Family Farmer Advocates Outline Farm Bill Priorities
Photo courtesy of iStock
This year Congress is set to renew America’s primary vehicle for agriculture policy, the Farm Bill. This massive legislative package passed roughly every five years encompasses federal nutrition benefits (think SNAP), crop price supports, agriculture conservation initiatives, farm loan programs, and much more. As debate begins, many family farm advocates have recently descended upon Washington to promote policies that challenge corporate consolidation and support more sustainable and regional food systems. Here’s a summary of the anti-monopoly bills and policy proposals to watch over the next few months.
Mega-Merger Prohibitions and Moratoriums
Given high levels of corporate consolidation along every link in the food supply chain, advocates are calling on Congress to simply ban or pause future Big Ag mergers. Organizations including the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, Farm Action, and the Land Stewardship Project have called for a ban on the largest agribusiness mergers, similar to the ban laid out in Senator Elizabeth Warren’s Prohibiting Anticompetitive Mergers Act. These organizations also support a more moderate moratorium on large food business mergers until Congress passes broader antitrust reform, as proposed by Senators Cory Booker, Jon Tester, Jeff Merkley, and Warren in the Food and Agribusiness Merger Moratorium and Antitrust Review Act. This bill, modeled after similar legislation introduced 20 years ago by the late Senator Paul Wellstone, would establish a commission to study consolidation in agriculture and suggest policy recommendations to improve merger and antitrust enforcement in the food sector. These proposals would also start studies to build the case for breaking up dominant agribusinesses.
Curbing and Investigating Meatpacker Manipulation
Pandemic meat supply-chain disruptions and price-fixing scandals have prompted calls to address monopolization in the meat industry. The Department of Agriculture (USDA) is currently in the process of updating the Packers and Stockyards Act (P&S Act), the main law banning unfair methods of competition, deception, and abusive tactics by meatpackers. Some legislative proposals, primarily included in Senator Booker’s Farm System Reform and Protecting America’s Meatpacking Workers Acts, would have Congress update the P&S Act directly, but while USDA works through their rulemakings, advocates mostly want Congress not to stall this process. When the Obama administration proposed similar Packers and Stockyards rules that would ban tournament payment systems used by poultry companies and improve farmers’ ability to bring P&S Act claims, Congress passed appropriations riders to prevent USDA from implementing the rules. Advocates hope Congress doesn’t repeat history this time around.
Beyond updating the P&S Act, Congress could boost its enforcement by including Senators Tester, Mike Rounds, and Chuck Grassley’s recently reintroduced Meat Packing Special Investigator Act in the Farm Bill. The proposal would create a new office and special investigator position with subpoena power within USDA’s Packers and Stockyards Division to investigate Packers and Stockyards violations.
Country of Origin Labeling and Checkoff Reform
This Farm Bill could finally settle a decade-long debate over something that seems quite simple: country of origin labels on meat. A coalition of 50 organizations including R-CALF, National Farmers Union, and the National Latino Farmers & Ranchers Trade Association recently urged Congress to pass the American Beef Labeling Act, which would mandate country of origin labels (COOL) on beef. As it stands, beef and pork raised and processed abroad can carry a “product of the U.S.A” label so long as it passes through a U.S. facility. This allows multinational meatpackers to market meat from their global networks as domestic products and unfairly compete with U.S. farmers. R-CALF and supporters want to close this loophole and disclose if animals were born, raised, and processed abroad. Congress required mandatory COOL in the 2008 Farm Bills, only to repeal it in 2015 after pressure from the World Trade Organization. Advocates hope this is the year that Congress mandates a WTO-compliant solution and institutes COOL for good.
One of the biggest opponents of country of origin labeling has been the National Cattleman’s Beef Association (NCBA), a lobbying group that gets some funding from a federal tax on cattle producers. Farmers of certain products, including beef, dairy, pork, and various fruits and vegetables, pay fees on their sales to fund “checkoff” programs intended to promote their industries. Checkoff programs gave us slogans like “Got Milk” and “Pork: The Other White Meat,” but they also prop up organizations such as the NCBA or the U.S. Dairy Export Council that, some farmers argue, serve the interests of processors and large-scale, corporate producers over smaller, independent farmers. In this Farm Bill, Farm Action wants Congress to mandate more transparency in checkoff programs and restrict the types of lobbying that checkoff dollars can go towards (as proposed by the Opportunities for Fairness in Farming Act). Looking forward to the next Farm Bill, Farm Action wants checkoff participation to become voluntary (as proposed in the Voluntary Checkoff Program Participation Act).
Support Struggling Dairies with Supply Management
The U.S. dairy industry is undergoing a rapid loss of family-scale farms as the industry consolidates production onto larger, industrial farms. In their Farm Bill platform released Thursday, the National Family Farm Coalition (NFFC) put a high priority on reforming federal dairy supports. As NFFC’s senior policy associate, Antonio Tovar put it, “we believe that dairy is still viable to be saved from these processes of consolidation, there’s still a lot of family dairy farmers that must be saved before it’s too late.”
A recent report found that the average dairy farmer managed to turn an annual profit just twice between 2000 and 2021. Milk prices have been below most farmers’ cost of production largely because the U.S. produces more milk than we consume. To survive on lower prices, dairies feel pressure to expand, but the shift to larger more productive farms only perpetuates the milk oversupply. NFFC has a proposal to implement supply management policies that match milk supply with profitable demand and establish a fair base price based on farm size.
Another dairy campaign, Dairy Together, has a similar Farm Bill proposal to discourage overproduction by charging dairy farmers a market access fee if they want to expand beyond an established production base, with larger farms paying higher fees. Dividends from these fees would then support farmers that did not expand.
Phase Out Large, Confined Livestock Farms and Cut Off their Federal Supports
Over 300 environmental, animal welfare, and public health organizations have endorsed a bold proposal to phase out large, confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs) by 2040. Senator Booker and Congressman Ro Khanna recently reintroduced their Farm Systems Reform Act ahead of Farm Bill debates, which would put a moratorium on opening or expanding confined livestock farms that have more than 700 dairy cattle, 2,500 hogs, or 82,000 laying hens and start fining these farms in 2040. The proposal would also direct $100 billion over 10 years to buy out CAFOs or help livestock farmers transition to managed pasture-based practices.
Additionally, a coalition of national and Midwest membership-based agriculture organizations called the Campaign for Family Farms and the Environment has advocated since the 2018 farm bill to prevent federal conservation dollars from supporting CAFOs. USDA’s Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) pays farmers to adopt conservation practices, but increasingly these funds go to large livestock farms to pay for “manure management,” or cleanup of their concentrated waste. In the 2020 fiscal year, 11% of EQIP funds, or $134 million, went to CAFOs. This spending subsidizes fundamentally dirty operations and directs scarce resources away from regenerative and lower-impact farming practices. Over the past decade, 69% of farmers who applied for EQIP funds couldn’t get them, in large part due to insufficient funds. CFFE and other advocates such as NSAC want to expand EQIP funding and prohibit new and expanding CAFOs from receiving these funds, which past Farm Bills once required.
Looking at the bigger picture, a coalition of more than 35 organizations including the Sierra Club, Farm Action, and the Environmental Working Group, hosted the Food Not Feed summit earlier this month to rethink federal farm subsidies. Speakers noted that roughly 40 percent of U.S. corn and 70 percent of soybeans are used for animal feed, and subsidies for these crops make it cheaper to raise more animals in CAFOs, they argued. Participants want to see more federal support for nutritious fruits and vegetables, which only receive 4% of all federal farm dollars by Farm Action’s estimate.
Combat Corporate Ownership of Farmland
Concentrated farmland ownership lies at the heart of agricultural consolidation. Increasingly, banks, retirement funds, retail investors, and even some nonprofits and universities are buying farmland as an investment. This has contributed to land speculation and farmland values nearly doubled between 2005 and 2019. Preventing further land consolidation by institutional investors is a priority for NFFC’s Farm Bill platform, but this issue is particularly challenging to address at a national level. States control land ownership law, and only eight states currently ban corporations and investors from owning farmland. That said, Congress has promised and largely failed to track foreign and corporate farmland ownership in past Farm Bills, and NFFC wants this Farm Bill to mandate that USDA finish the job. To make farmland accessible for beginning and historically disadvantaged farmers, NFFC proposes more support for land trusts and community-based land tenure models, USDA land grant programs, and more fair and equitable access to federal farm credit.
Plus, Reforming Corporatized Catch Shares for Fisherman
While technically not a part of the Farm Bill, earlier this month family fishermen joined farm advocates in D.C. to lobby for an anti-consolidation policy of their own: catch-share reform. Not unlike farmland, private equity firms and “armchair fishermen” are buying up fishing rights and quotas (called catch shares) designed to prevent overfishing. But the ability to buy, trade, and lease these shares has driven speculation and consolidation, forcing active fishers to rent shares from absentee owners and creating costly barriers to entry for the next generation of fishermen. The North American Marine Alliance wants a moratorium on all new catch-share programs until Congress can ensure fishing quotas go to active commercial fishermen instead of investors and limit the portion of fishing rights that any one entity can control.
What We’re Reading
The Department of Labor fined a slaughterhouse cleaning contractor for illegally employing over 100 children ranging from 13 to 17 years old to work dangerous overnight shifts sanitizing meat processing equipment at 13 facilities including plants run by JBS, Cargill, Tyson, and others. (The Guardian)
USDA will provide a total of $59 million in grants to five independent meat processors to expand their operations as part of an effort to diversify meat supply chains. (USDA / Politico Pro)
One year after a food safety recall shut down Abbott’s largest infant formula plant and created a nationwide shortage, formula supplies are still not back to normal. Reforms to make the industry safer and less consolidated are also slow-going. (Food Fix)