Condemning the Family Farm
by Thomas Alan Linzey, Esq.
It’s not often that Pennsylvania’s Departments of Agriculture and Environmental Protection are directly contradicted by the federal government – especially on farming issues.
But over the din of the battle to decide whether farm policy in this State will support the livelihoods of independent family farmers or merely continue to line the pockets of agribusiness corporations, that’s exactly what occurred recently.
For the first time in the history of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Ag Census, numbers collected included data concerning the number of hogs raised in Pennsylvania under corporate production contracts. Specifically, the Census numbers compared the percentage of hogs raised by independent family farms with the percentage of hogs now raised under contract to the four agribusiness corporations that control close to 70% of pork production in the United States.
It wasn’t even close.
The USDA survey found that corporate production systems now account for close to 70% of all pork production in Pennsylvania. Thus, “corporate farming” has become the dominant process by which hogs are raised in this State.
Given that all of the hogs in Pennsylvania were once raised by independent family livestock farmers and sold through the open market, the transformation of the face of hog production in this State over the past twenty years is nothing short of startling.
So much for the continuing assertions by the Rendell Administration that “corporate farming” simply isn’t an issue in Pennsylvania.
This “corporatization” of agriculture has worked well for those corporate few in a position to pull it off. First, a handful of agribusiness corporations pioneer the factory farm production system, overloading the market with a glut of cheap meat. Second, resulting basement-level hog prices then undermine independent family livestock farmers struggling to survive. Third, those family farmers then search for an economic lifeline, which the corporation provides in the form of “take it or leave it” factory farm production contracts. Those contracts then control every aspect of hog production and include provisions that enable the corporation to terminate the contract at its discretion while conferring all environmental liability onto the farmer.
Faced with this devil’s choice of “going corporate” or going bankrupt, farm families that want to stay in farming are forced to swallow hard while giving away the farm.
Once-independent family farmers are then not only economically transformed into mere production cogs in a giant machine, they’re actually harnessed to put other independent family farmers out of business.
Welcome to corporate farming.
Contrary to the editorial declarations of Secretary Dennis Wolff of the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture and Secretary Kathleen McGinty of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, Governor Ed Rendell’s recently announced “ACRE” Initiative will actually accelerate this process at the expense of still-surviving, independent family hog farmers.
Under the ACRE Initiative, Governor Rendell proposes to create a five member State Board of political appointees – called the Agricultural Review Board - empowered with the authority of a court to strike down local laws that control corporate farming. It would, in essence, place the full power and authority of State government behind a corporate livestock production system, while dooming rural communities to watch as their family farmers and rural communities enter into a now-familiar downward spiral.
If Rendell was serious about protecting family farmers and rural communities, the ACRE Initiative could have been written to explicitly preserve the authority of rural communities to regulate and control corporate farming, while solely empowering the Board to review local laws that unreasonably restrict the operations of independent family farmers.
It wasn’t.
Given the legislature’s track record in passing controversial legislation in the final hours of the legislative session, when most legislators haven’t even read the Bills being pushed on a “fast track” with little debate or discussion, Governor Rendell’s ACRE Initiative may be the holiday gift that just keeps on giving into the years to come.
It’s time to begin making farm policy in Pennsylvania that actually expands and strengthens independent family farmer-based agricultural markets and protects rural communities, rather than catering to agribusiness corporations that ravage our rural communities, eliminate family farmers, and destroy the natural environment.
After all, democracy is supposed to be about protecting the rights of community majorities, not about empowering the corporate few to govern.
It’s time to give Governor Rendell’s Agricultural Review Board the boot it sorely deserves.
