by Georgina Gustin • ggustin@post-dispatch.com

4 October 2009
St. Louis Post-Dispatch

St. Louis - Farm Aid, the longest-running benefit concert in the country, calls it the "good food" movement.

But by any name, the growing American appetite for locally raised food has conferred upon farmers a kind of celebrity status - or, at least, placed them at the center of the American conversation about food.

"As the good food movement was emerging, we began to see that we could show people that family farmers are the people who provide that food," said Glenda Yoder, an associate director with Farm Aid. "We could bring attention to farms."

That attention, organizers hope, will help Farm Aid in its mission to keep family farmers on their land - and, in the process, reshape the American food system.

Farm Aid was founded in 1985 when Willie Nelson banded together with Neil Young, John Mellencamp and Bob Dylan to help farmers who were losing their farms and livelihoods in the farming crisis of that decade. For the first time, St. Louis will host the event, which begins this afternoon at the Verizon Wireless Amphitheater.

The inaugural Farm Aid concert was held in Champaign, Ill., drawing 80,000 and raising nearly $7 million to help farmers stay afloat and feed their families. Since then, the Farm Aid organization has been working to keep the plight of farmers in the public eye.

"It did a lot to raise consciousness about agriculture," said Pat Westhoff, a director with the Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute at the University of Missouri. "It's still doing that even today."

And today, Farm Aid organizers say, the biggest threat to the independence of many family farms is the corporate consolidation that arose with so-called factory farming in the decade that followed the farm crisis of the 1980s. According to a 2007 U.S. Department of Agriculture report, large-scale and nonfamily farms dominate American agriculture, accounting for 75 percent of the value of production.

"We've seen a further concentration of production in many farming enterprises, especially over the last 20 years," Westhoff explained. "More production is happening on fewer farms."

That trend is continuing to push farmers with mid-sized operations out of farming, Farm Aid and other farm advocates say.

"Big companies will expand, while independents go out of business," said Rhonda Perry, of the Missouri Rural Crisis Center, a farm and rural advocacy group.

Farm Aid and its funded groups are pushing for changes in regulations and policies that will help them achieve a larger goal - set up regional food systems that would allow local farmers to reach consumers more directly. Such systems are essential, food and farm advocates say, for the "good food" movement to reach more people.

In that effort, Farm Aid and the groups it funds are pushing the U.S. Department of Agriculture to enforce antitrust laws that would prevent meat packers from controlling the supply of beef and, ultimately, the price ranchers are paid for their cattle. They also are calling for the federal government to stop giving direct loans to new and expanding large-scale factory poultry and hog farms. And they're calling for the government to set a price floor for milk so dairy farmers, coping with a decline in demand and high production costs, can survive.

"You can't have regional food systems if you don't address consolidation issues," said Mary Hendrickson, a professor of rural sociology at the University of Missouri. "Farm Aid is interesting because they're working on credit issues, structural issues, and they're trying to encourage regional food systems at the same time."

A regional food system would, in theory, mean rearranging or partly replacing an infrastructure that's been geared to a global, industrialized system. Some areas of the country have successfully established them.

"We need to start looking at the next level, the next horizon," said Walker Claridge, who farms near Columbia and sells his products at the Maplewood Farmer's Market. "That's getting our state and Department of Agriculture to set up systems that help local farmers move stuff around in an efficient way."

Missouri, for example, has more farms - roughly 108,000 - than any other state but Texas, so there's ample capacity. (Illinois has more than 76,000 farms.)

"We're not interested in every farm being five acres and selling at their local market," Perry explained. "We already have a base of family farms. We're interested in ways the traditional family farm can increase the production of high quality, affordable, healthy food directly to local markets."

The vast majority of the 2.3 million farms in the country are called "family farms," according to the Department of Agriculture. But many of those would not fit Farm Aid's definition of a family farm: an operation managed and owned by a family, or person, who has control over management decisions. Many family farmers have lost that control, the organization says.

"We know that because of the system of consolidation and agricultural policies, they're pushed into certain practices," Yoder explained.

Yoder and other advocates acknowledge that a network of regional food systems has limitations, and they don't support a wholesale replacement of the status quo. But, they believe, empowering family farmers would return some balance to a system that's gotten lopsided.

"We're already reliant on a global food system," Claridge said. "What we need to do is work to have a good equilibrium, so that we're producing commodities on a large scale, and small farmers can produce within a region."

Claridge will be attending his eighth consecutive Farm Aid concert today. Two benefit dinners, a festival in Tower Grove park, a farm policy forum, and today's concert-based booths and food stands, are rounding out the Farm Aid weekend.

"I'm so excited that instead of talking about what's going on in other regions of the country, now it's Missouri and St. Louis and Illinois' turn," he said. "We've gotten too far away from who grows our food and where it comes from. ... Every year in the places where Farm Aid has been you start to see change."