The Fruit Growers News - November 2002

Family farms and rural communities need allies to reverse the policy and market biases leading to their demise.

Recently, Iowa’s Leopold Center and the New York-based Glynwood Center convened representatives of a diverse set of organizations to discuss an alliance to sustain mid-size farms.

Non-farm groups came with a general view that the industrialization of agriculture is not good for their concerns. But many seemed reluctant to sign up for saving family farms or rural communities for their own sake.

They wanted other concerns directly addressed - environment, open space preservation, historic preservation, local food systems, and humane treatment of animals.

We need non-farm allies to overcome the market power and political influence of corporate agriculture. To get them, we must offer something in return.

The American public gets cheap and abundant food from the current system. But the American people want more than cheap food. They have other concerns about how food is produced. By addressing those concerns, family farmers can gain new political allies and an edge in the market.

It won’t be easy. For many farmers and ranchers, it will require taking a different perspective toward the critics of agriculture. Instead of a defensive reaction, we must take the marketer’s perspective that says “the customer is always right.” By doing a better job than corporate farmers in giving the public (our customers) what they want do, family farms can gain an advantage.

In markets, we can build new cooperatives to secure premium prices for food produced in ways consumers support. In the political arena, we can build powerful alliances in support of legislative packages that strengthen family farms and rural communities as they address non-farm concerns.

The first step to building powerful new alliances with the suburban and urban majority is to get us organized within rural America. We can build strong alliances that reflect the interests of family-size farms and rural people only if we bring enough people power to the table to make us valued partners and give us leverage. In politics, an alliance would need a strong rural presence to have credibility among the representatives from rural states and districts that dominate the congressional agriculture committees.

The potential impact of such an alliance should not be underestimated. As family farm decline deepens, the American public is demanding more of what family farms have to offer. That presents an opportunity waiting to be tapped.

Editor’s Note: Chuck Hassebrook is the executive director of The Center for Rural Affairs, Walthill, Neb. For more information contact (402) 846-5428, www.cfra. org, or chuckh@cfra.org.