Feingold has the right idea on farm policy
July 17, 2007
I’ve long been a fan of providing local foods to community schools, and of the idea that our farm policy should encourage organic and local food markets.
It’s a little thing, but the benefits are many. It helps the family farm, and thus strengthens the hundreds of small towns that are scattered all across the Midwest. It helps the environment, by dramatically reducing the carbon footprint of our food. It helps public health, by providing children with high-quality food instead of the stuff that passes for lunch at school cafeterias.
Everybody wins if we can craft a farm policy that accomplishes these things, while not throwing money at large farming corporations, or subsidizing the corn-syrupization of America. Shifting our argicultural policy from preferencing Tyson and ADM, to supporting local and organic foods, would result in a huge increase in the public good.
If I dropped the “on farm policy” caveat from the title of this post, I’d still have a pretty good metric for interpreting politics in the Senate, so it comes as no surprise that I’m happy to see that Russ Feingold is, as always, doing the right thing, and championing his own version of my pet theory:
When a nearby farm can provide fresh produce to a school down the road, both our farmers and our schools benefit. In the upcoming Farm Bill, there is an opportunity to give our farmers a chance to grow more of what is served in our school lunch programs.
Congress should include provisions in the upcoming Farm Bill that build on the Child Nutrition and WIC Reauthorization Act and the Department of Defense Fresh Program to ensure that our children have access to healthy food at school, ideally from local sources. At the same time, we also need to remove barriers to local healthy foods such as changing procurement rules that now sometimes prevent local schools from purchasing from neighboring farmers.
Fixing farm policy not the sexiest thing in politics, but it’s important. Apart from those once-in-a-generation opportunities for big changes — the New Deal, civil rights, the environmental consensus of the 1970s, and hopefully universal health care in 2009 — the good work of government comes from small victories and incremental improvements, and Feingold is working for another one of those victories.