Policy solutions to protect farmers and consumers from overbearing government and corporate restrictions on what they can eat, and how that food is made. Redesigning America’s nutritional guidelines away from highly-processed, corporatized food, towards natural, clean food, while protecting the freedom to choose.
For decades, small and mid-sized family farms have disappeared from the rural American landscape and economy, replaced by ever larger farms and food processors that consolidate food production into industrial factory systems. Cheap, plentiful, ultra-processed foods conceal the true human, animal, and environmental costs of this profit-driven transition.
The solution to these manmade problems requires a reversal of some of these commercial consolidations by relaxing onerous regulations that disproportionately burden smaller operators, and phasing out government subsidies that have favored large centralized industrial agricultural methods and operations at the expense of sustainable, widely dispersed local farms. A sensible list of policies that will improve food nutrition, productivity, and profitability for farmers and consumers alike will include:
The Farm Bill
Since its creation in the Great Depression, the US Farm Bill has swollen into an enormous juggernaut of funding and provisions. Originally crafted to connect farmers suffering from declining commodity prices with citizens starving during economic decline, the agricultural industry has changed dramatically over the past century. The Farm Bill has become an albatross to effective and responsive agricultural policy, dragging the nation in its wake. Current US farming policy is functioning under an extension of the 2018 Farm Bill; it does not appear that an updated Farm Bill will be legislated in 2024.
The chief reason for this damaging delay is that the Farm Bill includes too many provisions regarding too many players, and that there are really two teams – farmers and food assistance beneficiaries. For any revised Farm Bill to be enacted, it must craft consensus among the nation’s affected farmers (who have very different needs and business models, which also vary geographically and by crop), then dovetail that with provisions concerning the nation’s SNAP benefit recipients. These are two very different groups of stakeholders with very disparate policy goals.
The Farm Bill provides commodity loans and supports to farmers, and nutrition subsidies for low-income Americans. About 20% of funding under the Farm Bill goes to farmers: about 76% is allocated for nutrition: and 95% of that comprises SNAP benefits. Farms are facing unique inflationary pressures that impact food prices and thus the efficacy of SNAP Benefits: farms must be separately regulated to respond to such economic and market realities.
The Farm Bill should be split into separate pieces of legislation for congressional consideration: the needs of farmers in one; those of food benefits in another. This will greatly improve political efficiency and effective implementation of policy for both groups – there will be no need for legislators to swap farming policies or funding as a political trade-off for food distribution or other provisions unrelated to the best needs of the nation’s agricultural production.
Changing Laws to Help Farms
Regulations. Numerous federal and state regulations purporting to improve public safety have shuttered small farms and processors. It is not beneficial to Americans’ health and safety if there are only a handful of meat processors in the nation, or if local food production is slowly strangled as dependence on faraway, even foreign-grown (and less regulated) foods increases. Small businesses often cannot afford to comply with the high compliance costs that serve as a glass ceiling protecting the largest market players, whose ever-escalating economies of scale pose greater health risks and should be subjected to closer regulatory scrutiny.
Commodity Support Payments Through loans, price supports, and crop insurance, the federal government doles out billions of taxpayer dollars annually to the nation’s largest farming enterprises. These dollars are unavailable to small businesses, skewing food production toward larger, often more environmentally destructive industrial operations. Abruptly ceasing these payments would inflict unfair harm on many farmers and seed market anxiety and disruption. However, many of these subsidies are for environmentally deleterious, chemical-dependent monoculture crops, which have been unfairly favored by government subsidies for decades.
As of February 2024, the 2018 Farm Bill cost American taxpayers $1.4 trillion. Farms received $22.6 billion in payments in 2019 alone. The highest amount of agricultural subsidies – well above $6 billion annually – go to corn, soybean, and sugar production. These three industries all employ industrial farming methods of methodical application of glyphosate, synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides to the nation’s farmlands. These processes not only taint the foods American children eat, but pollute drinking water, kill soil microbes, increase erosion, and deplete soil and food nutrients. They are also the three crops most damaging to human health after processing into syrups, hydrogenated fats, and food additives.
Paring down these payments will reduce federal spending; a mere portion of the money saved can be used to instead subsidize regenerative agriculture, pilot studies of nutrition and soils, opioid recovery models connected to agriculture, improved educational materials for schools, improved nutritional content in public school meals and public assistance food purchasing.
Sugar Subsidies
There is longstanding contention over the inequitable distribution of billions of US taxpayer dollars each year to sugar producers, while archaic domestic protections and import restrictions drive up US food prices: currently, Americans pay more than twice the world price for the sugar the federal government subsidizes through the Farm Bill. High sugar prices have influenced many food producers, including soft drink makers Pepsi and Coke, to replace sugar with more harmful but less expensive (and highly subsidized) high fructose corn syrup.
Taxing consumers for the “sin” of eating sugary foods adds hypocritical government insult to regulatorily-inflicted injury. Reducing sugar subsidies and relaxing border restrictions will lower the price of sugar while releasing funds to support farming and processing of other crops or food products or to fund increased incentives for healthier food options for SNAP benefit recipients.
Our nation’s sugarcane and sugar processing policies are grossly overdue for sensible review and revision. This will reduce costs for a widely used food input cost, relieving food inflation pressures for many industries, while equitably improving health outcomes. The important effort to reform US sugar policy has been underway for many years. A useful model to consider how some of these policies can be productively updated is contained in the (unenacted) Sugar Policy Modernization Act of 2017.
Areas of Future Investment
By simply diverting some taxpayer dollars currently spent unwisely on practices that amplify short-term corporate profits at the expense of human and soil health, the agricultural system – and bureaucratically dizzying farming legislation – can be employed to heal what it has in the past inflicted. Money saved from subsidization of destructive agricultural practices can instead be invested for better food outcomes, including:
– exempting small farms and producers from regulatory strictures or subjecting them to less intrusive regs.
– a commission to fully consider whether glyphosate, atrazine, and other controversial chemicals should be more closely regulated in US agriculture.
– federal policies or funding to prioritize fresh, local food provision for public schools, prisons, military personnel, statehouses, and other public outlets. The SNAP Program is a useful vehicle to encourage and assist states to improve the connection of local producers with schools and other consumers. Low-income recipients can be incentivized to purchase healthy food options such as fruits and vegetables and buy directly from local farmers at farmstands and farmers’ markets.
– NSLP The National School Lunch Program is a rubber-meets-the-road opportunity to fund and equip school cafeterias to improve health outcomes for children by offering healthier meal choices that they want to eat, educating our youth, and shaping their eating habits for life.
– Addiction-related agricultural systems can be easily funded and built upon once proven successful. Pilot programs to house substance abusers in facilities where they learn to eat fresh food, how to farm various plants or animals, and then sell these products directly to the community have already proven how much more successful these therapeutic farming pathways are than essentially confining those in addiction recovery in boarding houses. These facilities can produce fresh, organic foods for local markets to subsidize recovery costs while contributing to local community health and economic activity, but also destigmatize addiction and substance abuse treatment facilities. Successful graduates can go on to start or work at a farm.
– improved distribution systems and labeling for certified organic small-scale producers. Consumers find it challenging to discern which foods are safe versus those that are harmful. Studies show low-income, inner-city households often buy fewer fruits and vegetables for fear of chemical residues: improved labeling and education will help all Americans shop more wisely and health consciously.
– increased funding for research of regenerative and organic agricultural processes and improvements, especially toward soil health and reduced chemical applications
– increased funding for composting education and facilities, reducing organic landfill waste while increasing compost availability at cost for agricultural and residential uses.
– providing more educational resources for Americans regarding food health. Consumers are confused and yet easily educated. The more people are educated, the better decisions they can make. The government warns about cigarettes, and we have active shooter drills in schools – how about active toxic food drills? The government should be involved in educating people about healthy food, having spent nearly a century serving processed food companies to deceive them. This is low-cost and effective: America needs a new, true food pyramid and materials that help consumers know what is healthy rather than labels and messaging designed to accomplish the opposite.
– phase out ethanol subsidies. The current US ethanol scheme pushes high-erosion sloped and sandy soils into corn production. It is environmentally destructive; far more damaging to the ecosystem than is justified by purported savings in fossil fuel usage energy usage. Cheap, highly subsidized corn supports the continued manufacture of unhealthy, high-fructose corn syrup and unnatural hydrogenated fats.
– FDA must be held to higher human health standards when evaluating food flavorings, additives, preservatives, and hormones that are fed to our nation’s young, often with little or insufficient evidence of safety. America must craft a way to either bolster existing regulatory oversight of certain substances, ban some individual substances outright (glyphosate?), or help people avoid them using subsidies (for non-toxic options), education, labeling, etc.
– increase funding for the Specialty Crops Program, to incentivize agricultural production and marketing of more nutritious fruit and vegetable crops in lieu of grains and corn, and possibly to fund organic crops – particularly crops heavy in chemical residues (such as listed annually in the Dirty Dozen, including many popular berry crops).
– a government database to inform the public about specific food processes, ingredient risks, what products to avoid, preservatives and their threats, endocrine disruptors, packaging risks, and the risks of take-out food (known to contain higher amounts of phthalates than home-cooked meals). Increased public education about the importance of breastfeeding, physical exercise, and practical ways to save money while improving health outcomes (such as preparing trustworthy baby foods at home rather than buying processed offerings) will reduce healthcare costs and disease. Helping consumers make wise decisions rather than making those decisions for them equips Americans to protect themselves.
– pilot programs to investigate utilizing agricultural education or farming environments as therapeutic interventions for children with special needs, including children born with drug or alcohol-related syndromes, autistic children, and trauma victims.
– school program modules educating children about food toxins, nutrition, what foods are healthiest, and how to avoid chemicals in food and packaging. It is easier to start kids right than reverse established bad habits. This also reverses corporate America’s incessant barrage of young children with food advertisements for junk cereals, etc. Class modules in civics, home economics, and related practical knowledge will educate children already embroiled in a “buyer beware” war with food sellers. Children must learn about soils and their connection to human health, basic farming, where there food comes from, and how to prepare and store it safely. Children are eager to learn these life skills, and often take this knowledge home to parents also struggling to figure out what is best for their dinner table.
Legislation to be Monitored
Current bills to support are listed here. New legislation that will support these plans to improve health and access to nutritious local food will be crafted and tracked here. Americans must become more knowledgeable about their food, but also become involved in legislation that so directly impacts its health, freshness, and future availability.