Green Daily

Saturday's New York Times featured an editorial by a Minnesotan named Jack Hedin, who identified himself only as "a farmer." Hedin's piece was eye-opening. He wrote about the difficulty he had been having in finding enough land to rent to grow local produce to sell at farmers' markets. Excited by the concept of local eating, and anticipating selling a lot of stuff at his local market, he tried to rent land from larger, more conventional growers nearby. (These are the kinds of farmers who plant acre after acre of the same grain, often genetically bred corn, which ends up being food for feedlot cows or high fructose corn syrup, and receive subsidies from the government to do so - for a quick primer on this phenomenon, read Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma, or see the documentary "King Corn").

Why couldn't Hedin rent the land he wanted to take out of monoculture and put into use making the watermelons, tomatoes, and squash that he knew his neighbors wanted to buy at the market? Because the land was basically locked into being used for subsidized conventional agriculture. If the bigger farmers wanted to rent to Hedin, they would have to PAY for their decision.

Get involved in changing the way that government finances big agriculture by visiting the Farm and Food Policy Project and learning about the latest farm bill, which is now in Congress.