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Why don’t we want people to farm
Ezra Klein, blog at American Prospect
In a policy paper almost custom-designed to catch this blog’s eye, the Access Project has released an issue brief on the intersection of farming and health care coverage. And the news isn’t good. Health policy types tend to assume a household is experiencing financial hardship from medical costs if they spend more than 10 percent of their income on health care. That’s true for 54 percent of folks who report their primary occupation as farming or ranching. Add in part-time farmers (which is common given that farming is often seasonal) and it’s 44 percent. That’s high. And high is bad.
Small farmers get their health insurance on the individual market. They are not protected by an employer’s bargaining power. They do not get to deduct their insurance costs, as employers do. And the individual market is bad, pricey place to get your health insurance. The median amount that farmers on the individual market get paid out-of-pocket for health insurance was $11,200. Those who got their insurance from an employer paid $5,600 out of pocket (they of course paid more out of potential wages redirected to health care, but that’s a different sort of burden).
So why does this matter? As Steph Larsen, a rural policy organizer for the Center for Rural Affairs observes, when you’re talking about building a more environmentally sustainable, local food production system, you’re talking about having a lot of farms. As Larsen puts it, that requires small-scale farming to be not only environmentally sustainable, but economically viable. Small-scale farming is hard to make a living at and harder to make a regular living at. Crop prices go up and down. Droughts descend. Tastes change. Subsidies shift. If you can’t keep your health care amidst these fluctuations, you can’t keep farming. It’s irresponsible. And so many don’t. As Larsen concludes, health reform is an important part of farm policy not only for the farmer who needs health care, but the office worker who’d like to farm. In this, it’s much like the rest of health care policy.
The fact that our health system specifically advantages stable jobs at large employers reduces entrepreneurship in all forms. Fewer people can start small businesses, move home to take over their family farm, or spend a couple years trying to make it as a rock band. Economic creativity is reduced across the board. Scraping by on low wages for a few years is one thing. Going without health care, particularly if you’re older or have a family, is rather another. It’s as true for the young innovator who wants to leave Bell Labs* and start his own company as for the tired office worker who’d prefer to return to Nebraska and reinvigorate the farm he grew up on. We have decided to discourage them as a matter of national policy. We have decided to make it easier for ConAgra and harder for family farms. The question is why.
*Yes, they still exist.
(8 January 2009)
EB contributor Carl Etnier writes:
I take notice when a young blogger at a Washington, DC magazine who is read by many center-left bloggers embraces increasing the number of farmers and ties it to the current debate on health care policy. Klein doesn’t call for 50 million or 100 million farmers, as Richard Heinberg and Sharon Astyk do, but I’m glad to see him addressing the issue in this way.
From Dining Out to Cold Turkey
Marian Burros, New York Times
SANDY Dawes, a new lawyer, used to dine out four times a week with her husband, Chris, a Ph.D. candidate. Now it’s once a week, at most, as rising prices, student loan bills and car payments have squeezed their budget.
“We needed to cut back, and that was the easiest thing to cut,” said Ms. Dawes, who lives in Cardiff by the Sea, Calif. “It takes a little more motivation to cook at home — more planning, keeping the refrigerator full to be ready to cook dinner — but it doesn’t take more time than going out to dinner.”
Americans have been spending more time in their kitchens since the economy soured and food prices began to rise this year. About 60 percent surveyed in July by Mintel International, a market research firm, said they were cooking more often and dining out less frequently.
(9 December 2008)
Eat This City (video)
Michael Gebert, Homegrown Evolution
From the Sky Full of Bacon podcast, a video on Chicago urban foragers Art Jackson and Nance Klehm.
17:45 minutes.
(6 January 2009)
Suggested by EB contributor Jim Barton.
The Greenhorns Guide for Beginning Farmers (PDF)
The Greenhorns
This is a guidebook for beginning farmers. It is written to help you plan your professional trajectory into the field of sustainable agriculture. In this 30-page guide, we cover some of the major areas of institutional support for young farmers, some likely venues of learning and useful references. You should come away with a sense of how to approach the many hurdles with style, persistance, and improvisational zip.
Guide for Beginning Farmers [PDF, 1.67 MB]
The guidebook is written by young farmers, for young farmers.
It’s a collaboration of Greenhorns – affiliated greenhorns, and those who have contributed online to: foryoungfarmer.wikispace.com
(January 2009)
From the Greeenhorns, a website for a recent documentary about young farmers. Trailer (YouTube).
Suggested by EB contributor Jim Barton.
Unprecedented heat will trigger global food crisis
Martin Mittelstaedt, The Globe and Mail
The world faces a “perpetual food crisis” because global warming will likely lead to massive and simultaneous crop failures in many regions, possibly as early as the period from 2040 to 2060, a new study says.
The finding, appearing in the journal Science, is based on climate models that suggest the worst heat waves of the past – such as the one in Europe in 2003 that killed at least 30,000 people – are likely to become the new normal summertime temperatures.
…During recent heat waves, such as the one in France, the poor harvests were mitigated because the rest of the global food system was still functioning well. The study said this may not be possible in the future because many areas could suffer extreme temperatures simultaneously.
“It will be extremely difficult to balance food deficits in one part of the world with food surpluses in another” unless major investments are made soon to develop heat-tolerant crops and better irrigation, the study states.
(8 January 2009)
EB contributor SCL writes:
It is interesting to note that no mention is made of expected limitations in energy and water in the same timeframe, or that both increased irrigation and balancing food supply by transfering staples from areas of surplus to areas of deficit both require inexpensive supplies of petroleum.
