How to Save the Small Farmer – and Why We Must

By John Klar, Special to The Kennedy Beacon

The below was first published (in a slightly different form) in the new open policy forum “Policies for the People.” Intended for subject matter specialists, issue-based activists and the everyday American alike, Policies for the People welcomes contributions from people and groups interested in helping to develop tangible government policy solutions. Everyone with policy ideas is encouraged to post and comment. Some of your ideas may be funneled to the Trump transition team (should he win the election), via Robert F. Kennedy Jr.  

Below are some policy solutions to protect farmers and consumers from overbearing government and corporate restrictions on what they can eat, and how that food is made. Such solutions require 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 man-made problems requires a reversal of some 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:

Revisiting the Farm Bill

Since its creation during  the Great Depression (1929 - 1939), the U.S. 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 U.S. 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); and the nation’s SNAP benefit recipients. These are two very different groups of stakeholders with disparate policy goals.

The Farm Bill provides commodity loans and support 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: in one, the needs of farmers ; in another, the needs of SNAP benefit recipients. 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

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.

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 costs 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. 

Such 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 payments to big farms and farmers will reduce federal spending. A small portion of the money saved can be used, instead, to 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. 

Such micro changes can have macro impacts on the food we eat – and therefore our overall health.

To read more of John’s food policy ideas, please go to:  https://forum.policiesforpeople.com/t/food-for-the-people/52

Attorney-turned-farmer John Klar studied literature and political science at the University of Connecticut, and focused on international, tax and environmental law at the University of Connecticut School of Law. He worked as a tax adviser with Coopers & Lybrand (now PriceWaterhouseCoopers) in Hartford, Connecticut and Birmingham, UK before operating a litigation practice in Storrs, Connecticut for seven years. In 1998, John developed persistent and intense muscle pain that eventually became nearly totally disabling. He was diagnosed with chronic fibromyalgia, but only years later realized he suffered from chronic Lyme Disease. He was forced to close his practice and moved with his wife Jacqueline to northeastern Vermont, in 199, where the couple bought a 160-acre former dairy farm and began learning animal husbandry. 

John manages his fibromyalgia with regular (farming) exercise and whole foods. He began writing commentaries for various periodicals, and now writes regularly for Mother Earth News, American Thinker, and Vermont’s True North Reports. 

He’s also author of the book, “Small Town Republic: Why Conservatives Must Embrace Local Agriculture, Reject Climate Alarmism, and Lead an Environmental Revival.”