Food Fights

I am sitting in a hotel room tonight, soaking in the sounds of Haydn and Bach while unwinding after a day of meetings. 187 voting Farm Bureau delegates from 25 counties in Washington State are also settling into their hotel rooms in Yakima tonight. It was a busy, productive, well organized day.

Why would five hundred farmers, business owners, agency staffers and family members take three days out of their work week to sit in a large hall and craft agricultural public policies? Maybe it is the fine food? The pleasant talk of old friends? The entertainment? The world class convention center facilities? The fabulous salaries farmers [don’t] make?

Public policy. Do you think in the abstract? Can you draw a blueprint for a house? A diagram of your vegetable garden? Can you write a love letter? A song? A check? We go to school to learn to read, write and count. At least most of us.

Public policy is important to food. Is food important to you? Then you should care about public agricultural policy, words that define how your food will be grown.

Do you know the dad who grew your potatoes? The mom who keeps the family books for the farm that grew the grain that became flour for your bread? Do you know the children of the orchardist who harvested the apricots in the fruit smoothie you are drinking right now? Do you know the insurance man who paid out for the rain spoiled cherries that never got to your table this year?

Do you know the lobbyist and the senator and the lawyer who teamed up to pass legislation to fund a balanced water management plan? A plan that will provide river water for both irrigation and fish habitat in the Yakima valley in years to come? Do you know the representative who wrote the new law that requires Washington government agencies to fully footnote the “best science” that underpins their policies? What a novel thought!

Do you know how many successful joint tribal/farmer agricultural management plans are already or almost in place in Washington State today? Do you know how many upper river, flood controlling and water conserving dams tribal groups have committed to seeing built?

 Do you know how many diabetics today inject quality, low cost insulin harvested from genetically modified bacterial cultures? Do you know both the dangers AND successes of modern agricultural farm interventions? Do you know how farmers are successfully adapting to changing rainfalls, temperatures, and pest migrations? Can you see the tilth in the field your facebook page will never speed past?

Probably not!

Do you know the millionaire who tears at agriculture and industry with a knife of hostility? Do you know the news editor who prefers stories pitting tribal aquaculture against dairy farmers? Do you know the government agents who travel field and stream profiling farmers and loggers who MAY pollute—some day. Do you know the environmental activists whose frivolous listing of poorly defined endangered species is really designed to target, take and idle the farm land that was used to grow the food you ate today?

Do you know the government agents who drive an adversarial wedge between reluctant tribal elders and their neighboring towns? Do you know the tribal elders who are stepping up to mitigate the havoc easy government money and drugs are wreaking on their youth?

Do you know the college professors who demonize the people who grow your food and cut the wood for your shelter? Who teach for a day when property is not private and families are not traditional?

Maybe!

There was a day when public agricultural policy was a simple statement of what the whole culture lived out every day. The closest farms were just a mile or two from the towns they fed. The farmer was your dad, your uncle, or your brother. Then things changed. Now, growing food is a distant and dim reality, and public agricultural policy is often an ideological food fight in halls of power and education.

Today, with one hand the social activist eats the food we grow, and with the other hand they pen public policy which destroys us. Therefore, I am in Yakima with Washington farmers today, and we voted for policies that Farm Bureau lobbyists and legal foundations will promote in the Washington State House and Senate this next year.

Today, we considered the very real gap between public who eat our food in sanitized cities, and ourselves who secure that food in distant, harsh and unpredictable conditions. Today, we brainstormed for ways to penetrate the barrier set up by hostile media and educators and environmentalists between ourselves and tomorrow’s leaders, even our own children.

Today, we worked on public policy. Tomorrow, we will feed you. The next day? You may need to grow your own food. Now, having you or your children working in a field might be the best idea yet!

-- JK