Civic Agriculture: Reconnecting Farm, Food, and Community

7. From Commodity Agriculture to Civic Agriculture

c h a p t e r 7 From Commodity Agriculture to Civic Agriculture   Commodity Agriculture As American agriculture turns down the path of a new century , we see that the independent, self-reliant farmer of the last century is rapidly disappearing from the rural landscape. Farmers, who were once the backbone of the rural economy, have been reduced to mere cogs in a well-oiled agribusiness machine. The real value in agriculture no longer rests in the commodities produced by farmers, but instead is captured by the corporately controlled and integrated sectors of the agrifood system that bracket producers with high-priced inputs on one side and tightly managed production contracts and marketing schemes on the other side. The prime supporters of current agricultural policy in the United States have been the land grant colleges and universities , the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and more recently large, multinational agribusiness firms. The land-grant system was organized to bring the methods of scientific research to agriculture.1 At U.S. land-grant universities, the emphasis in the classroom and research laboratory has been on commodity production. As different production-oriented agricultural disciplines were formed over the past 120 years such as [99] agronomy, plant pathology, the animal sciences, plant breeding , and entomology, they broke apart “farming” bit by bit into disciplinary niches. The goals were the same, however, across disciplines. In the plant sciences, attention was directed at increasing commodity yields by enhancing soil fertility, reducing pests, and developing new genetic varieties. Animal scientists, on the other hand, focused on health, nutrition, and breeding. The scientific and technological advances wrought by land-grant scientists were filtered through a farm management paradigm in agricultural economics that championed sets of “best management practices” as the policy blueprints for successful and presumably profitable operations.2 Agricultural policy at the national and state levels focuses primarily on commodities as units of observation, analysis, experimentation, and intervention. Farmers and farms have largely been overlooked by policy makers. Indeed, farmers are often reduced to workers whose primary tasks are to follow production procedures outlined from above. And farms are simply places where production occurs, devoid of connections to the local community or social order.3 Commodity agriculture has become synonymous with industrial agriculture. Many of the basic commodities that undergird the U.S. food system are produced on very large farms that are tied to large agribusiness firms through production contracts. Production contracts are especially prevalent among poultry and livestock farms.4 The entire system of commodity production is being propped up by large government subsidies. These subsidies favor some producers over others (usually large ones over small ones) and certain production practices over others (usually capital-intensive over organic). A recent report by Brian Riedl of the Heritage Foundation noted that “growers of corn, civic agriculture [100] civic agriculture wheat, cotton, soybeans, and rice receive more than 90 percent of all farm subsidies, while growers of most of the 400 other domestic crops are completely shut out of farm subsidy programs .” The report continued: “farm subsidies in 2001 were distributed overwhelmingly to large growers and agribusiness, including a number of Fortune 500 companies. . . . The top 10 percent of recipients—most of whom earn over $250,000 annually —received 73 percent of all farm subsidies in 2001.”5 The shortcomings of a corporately controlled and managed food system have been revealed in many scholarly books and journal articles, as well as in the popular press.6 However , only recently has a civic agriculture paradigm emerged to challenge the wisdom of conventional commodity agriculture . The emerging civic approach is associated with a relocalizing of production. From this perspective, agriculture and food endeavors are seen as engines of local economic development and integrally related to the social and cultural fabric of the community. Refashioning Farming to Fit the Marketplace Civic agriculture brings together production and consumption activities within communities and offers consumers real alternatives to the commodities produced, processed, and marketed by large agribusiness firms. Civic agriculture is the embedding of local agricultural and food production in the community.7 Civic agriculture is not only a source of family income for the farmer and food processor; civic agricultural enterprises also contribute to the health and vitality of their local communities in a variety of social, economic, political, and cultural contexts. For example, civic agriculture increases agricultural literacy by directly linking consumers to producers...