O’Neill: Most agriculture is subsidized

Casey O’Neill is a farmer and owner of Happy Day Farms in Laytonville, Calif. The opinions expressed in this column do not necessarily reflect the views of The Mendocino Voice. If you’d like to write your own column for The Mendocino Voice, send your idea to info@mendovoice.com.

To farm well (and perhaps to live well) is to adapt and change over the seasons as conditions shift and new information and practices become available. Farmers task themselves as the fulcrum to transmute sun and weather through seeds and livestock to create food from the land we tend. Every farmer I talk with this spring notes that we didn’t get enough winter, that the work didn’t stop, that the hot March weather was unnerving and has required adaptation and change in the normal rhythms of farm life.

Agriculture is what feeds us, nourishes our bodies and acts on the landscape for good or ill. Systems of governance and regulation that support or hinder farmers have as much to do with the successes of crops and farmscapes as do the tangible effects of weather and the hands that do the work. I would make the argument that most agriculture is subsidized in some way; large agribusinesses tend to receive government payments and often take their subsidies directly from the land by abusing the soil and from farm workers through low pay.

It costs more to care for the land, to pay living wages, to build and maintain community. The much-touted economies of scale are often just ways to hide the abuses and pass costs on to future generations in the form of erosion, soil loss, pesticide and herbicide damage. The reason I say that agriculture requires subsidies is because it’s so hard to make it pencil, especially with the vagaries of weather and the inevitable difficulties that come from working with living things.

We should subsidize agriculture, but we should subsidize it in ways that support land and human health. The focus should be on increasing nutrient density in our crops, supporting the microorganic populations that make the soil alive. An agriculture focused on chemicals and pesticides has gone awry, damaging the land and our bodies. I think often of the myth of Rome salting the fields after the destruction of Carthage. Though this never actually happened, today agribusinesses salt the fields with glyphosate that destroys the microorganic populations and now exists in the bodies of our people, damaging our futures.

Let’s focus more on good practices and appropriate scale. Let’s subsidize water storage, native plants, compost and building soils! Programs like these are being run by the Natural Resources Conservation Service, by Resource Conservation districts, by many farmers on their farms. We need more, much more of this, and we need less corn-wheat-soy corporate agribusiness. Scale isn’t the problem, it’s focus; when we focus on quantity over quality we lose the path to a future that sustains us all.

I think about the ways that our farm has been supported through grant programs, and I want to see this happen more often for more farms. The difficulties of making ends meet from the crops we grow are shared by every farmer I talk to, and I wonder what it would be like to not have to worry about money. Our government spends billions on wars while the people who produce the food necessary to sustain every single one of us aren’t sure if they can keep making it work.

The rich get richer, yet the folks who do the work day in and day out keep having to fight harder to survive. Capitalism is propped up by wars of extraction that are paid for with the sweat of the labor of working people. We need systems and structures that honor the labor that it takes to make everything under the sun, and that fairly reward the people who do that making. Billionaires should be taxed out of existence, and those monies should support healthful lives for all.

As it’s Easter Sunday, I’ll close with a reflection on Jesus and his flipping of the tables of the moneychangers in the Temple of Jerusalem. When too many have too little, and the few have too much, it is a fundamental wrong to humanity and the land that sustains us. It is wrong when wars are fought to conquer and plunder to feed the insatiable greed of the rich while working people struggle to make ends meet. Why are we spending money to kill people in other countries when we could be spending that money to make all of our lives better?

I’m grateful to be able to farm, grateful for my family and community and for the many ways we are supported in our efforts. I work to see this become more of a reality for more farmers, and for the health of humans and land to be the litmus test for how we construct our shared society. As always, much love and great success to you on your journey!