There Are No Easy Choices
How can a truly local food system bring sense to our local economies?
This is a collection of observations and thoughts on the recent USDA (and beyond) funding freeze and what it means to our small farms and local food systems. And more importantly, what we each might have control over.
Inflation, Funding Freezes, and Shortages
Over the past couple weeks, I’ve heard from dozens of farmers and those adjacent to the farming communities.
The funding freeze is crippling. It’s causing hurt in both predictable and unpredictable ways.
Many people are beyond anxious and flinging blame all over the place.
“Serves them right for voting for Trump…” I’ve seen and heard multiple times.
“They shoulda known this was gonna happen.”
Or the opposite:
“It’s about time we stopped giving millions to corporate ‘farmers.’”
“We’ve got to clean up the fraud and corruption.”
Baked into statements are many assumptions, judgements and blame without looking at the nuances.
Judgement and blame don’t solve anything.
There are people and organizations who long ago set aside blame and judgement in order to accomplish common goals of creating a secure and stable local food system.
They are part of the solution, not the problem.
Between the spending freeze, unemployment – including federal workers losing their jobs – the instability from the economic turmoil, and uncertainty, many of us are out of “easy” choices on the personal level.
Many of us can relate to financial constriction or dramatic decrease in resources that some of our farmers are facing right now. We can understand the fear, uncertainty, and instability that goes with that territory.
We’re not choosing which vacation we’re going on this year. We’re choosing which bills to pay, or how to keep our businesses or farms afloat, or whether to pay medical bills or put food on the table. We’re wondering what else we can cut that’s not totally essential.
But this is reflective of the fact that our larger systems are out of easy choices.
Perhaps, as a country, we’ve been out of easy choices for a long time?
We are 36 trillion dollars in debt, and it’s not going in the right direction.
While no one likes to tighten their belts, especially when there are so many unknowns and uncertainties, is this economic constriction perhaps the only way to return to a reasonable economy?
Farming has long been the proverbial canary in the coal mine:
Could this economic crisis possibly push us to focus on that which we truly value?
Look, don’t read this wrong, I know constriction is painful.
But for the economy to keep going as it has been, it’s inevitable that it will crash, only we won’t have any control over the timing of it.
Hyperinflation is far more harmful than this kind of constriction.
Why Is This happening?
On the global scale, the world is shifting away from the dollar. BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), and other big economies are developing parallel systems away from the dollar. That means we can no longer export our inflation.
Do you remember back in 2008, right after Obama took office? Congress voted and passed a $700 BILLION bank bailout. This was after the highest number ever of constituent calls and useless emails telling our reps we did not want the bank bailout. We didn’t want our taxpayer money propping up a financial institution that was rife with corruption, fraud, and abuse.
Congressman Ron Paul said let them fail.
He warned that yes, it would be catastrophic and painful, but it will be helpful in the long run.
The economy would recover.
Talking heads chastised him. Congress, of course, didn’t listen.
Are we now perhaps facing part of the consequence Congress kicked down the road?
A False Economy?
No one wants food production to stop. Not the casual American consumer, certainly not the farmers, nor the politicians or bureaucrats. We all need to eat.
As much as any of us don’t like this painful period of adjustment, perhaps it will help put into focus where our system is functioning in a healthy way?
A couple months back, I was talking to a farmer I work with closely. This is one of the hardest working men I know and he won’t sugar coat anything. He tells it straight. The context was discussing why sales were falling for many small, local food producers.
He brought up another smallish, local farm that seemed to be thriving – flashy new vehicles, a new building project every year, polished social media, hiring new people all the time, and much more.
“How are they doing so well?” I asked curiously.
“It’s because of grants” he said.
I’d seen it too. This farm was not shy about bragging about all the grants they got for this or that new project.
“What about the grants?” I prompted, wanting to hear more.
“It creates a false economy,” he went on. It means that other local farms can’t compete since the flashy farm’s prices don’t need to reflect the true costs of things.”
This might seem like a small – or wrong – detail to focus on.
Shouldn’t small, local farms get government grants?
Don’t we want to see our small farms thriving?
Isn’t it better to give grants to small, organic farms that are serving their local economies than for that money to go towards big companies
Wouldn’t we rather fund small farms than the Department of Defense?
Maybe it’s not that simple.
Look, I’m not suggesting that what’s happened is the “right” way of doing it or not. Clearly, it’s all been quite messy and the process with which the spending freeze happened has gutted many hard-working farming families. This is, itself, a tragedy whether or not it prevents a different tragedy. I recognize the desperation and instability that sudden loss causes for our farming communities.
We can all acknowledge the planning and budgeting that went into certain decisions for them only to have promises broken and suddenly be faced with crippling debt. For many farmers, that leaves them in a terrible place of awful choices and no way out. The same can be said for multiple organizations that exist to support small farms.
Staying Grounded: Living Capital and Local Systems
There is a lot of chaos and uncertainty right now.
Federal funding and allocations are complex and twisted. And it is precisely this complexity that begs for us to bring – at least our food systems – back to a local level.
Domestic food production, funding, and governance can be decentralized at least to the states and we can work this out on the state level.
For many of us, one way of dealing with that chaos and uncertainty is focusing on that which we truly do have control over.
How can we do that?
In permaculture, there is a theory of 8 forms of capital that keep systems resilient. Of the 8 forms of capital usually highlighted, living capital is one of them.
I wrote about this about 2 years ago as we faced other economic instabilities.
Living capital is just what it sounds like – living organisms that contribute to the quality or resilience of a system.
A couple of examples of this are livestock, plants, natural streams you have access to, etc. Essentially, it’s everything living and/or reproducing within an ecosystem you have access to.
Living capital naturally replaces itself as it grows and also has built-in limits as things die or ecosystems’ carrying capacities are reached.
As financial capital constricts, it is a great time to seriously look at and evaluate what living capital you and your community have access to and what you can do to grow or ensure that it remains stable.
In a cooperative social system, one might have access to the rivers and streams for fishing, to the forests and meadows for hunting and foraging. In America we have social restrictions on our ability to naturally access some of these resources.
So we can focus on what we have access to and to the farms and farmers leveraging living capital to bring us true value.
We Can All Help Build Food Security
Here are a few great places to start:
Join a CSA – Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) is a structure designed to give farmers security to plan. The payment structure for most CSAs is a seasonal prepayment to give the farm the financial resources to plan for the whole year. It’s still a great tool for them and a way to show true community support for what they are doing.
Privately-funded grants. I know I just told a story about a farmer who sees grants as creating a false economy. I get it. This might be a mild contradiction, but it doesn’t need to be. Sudden changes in funding structures can cause the kinds of instability that lead to sudden, massive disruption. I don’t want that, and none of the farmers I know want that. We want to build a parallel food system because the one we are depending on right now is collapsing. Small, private grants can be just enough to get someone started. But I agree that relying on grants for ongoing operations is not a way to build a sustainable food system.
Grow, produce, forage, fish or hunt any of your own food. Pretty soon, we’re all going to need to know how to produce or process food as our systems fail us. So get started now. Buy seeds, save seeds, learn permaculture, pick up acorns, learn about herbs, volunteer at a farm…. Start anywhere and then learn more.
Donate - if you can - to local, small nonprofits with missions you can support. These are still vital support systems to our local farms and a great way to help increase local food security.
We’ll get through this constriction together and hopefully, have a stronger, more resilient food system as a result of coming together to mend the parts we can.
What a well written and thought out piece. I appreciate the work you put into this post.