A Place at the Table

NFU delegates carry family farmer
concerns to Capitol Hill, White House

By Dan Campbell, Editor
USDA Rural Development


tanding at the speakers’ podium of the National Farmers Union (NFU) annual meeting in Washington, D.C., in March, Wes Niederman was helping to herd a blizzard of NFU policy positions toward resolution. It was a day-long example of democracy in action as 600 members (142 of them voting delegates) from around the nation discussed and debated issues that eventually filled 200 pages of policy positions — many of them issues that could have a major impact on the continued viability of family farming.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch (literally) in North Dakota, it was calving time, and Niederman’s family was dealing with a very different kind of blizzard — one that roared down from Canada, dumping 7 inches of snow and driving the mercury to 20 below zero. Luckily, Niederman’s daughter, Myra, and a friend were home for a visit and helped his son Matthew (a recent college graduate) ease all those new-born snouts into the cold world of a North Dakota winter.

As much as Niederman needed to be home to help with calving, he says his work in Washington was just as critical to the future of the family’s wheat and cattle farm. He and the other NFU delegates passed positions dealing with everything from renewable energy and commodity check-off programs to rural healthcare and conservation.

Delegates to the NFU convention also heard from — and got to question — a who’s who of Congressional and Executive Branch leaders, including: Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, House Ag Committee Chairman Collin Peterson, Senate Ag Committee Chairman Tom Harkin and ranking minority member Charles Grassley, and Rep. Rosa DeLauro, who chairs the Agriculture Appropriations Subcommittee

“There are always some in Washington trying to strip money away from farm programs, so a big part of our effort this year is to make sure the [2008] Farm Bill is implemented as passed,” says Niederman.

On any day of the year, farmers and ranchers like Niederman sacrifice precious work time away from their farms in order to attend all manner of ag meetings — ranging from meetings of their local co-op boards, to farm commodity councils and state and national farmers’ associations, such as NFU. They do so, in part, because they know that what happens at the point of a pen in Washington and in their state capitals can do so much to help or hinder the work that they do from the seat of a tractor or in their milking parlors.

Staying off the menu
If there was ever a year when it was opportune to hold the NFU annual meeting in Washington, this was it. With the nation in the grips of the worst economic recession since the 1930s, family farmers must intensify efforts to ensure that their voices are heard in the halls of Congress, says newly elected NFU President Roger Johnson.

“In Washington, if you don’t have a place at the table, you will have a place on the menu,” says Johnson, who is taking the reins at NFU after 12 years as North Dakota agriculture commissioner. He succeeds Tom Buis, who is now working at Growth Energy which promotes biofuels.

Working on Capitol Hill is nothing new for Johnson, who still owns the farm his grandfather started 100 years ago and on which he grew up. As former president of the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture, he is well versed in the realities of the legislative process, and he has also devoted much effort to helping consumers better understand where their food comes from and what it takes to produce it.

The NFU meeting included time for delegates to form teams that visited congressional leaders from their various states to discuss vital farm issues; Johnson and the NFU board of directors did the same with White House officials.

Key to the NFU lobbying blitz was to take those 200 pages of policy positions and boil them down to a page or two of the most pressing issues. High on that list is NFU’s support for a national energy policy calling for 25 percent of the nation’s power to be generated from renewable resources by the year 2025. This translates into support for biofuel and wind power, as well as efforts that promote local ownership of renewable energy in order to keep more of those energy dollars home in rural America.

Another top issue for NFU is support for improved rural healthcare, which Johnson says is essential if rural communities are to hang on to their population and attract new residents. NFU is also advocating for a mandatory “capand- trade” system for carbon credits. The latter position puts NFU at odds with some other major farm groups. But Johnson is convinced NFU is taking the right path.

“Climate change legislation will almost certainly result in farmers having to pay more for energy and fertilizer,” Johnson says. He thinks these higher prices can be offset — and hopefully even become a net gain for farmers — if producers are rewarded with carbon credits for adopting environmentally friendly farming practices, such as notill farming, re-establishing permanent vegetation and adopting advanced grazing techniques.

“This [environmental legislation] is huge, and agriculture must have a place at the table,” Johnson says. The key to earning carbon credits, which farmers could then sell on the carbon-trading market, is to show that farming practices are sufficiently different from standard practices and that there is science showing that these practices result in carbon sequestration.

Farmers aren’t the only ones who can benefit from such policies. Johnson notes that city leaders in Fargo, N.D., are earning revenue by drilling holes at landfills where methane gas (generated from decomposing trash) is compressed and stored, then sold to a foodprocessing plant, which burns the gas for heat. Pound for pound, methane gas is considered to be a far bigger culprit of global warming than carbon, which is one reason interest is growing among dairy farmers in processing methane gas from manure.

Dairy farmers struggling
“I keep reading that rural America hasn’t really been hurt by the economic downturn,” says Niederman. “But that just isn’t true. When the economy went south, our commodity markets went down with them.” And when that happens, virtually all of rural America feels the pain to some extent, he notes.

No one knows that better this year than dairy farmers like Joaquin Contente, a delegate from Hanford, Calif., where he runs a 700-cow dairy farm with his brother. The Contente family has seen its milk check about cut in half during the past year.

“These milk prices are the worst event of my life,” says Contente, who in March was losing about $75,000 per month on his operation. He has been averaging just $9 per hundredweight of milk sold, down from nearly $20 a year ago; he needs $15 just to cover costs. At the same time milk prices were plummeting, he has had to pay record-high prices for the corn fed to his herd while also contending with soaring fuel bills.

While he hasn’t yet seen many farm failures in his area, “many farmers are hovering on the brink,” Contente says. “Younger farmers who are just building their herds and don’t have much equity built up in their farms are especially vulnerable. Many are on the edge.”

What really bothers Contente is that grocery store prices for milk have not shown a similar drop in price to what farmers are experiencing. He thinks a big part of the blame is concentration in the food industry, resulting in everfewer food companies that control more and more of the retail market.

“We have about four huge food companies that end up touching almost all of our milk in one way or another before it reaches the consumer,” he says. “That’s a big part of the problem facing us: the lack of a functioning, truly competitive marketplace due to concentration.”

Contente says he thinks some national farmer associations have become too closely tied to big food companies, and have lost their focus on the farmers they are supposed to be helping. NFU, on the other hand, “is a true, bottom-up farm organization that has only one purpose: to support the causes of family farmers,” he says.

Organic growers
succeed with CSA
Wisconsin member Katrina Becker represents a growing segment of NFU: young organic vegetable and fruit farmers. She and her husband, Tony Schultz, grow 170 different crops on 120 acres on their Stoney Acres Farm near Athens, Wis. — everything from broccoli to raspberries, Jerusalem artichokes and sour cherries. The family also raises grass-fed beef.

They started a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) project three years ago, and this year added a neighboring farmer who provides eggs. So far, the CSA has far exceeded expectations. It started with 72 members the first year, but in just three years has grown to 145 families in nearby communities.

Members pay either $460 or $300 for 20 weekly produce deliveries, the amount depending on their share size. The deliveries begin the first week in June and last until mid-October — with an optional final delivery around Thanksgiving. Members include a community hospital that enrolled in the CSA on behalf of its employees. “We’ve got all the members we can supply right now,” Becker says.

Her goal is to expand the CSA by forming a small co-op with several other farmers — maybe even bringing in some beginning farmers interested in buying land near her farm, where she says farmland is still relatively affordable. Becker would also like to start a processing kitchen where farmers could further process food — producing everything from dairy foods to wine and beer. She also thinks the area has great agri-tourism potential.

Becker and Schultz are the type of business-savvy young farmers that NFU is looking to as the future of family farming. As such, they have been picked as an NFU Enterprise Couple, a program under which NFU provides members with training opportunities to further enhance their abilities as future leaders.

“We were attracted to NFU because of its progressive, pro-family farmer policies, its democratic functioning and the fact that it is very influential in Wisconsin,” Becker says.

A highlight of the trip for her was the time on Capitol Hill visiting the Wisconsin Congressional delegation. “We talked about many issues, such as the need for dairy price supports, concerns about market concentration, our support for conservation programs and the need for more programs that help small farms.”

Growers of vegetable, fruit and other specialty crops qualify for few, if any, federal support programs, she notes. One way to help them is to offer more benefits for those who use conservation practices in their farming.

Despite the success of her family farm, Becker says she is very concerned about the small dairy farmers all around her farm. They have suffered severely with the drop in milk prices. She, too, views concentration in the food industry as one of the major problems facing farmers. Becker questions why “anti-monopoly laws are so toothless, or are not being enforced.”

NFU President Johnson agrees, saying concentration in the food industry has long been a top concern for NFU. “We’ve pushed the Department of Justice to disallow the mergers that have resulted in these huge food conglomerates, but without a lot of success. As we’ve seen with the banking industry during the current financial crisis, no company should ever be allowed to become ‘too big to fail.’ We’re all having to pay for the consequences of that now.”

Of course, one of the most effective tools that can help farmers counteract concentration in the marketplace is through the use of cooperatives. Johnston points out that the roots of NFU are in the cooperative movement, and that the organization has always shown strong support for cooperatives.

“Cooperatives play a big part in NFU. In North Dakota and much of the Midwest, cooperatives formed the foundation that agriculture was founded and built upon,” Johnson says.



Kick-starting the rural economy
with renewable energy

With 200 pages of policy positions adopted during the National Farmers Union annual meeting, most issues important to farmers and rural communities are addressed in one way or another. At the top of the list for many of the delegates is the policy they adopted in support of renewable energy, the concluding portion of which is excerpted below. (The full text of all the policies is online at:
http://nfu.org/about/policy).

“BE IT RESOLVED, National Farmers Union supports the following policies that demonstrate a commitment to expanding renewable energy and creating additional financial opportunities through ecosystems services and markets: THEREFORE BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, in supporting
a national, mandatory carbon emission cap-and-trade system to reduce non-farm greenhouse gas emissions, NFU outlines the following priorities for pending climate change legislation:





May/June Table of Contents