Burnt Out on Politicking?
How Integrity and Prototyping Can Foster a Better Farm Bill and Future for the World
I keep seeing headlines on the upcoming Farm Bill. I’ve also picked up on a pattern in the pieces. They relay narrative predictions and aim at regional, specific audiences. They say:
“There’s gonna be this movement from this group, and this response from legislators, and a counter-push from this industry, so on and so forth.”
And they close with a version of the following:
“It’d be wise for congressional representatives to remember these words, and draft a bill and vote in a way that prioritizes this narrative accordingly.”
My head spins when I try to keep all of these different narratives in mind. Wildfire risk mitigation, small farm vulnerability, industrial agriculture subsidies, propane storage limits, land conservation programs, climate-smart ag practices, rural electrical infrastructure, commodity crop research, so on and so forth — all of these issues vie for prioritization in the Farm Bill, and the various writings make it implicit that I need to be involved. My help is required in order to ensure the drafting and certification of the proper Farm Bill. But as the writings work into the particulars of their respective fields, they stop short of sharing how to effectively support their cause through the messiest part — the actual shaping of omnibus legislature in the face of competing visions.
What do I mean by “omnibus legislature”? I mean large, complex bills that contain many different measures, addressing many various topics. These are scaled, formalized and “legalesed” beyond the point at which a single human can reasonably review and understand them, especially someone without time or energy to spare. That’s me. It might also be you. These sorts of bills have gained a nickname—“big uglies.” And not just in the United States. In Canada, omnibus bills have been labelled “anti-democratic”, as “they are almost always an attempt to slip controversial amendments past Parliament and the public without adequate scrutiny.”
In 2011, Marion Nestle, a professor at NYU, decided to teach a class on the Farm Bill. Was she qualified? Probably. She had written on and taught food politics and policy for almost twenty-five years. Did it go as planned? Nope. Here’s her experience:
“… I tried to catalog the hundreds of programs it covers, each with its own set of arcane stipulations and invested lobbyists. Beyond the obvious — that its agricultural programs are heavily slanted to benefit Big Agriculture — its details defeated me. My students, most of them enrolled in graduate programs in nutrition, food studies, public health, public policy or law, were deeply invested in farm bill issues but they too were soon overwhelmed. The bill not only lacked an overarching vision, but seemed designed to obfuscate how the programs actually worked.
I came away from this experience convinced that agricultural policy in our country is not only hazardous to public health and the environment, but also to American democracy. Democracy requires informed citizens. I suspect that few citizens, let alone members of Congress, have the vaguest idea of what is in this bill and how it works in practice. Even lobbyists and congressional staff are likely to know only the pieces they are paid to understand.
This is a shame, because the farm bill matters. It is crucial to practically everything about our food system: what crops get subsidized, how much foods cost, how land is used and whether low-income Americans have enough to eat. Whether you are rich or poor, much about your food choices is shaped by what’s in this bill’s 357 printed pages.”
Ouch. Let’s say you’re a farmer. Is there anything you can do to work towards a Farm Bill that keeps you afloat and allows for a generationally sustained vision? Conventional wisdom says raise your voice. That’s the way of political process. Results favor those who shout loudest and draw the most attention. You can share your experiences and concerns through listening sessions with representatives and advocacy organizations. You can write op-eds in your local newspaper. You can share your story with anyone willing to lend an ear, whether in the checkout line at the supermarket or with your grandkids on Sunday evening.
Unfortunately, even when driven by the best intentions, committing full-stop to attempts to shape legislature by sharing your own story runs the risk of burnout. It can also encourage the reductive habit of evaluating people regarding their influence. I don’t mean to characterize these efforts as fruitless or unnecessary. I‘m just not convinced that they’re the best actions for most people to invest the bulk of their energy in. A lot of money is involved in this arena—think $165 million from agribusiness lobbyists in 2022. Numbers like that tend to drown out everyday voices and concerns. If you toss your hat in, there’s a genuine risk of painful confrontation with your own limits — with seeming insignificance in the face of systems that shape you as you attempt to shape them.
If it’s humility that you’re after, save yourself a lot of anguish and step outside in the middle of the inky night and look up. If it’s better food systems and a healthier world, consider a different stance than throwing all your eggs into one political basket. It looks very different for all sorts of people, but the following pattern will ideally complement the best work at listening sessions and representatives’ offices.
Find the spark that grows from considering one’s place in the world, whatever is needed wherever you are, and tend to it. Show that another world is possible. This prescription isn’t apolitical apathy. It’s a path forward for those strung out by traditional political maneuvering, and it isn’t soul-crushing, or locked into five-year Farm Bill renewal cycles. The folks doing campaign-style work can’t get anywhere if they can’t point to real-world models, examples, and data—their visions don’t have teeth. We can work on those structures. Their tangible presence in the world—improving soil life, bolstering ecological cycles and getting good food to those who need it—communicates volumes when our words don’t make it far.
We can take action outside of the legislative process. We can work together to build out our dreams for the world we want, prototyping and evolving ways to grow and sell food, to set up farm markets and food hubs, to manage the risks of food-borne illnesses, to best care for farm workers, protect farmland, support new farmers, gracefully transition farms from generation to generation, and on and on and on. Combine this with a small dose of legislative action and informed voting, and you have two effective prongs for shaping future food systems.
Ricardo Salvador, the director of the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Food and Environment Program and “leading commentator on our food system,” focused on this dynamic in a recent keynote address. Here are the bones of his presentation:
-The influence of the Farm Bill is remarkably far-reaching.
-Opponents of grassroots organizing to shape the Farm Bill enjoy massive amounts of financial and political clout.
-There’s still hope.
-The three necessary steps of food systems improvement are envisioning different futures, demonstrating and prototyping those models, and transitioning from the current state.
-Organizations like Ricardo’s (The Union of Concerned Scientists) are dependent upon groups like the Savanna Institute and their grounded demonstration that alternative visions are not only feasible, but preferable.
Salvador works from this baseline to advocate for a groundswell of efforts united to shape the Farm Bill. Marion Nestle also does: “The only hope I see for meaningful change is grass-roots advocacy — a uniting of the many groups working on farm bill issues to create one loud voice for improving the bill, program by individual program.” The only way that one loud voice is assembled, and rings true and clear, is if it’s grounded first in healthy, established models.
Ricardo’s talk also details the stakes involved, and the stark differences in future models . One is a data-driven, resource intensive, large-scale, consolidated food system. The other is a grassroots, localized model, keenly receptive to an indigenous perspective of environmental impact and resource extraction. If you don’t have the bandwidth for Ricardo’s talk, here’s a dystopian animation shared by the Indigenous Environmental Network that illustrates what he’s talking about. It shows the dark side of the technified, corporatized Green Revolution’s global evolution, but also (at 8m08s) begins to offer a hopeful glimpse of the prioritization of decentralized food systems and small-scale, local, generational wisdom and practices.
Stepping into this healthier alternative might look like honing skills alongside a local guild, like the herb or beekeeping guilds facilitated by Crosshatch, or volunteering at or growing food for your local food pantry (an estimated 85% of the funding in the 2023 Farm Bill will be relegated to SNAP and other programs serving the food-insecure.) Maybe seed-saving and scion swapping, topics explored at past Northern Michigan Small Farm Conferences. Converting lawn to pollinator habitat. Getting involved with groups like the Savanna Institute. Attending workshops on efficient tools for small farms, coppicing, rotational grazing, or hazelnuts, and then putting findings to good use. There’s room for you in that alternative vision. You can work on the templates that make sense to you and your circumstances, the very efforts that legislators and campaigns can point to in the future. Each of these can be small and accessible practices that reshape the future of food, farming, the land, and ourselves.
So.
Step 1: Do the work that needs to get done as well as you can where you are.
Step 2: Vote wisely, and support grassroots initiatives and organizations aiming to shift the Farm Bill needle.
Let your representatives pour their time and energy into shaping the bill, as well as those organizations that have made it their goal to unite effectively for broad-based food systems causes. And if this Farm Bill doesn’t pan out in helpful ways, you’re still pushing forward with needed work that supports those around you and helps form a unified voice primed to shape future legislation.
