Entrenched farming practices

“There’s been just an entrenched interest on the ag committee,” says Hamerschlag. “It’s a very small number of people in Congress that are defining our agricultural policy, and they sit on the House and the Senate ag committees, and they are completely in the pocket of Big Ag and commodity producers.” It’s the pharmaceutical and agrichemical companies—the makers of pesticides and GMO seeds—and interest groups representing large-scale commodity growers that are exerting this influence, she says.

Hamerschlag points to a much-needed shift in subsidies. Fruit and vegetable farmers (growers of what the USDA tellingly refers to as “specialty crops”) receive a small fraction of the subsidies given to the big commodities, she says. It’s an imbalance that maintains an unhealthy status quo for both land and humans.

The government assistance these specialty producers seek is in the form of research and promotion, says Hamerschlag. “Promotion is what’s really important if we want people to eat half a plate of fruits and vegetables. We need to really support the marketing of that.”

“It’s just really hard to break outside the norm,” says Myer when asked why change is slow to come. “I don’t want to say it’s easier to grow corn; it’s not that simple. I just think the system is so complicated it makes it hard for people to experiment and try different things on their own.”

Local infrastructure is part of it. If there’s no market represented at the local grain elevator, farmers must take their goods elsewhere or, as Myer did, create their own market: through farmers’ markets and buy-by-the-box programs. Myer’s latest focus is to build her wholesale network.

Crop insurance is also set up to serve the big commodities. It’s based on acreage, which is irrelevant for a farm like Myer’s—not just because it’s small, but because it’s diverse. “When I’ve looked into it, it’s usually like: ‘How many acres of carrots are you going to grow?’ ‘How many acres of bell peppers are you going to grow?’ But it’s not acres when you’re working at this scale. I’m going to have 200 pounds of carrots and 500 pounds of sweet potatoes. So, there is no system set up that translates to this type of production. Everything is created for corn and soybeans.”

And yet, such diversity is crucial, not just for our diet, but for the sustainability of our agricultural system. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that only 30 of the approximately 7,000 edible plant species feed the world, with just three—corn, wheat and rice—providing some 60 percent of global calories from plants. Although this increases industrial efficiencies, such minimizing of genetic diversity leaves the entire agricultural system less resilient to pest and disease pressures in a changing climate.

But it’s not just what we grow that’s ripe for improvement. It’s how we grow it. “We also need to support sustainable agriculture, right?” says Hamerschlag. “Like the healthy, organic, pesticide-free, ecologically sound crop production practices. Not only are we subsidizing the wrong kind of crops, we’re also subsidizing the wrong kind of crop production system.”

With the growing popularity of organic products and the emergence of farmers like Myer, surely a shift is brewing. “No, not at all,” Hamerschlag corrects with urgency. “Not in the policy arena.” The House Farm Bill went backward, she says, and the Senate’s is pretty much status quo. “There is no paradigm shift going on at the policy level.”

Hamerschlag does see change at the consumer level, however. “It does certainly seem like at the market level there is a shift, and that’s the hopeful part,” she says. She’s also hopeful on the access front, listing college campuses, airports and K-12 schools as providing more healthful options. “I’m hopeful that it’s coming through market change that there’s growth in healthy eating. But we’d sure get there faster if we could have the policy side of things catch up.”