Restoring family farms
part 2 of 2
Fair labeling
The National Farmer’s Union explains this issue well.1
Surveys show the vast majority of Americans want to know where their food comes from, and farmers and ranchers want to provide them with that information. Laws should support farmers and consumers in achieving that goal, but multinational meatpackers and foreign competitors have fought fair and accurate labels for decades. This allows companies to import cheaper products from other countries and earn a premium by passing them off as local products. This, in turn, depresses prices for American ranchers and undermines consumer confidence in labels.
Laborism supports country of origin labeling. Again, laborism believes in markets, and we believe in consumer choice. American consumers think, rightly, that the country of origin is relevant information, and they want to use that information in making their purchasing choices. We will give them that ability.2
Similarly, laborism will work with farmers and consumer groups to develop useful, meaningful labels concerning the practices used in producing food. Consumers have a strong interest in how animals are raised and fed. They have a strong interest in what chemicals have been used on crops and injected or fed into cows and chickens. We should have meaningful descriptive standards, with the definitions easy to find on the internet, that can be easily vetted by inspections, and that producers can then use on their labels to communicate to customers in a meaningful way. If farmers want to go even further through additional labeling they will be free to do so, and if consumers find those additional labels relevant then they can be promoted to formal, regulated standards as well. Laborism will always promote the efficiency of markets in giving us the products we want, rather than the products producers want to give us. In the case of food, the good family farmers want to give consumers the products they want, and good, reliable labels help to make that possible.
Protecting land and resources for family farms
This is particularly important under laborism. When we prevent financiers from earning compound interest from banks and corporations, they will try to buy up real estate. They will try even harder when we implement laborist tax policy that reduces reliance on property taxes. We won’t let them.
Corporate land and water grabs are already a problem. As the National Family Farm Coalition states,
“With more than 40 percent of all US farmland expected to transfer hands in the next few decades, keeping land within local agricultural control, and not in the hands of corporations, is crucial.”3
Laborism will ban corporate ownership of farmland. We will also ban foreign ownership of farmland. We will limit absentee ownership of cropland. Bill Gates, that well known son of the soil, should not be one of the largest owners of farmland in America. My Norwegian ancestors came to this country because they could never be more than sharecroppers in Norway. The people who wanted to be self-sufficient farmers on their own land built this country.4 Becoming a nation of tenant farmers would be a disgrace to their legacy. Dry-prairie western grazing operations naturally need a lot of land per animal, and we would not draw stupid arbitrary lines on land ownership or grazing rights, but we would have policies that favored resident full-time farmers and ranchers over absentee billionaires.
But land ownership in itself is not the only threat. I went to school across the ridge from the Owens Valley in California. The Owens Valley had once been farmable land, but financiers acquired the water rights, pumped the valley dry, and sent the water to Los Angeles.5 Similar water conflicts occur across the west. Laborism will promote fair and sensible water policy that gives priority to family farms producing food for Americans. Water-intensive hay production for export to China would be deprioritized. Water to cool AI server banks would be deprioritized, though if a company makes the investment to pump and demineralize water and then provides it (at a suitable temperature) to farmers that need it, they may avoid the conflict. We will also work with organizations like the American Farm Bureau to use investment and education to maximize the efficiency of our water use.6
Wind and solar power production should benefit, not harm, family farms. Through suitable system design and location we can use green power production to increase the income of family farmers without significantly interfering with their farming activities. Similarly, affected homeowners and farmers should have a proper say on fracking and produced water operations. Destroying an aquifer forever to earn a buck for ten years is not a good trade, and a laborist government would make sure that the rich financiers who own the big oil companies don’t get to ride roughshod over farmers in addressing those conflicts.
Factory farming in the form of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations can contaminate cropland and water for miles around. Laborism would rebalance agriculture back in favor of sensibly-sized family farms, rather than bleak, manure-filled animal concentration camps staffed by unauthorized immigrant labor. Under the traditional common law things like CAFOs would be considered to be a prohibited nuisance7 because they interfere with the normal use and enjoyment of neighboring land and with the common interest in clean water. The financiers have managed to push back those traditional legal restrictions our ancestors enjoyed, but laborism would restore them.
Discouraging and restricting industrial practices that hurt farming
The financier squeeze on farmers has a terrible effect on farming practices. A fifth of US butterflies have disappeared since 2000.8 Beekeepers lost more than 45 percent of their honeybee colonies between April 2020 and 2021, the second-highest losses on record.9 A major factor in this has been the overuse of pesticides, which have killed butterflies and bees and other pollinators and poisoned our children without increasing crop yields. As the American Chemical Society (hardly a radical organization) reports:10
Pollinators and aquatic insects appear to be especially susceptible to the effects of neonicotinoids with current research suggesting that chronic sublethal effects are more prevalent than acute toxicity. Meanwhile, evidence of clear and consistent yield benefits from the use of neonicotinoids remains elusive for most crops.
Besides poisoning the food we feed our children with dangerous neurotoxins, this destruction of pollinators threatens all of the food crops that rely on pollinators to produce and seed. As one article summarized,11
Of all flowering plants on earth, 87.5% benefits from animal pollination. Globally, 87 of the leading food crops (accounting for 35% of the world food production volume) depend on animal pollination. Pollinator mediated crops are of key importance in providing essential nutrients in the human food supply.
Farmers work hard to produce our food. Pollinators, the busy bees, work even harder. Bad agricultural practices are killing them, threatening the family farm economy.
A single enormous, disgusting cattle feeding operation in Yuma, Arizona, threatens the safety of thousands of acres of leafy greens grown in America during the colder months, contaminating our children’s salads with deadly bacteria.12 Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations contaminate our food and promote the rise of new diseases. Antibiotics used to fatten animals13 and to control disease in these concentration camps breed antibiotic resistant bacteria that make the great medical miracle of the 20th century ineffective. We pride ourselves on modern medical technology, but by breeding antibiotic resistant bacteria and by providing the perfect environment for generating new viruses, factory farms threaten to undermine the two big innovations that really made a difference in reducing the deaths of our children. At the same time, they undercut the economics of family farms, both by contaminating the environment and by flooding the market with low-price, inferior meat, milk, and eggs that corporate store chains prefer to sell us. Under laborist policy, which would reduce the skim by parasitic middlemen, we would be able to buy good, healthy food from sustainable family farms for the same price.
By helping farmers to get fair prices, banning corporate farms, improving labeling, better regulating pesticides, imposing excise taxes that make pesticide prices reflect their bad side effects so that sustainable farmers can better compete, restoring anti-nuisance laws and making the other pro-family-farm measures described here, laborism will stop these threats to family farmers and to the health of our children. That will be good for everyone, except the financiers.
Rural infrastructure
As of 2021, 18% of US farms had no access to the internet, much less broadband. 17% of rural Americans lack access to high-speed internet, versus 1% for urban Americans. In today’s world, farmers need the internet as much as the rest of us. Modern sustainable farming blends ancient practices with cutting-edge research. The University of Minnesota is using robots to check the health of plants and apply chemicals with extreme precision only where they are needed. Plus, attracting the next generation to the farm requires making use of the internet to give them access to the world of entertainment that their urban cousins enjoy. Running high-speed 2-way internet to an isolated farm costs money, but we ultimately ran electricity and telephone wires everywhere. We need to treat high-speed internet as a similar priority for Americans.
The financiers want to destroy the US postal service so that they can replace it with financier-owned private ventures. But the Postal Service has, for generations, given everyone everywhere access to the entire world. We delivered mail to ships at sea and across enemy lines in wartime. We ran the pony express across the wild frontier. Rural post offices are an important part of the American system, and we should build on them rather than destroying them. The system where, on a daily basis, the postal delivery goes to every home in America provides an efficient base for expanding opportunities for small businesses everywhere as well as providing support for rural Americans. It also provides a remaining secure form of communication that the government’s computers don’t get to read or listen to. A laborist government will invest in the postal service.
Farmers need to be able to get their products to market in a timely and cost-efficient way. That requires proper investment in roads, waterways, and railroads. A laborist government would do a thorough review of US transportation needs and would use laborist interest-free financing to build and restore infrastructure that will help Americans to save costs, with the financing to be repaid over time through tolls or taxes, depending on whether it is making new things possible or just offering improvements over the use of tax-supported roads and highways.14 Perhaps new rail spurs combined with modern routing technology would make it relatively cheap to get products from rural towns to urban markets where cooperative agents could sell them directly to consumers, without the farmer having to load up a truck and spend a day or three and a lot of gas going back and forth to town. Or maybe not. In any case, freed of service to the financiers, we should start with a blank sheet of paper and ask what do working people need and want, and think about how it could be provided. A laborist government would meet with organizations like the Rebuild Rural Infrastructure Coalition15 and with individual farmers to get this process going.
In fact, the laborist political mechanism is specially suited for this. We are based on ground-up politics. Individual working people meeting together in their towns and neighborhoods are the ones who will select local government officials (such as town councilors), and will send representatives to the next level armed with live discussions with the individual workers about what they need and want from the government. Those representatives will choose government officials at the next level (such as county commissioners - elected the way they are today, but with the laborist meetings choosing the candidates, instead of some top-down corrupt financier-owned cabal doing it) and will discuss policy ideas from below and choose representatives to take those requests and ideas to the next level up, and so on. In this way people’s needs and priorities filter up, and then when the relevant level of government proposes actions to address those needs and priorities, they will consult with the people affected to be sure they’ve got it right.
Right to repair
The demands of compound interest compel American corporations to be always in search of new ways to extract money from their customers. Many have fastened onto the concept that economists refer to as the razor and razor blades, or perhaps more recently as printers and ink. With old-fashioned safety razors with replaceable blades, the manufacturers might sell their razor at or below cost but then make a large profit over time as users bought the replacement blades, producing a continuing income stream instead of just a one-time profit from the razor. More recently, printer manufacturers will sell their machines at a low price but make it very difficult to replace the ink with anything other than their expensive replacement cartridges, and will program the printers to waste a lot of ink running “cleaning cycles” to make sure that you buy those replacement cartridges frequently.
Automobile manufacturers have been trying to do the same thing, turning cars into a big and expensive smartphone and seeking to sell a lot of ongoing subscription services. At the same time, all those electronics have made teenage mechanics obsolete. When I was first married we bought the factory manual for our car and when something needed maintenance or repair I did it. I did a lot of that on our next car, but that one had a master electronics chip, and when that went out we had to take it into the dealer. Our third car was more complicated, and after that I had to give up. We go to the dealer and pay a lot of money to get whatever needs doing done. That was intentional on the part of the companies.
Farm equipment manufacturers do the same thing. They have been adding useful electronics to their machines, but when they go on the fritz the farmer hasn’t been able to read the error codes or do a repair. This was an intentional plan to make them use a dealer technician to do the repair. Not only does that cost the farmer more money, but the machine has probably acted up just when the farmer needs it most, and getting the machine to a technician who may be hundreds of miles away to do a repair is a major problem. Laborist policy will prevent this. We will require manufacturers to provide explanations of the error codes and guides for repair so that the farmers can repair anything within their basic capabilities.
Cooperatives
Finally, laborism will encourage rural cooperatives for buying inputs, selling products, and supporting operations. Rural cooperatives have been a major useful thing for decades. Some have grown so much that they became more of a problem than a help. For example, the California Avocado Growers Association was a great cooperative formed in 1924 and when I was a kid we sought out Calavo avocados. In 2001 it became a public for-profit corporation, and now is on the other side from current farmers. Certain other cooperatives have essentially switched sides as well. Cooperatives are not a cure-all, but they are an important piece of the puzzle. We don’t want the government having to run all of the operations that should be run as non-profits to avoid having a piratical bottleneck, and farmer-owned cooperatives of a reasonable scale are the best alternative. Laborism will support such entities and give them whatever help they need.
Laborism will also support labor cooperatives. Migrant farm workers and farm owners can both benefit from organizations that ensure good pay, benefits and conditions for workers while ensuring timely and efficient labor for the farms. As laborism liberates the farm profits previously stolen by middlemen, we need to ensure that the workers get the benefit of those profits, rather than having them default to landowners just because they own the land. By controlling the profits going to financier middlemen we can both allow farmers to get the profits they deserve for the risks they take, the work they do and the knowledge they provide, and allow farm workers to get their fair share for the work they provide. Remember, the whole mess that became modern financier capitalism started with the assumption that landowners should get the profit from farm work. We want to support family farms and get rid of the parasitic financier middleman profit, but we don’t want to repeat that historical mistake in the process.
To defeat the power of compound interest, we must use compound effort. Please subscribe (it’s free and I won’t send you spam, just posts) and pledge to recruit at least 5 other people who each pledge to recruit at least 5 others. Recruit family, friends, co-workers, church members, union members, lodge members, people in your organizations, strangers. We can do this, but we each need to put in the effort.
We will also better align origin labeling with the FDA import alerts, including their Green Lists. See, for example, https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/cms_ia/importalert_81.html Online resellers can provide such source information without much difficulty.
Again, that could have happened and should have happened in a different way, if it were not for financiers. Even in the days of America’s westward expansion there were plenty of white people of goodwill who would have been willing to work out a mutually satisfactory arrangement with America’s native peoples, at least in the areas where the natives weren’t already inclined to be homicidal. (Some of those who had been clashing with the Spanish for centuries might have been unreceptive. I have no personal knowledge about that. But the northern tribes weren’t like that.)
For reasons we don’t understand, chronic antibiotic use makes animals gain weight faster, and industrial operations make use of this phenomenon to increase profits.
New railways can save wear and tear on roads and so reduce tax money spent on roads, in which case those tax savings can be available to repay the financing. In general, laborist policy would seek to do a reasoned cost-benefit for new investment, and match the cost with the savings.
https://rebuildrural.com/#page1