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
