable and healthy food. The producers best positioned to provide it are scraping by or going under, unable to get their hands on enough revenue. And standing between these two groups is a tiny number of very large companies that are having a pretty darn good year.
Call me old-fashioned, but I still believe that government has a responsibility to step in when the market is clearly not working. This is not a problem that we can shop our way out of -- that's just the point. But given the challenges to getting the government to do the right thing these days, it's going to take a politically organized California to tell our policymakers what we want, and make it clear that their reelection depends on getting it done.
We've got our work cut out for us. Strong new rules to scale back the power of giant meatpacking companies and help keep California's family ranchers in business are now stalled at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (I go off on this issue in more detail here), and our congressional delegation should be putting the pressure on to get them finalized. The House's devastating 2012 budget cuts programs that finance local and regional food infrastructure -- I'm talking about local meat processing, cold storage for small and midsized farmers' crops, and distribution hubs -- and will make it all the harder to rebuild alternatives to the industrial food chain. Senators Boxer and Feinstein should defend these programs and others like them this summer when the Senate crafts its budget proposal.
Our members of Congress should do this because it's right, but they should also do it because it's smart. California has the second-highest unemployment rate in the nation. We have cities full of folks wanting more local and sustainable food. We know, thanks to 70 years of research, that midsized farms are the best source of community economic development among all farm types because they generate significant local jobs both on and off the farm and keep profits in the community. So what are we waiting for?
Finding the solution to our job crisis shouldn't take a rocket scientist. We just need to look down at our plates.
Elanor Starmer is the Western Region Director of Food & Water Watch, based in San Francisco. Learn more and join their campaign for fair food policy here.
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Farmers...
roflmao...
No one... and I mean no one can afford to go into farming unless they are already a millionaire...
roflmao...
That is so funny...
:-)
Drier areas, like the foothills of the Coast Range or the Sierra Foothillls south to Santa Barbara which can easily require 40 to 160 acres to grow the supply of forage to make a cow able to raise a calf, if they are within roughly 2-300 miles of the Bay Area( that's 300 hundred) are probably so costly as to make that prohibitive. Historically, cash return on the investment in land and cattle and equipment for western ranches has been from about -.5% to maybe as much as 1.5% The owners of virtually all that land, either inherited it, or bought it with money from some source like construction or Silicon Valley, and intend to make their return on selling the land, in the meantime it's basically a big park for them. Just raising the cattle gets pretty expensive.
All that chicken poop would drive ya nuts and your neighbors would start up a lynching party...
:-)
Working 24 / 7 is not for the weak at heart...
:-)
Some how we Americans have forgotten that our economic booms happened when more where able to contribute and there was less consolidation and conglomerates. Each and everyone of the major problems could be fixed if the subsidized & tax benefiting quasi-monopolies were somehow dealt with. Letting free markets actually blossom and create competition. Not free markets without rules or over-site where fraud and corruption flourish but fair markets and participants. The amount of jobs that could be created and retooled would be mind-boggling if the game wasn't rigged by the biggies that buy off the governments.
Big Pharma, Big Oil, Big Ag, Big Banks... even are not the answer. They are the problem. In the meantime Big Gov't just upgraded to Super Gov't. We are so fascinated by the option and need to Super-size.
It seems to me that a key part of reviving local agriculture is to cut out the middlemen, and get more than $0.15 of every dollar from the consumer's pocket to the farmer's.
We have an unspoken, massive subsidy for petroleum in this country, however. This drives down the costs of synthetic fertilizers, and the energy to warehouse foodstuffs, and the fuel to drive them over long distances. Eliminating financial giveaways to the fossil fuel industries, and adding some proper taxes to gasoline as well, would make local food price-competitive.
On a related subject: I see you live in the San Francisco Bay Area. As a San Jose resident, I shake my head at one of our biggest mistakes. My house, and thousands of others like it, and shopping centers, and office buildings, and eight-lane freeways, are built right on top of what used to be prime orchard and farm land. Before they called this place Silicon Valley, it was known as the Valley of Heart's Delight.
It's a shame to realize that, even if your plan to revive local farming were to take shape, the land that they ought to use for those farms is often no longer available.
And the author claims to speak for an entire region, claiming that the prevailing sentiment among Bay Area consumers is a desire for only organic, locally grown foods. I lived in the Bay Area for over a decade and saw no evidence of that. It's like claiming that all Bay Area residents are devotees of feng shui or some of the other nonsensical notions that a small minority profess. Yet she'd manipulate the market to limit access to the most affordable food at the expense of the average consumer, a true nanny-state sentiment. "WE know what's best for you, even if you don't!"
One minor quibble though, "..."cage free" only means they are free to roam around a giant factory barn with thousands of their brethren." Has biotech come so far that they now have the brethren of the hens producing eggs as well?