How deep would the pain and anger have to be for an Iowa farmer in 1985 to shoot and kill his wife, neighbor and banker before turning a gun on himself, asked Tom Vilsack, a former U.S. secretary of agriculture.
“That’s where I start,” Vilsack, also a former two-term Iowa governor, said of gauging the emotional impact of the 1980s Farm Crisis as he thinks about solutions for current U.S. farming struggles.
Then-U.S. Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz, addressing farmers during the 1970s, the decade before the Farm Crisis calamity, told them they needed to “get big or get out.”
The philosophy Butz voiced has created an ag system where large U.S. farms — about 10% of the 1.9 million total operations — get roughly 85% of the nation’s net cash farm income, Vilsack said. And given their size, large farms also receive about 75% of federal government support payments, he said.
But Vilsack, now CEO of the World Food Prize Foundation in Des Moines, said the nation needs to rethink the long-term trend of farm consolidation and to provide safety net programs that better support small and midsized farmers.
The current system leaves about 90% of U.S. farmers sharing 15% of the remaining net cash farm income, he said. And about half those growers don’t make money and must rely on off-farm income to support their families, he said.
Large farms are important to feeding the world population, he said. But helping small and mid-sized farmers improve profits is key to reversing the deterioration of rural America, suffering from the continued loss of people, businesses and jobs, he said.
It’s also important to the nation’s defense, Vilsack said. While about 16% of the U.S. population is rural, that segment provides 40% of the U.S. military service members, he said.
“If food security is national security,” then maintaining rural populations is key to “maintaining our volunteer military,” he said.
His proposal includes a “small-farmer farm bill” to help growers adopt initiatives that can boost on-farm income, like capturing biogas from livestock operations to power vehicles, or growing grain or meat with conservation or animal welfare practices that consumers will pay more to support.
It was part of the approach the Biden administration took with its climate smart agriculture initiative, he said, but “we did it primarily for environmental reasons… and not as a strategy for helping smaller farms survive more profitably.”
He sees the small-farmer farm bill as “de-risking” new approaches as well as providing the technical expertise producers may need. And it can be an alternative to the nation’s broad farm bill, last approved in 2018 and extended three times.
Here are some other possible solutions.
Iowa, U.S. corn growers want E15, ultra-low-carbon fuel access
Iowa leaders and the National Corn Growers Association want Congress to give consumers year-round access to gasoline with 15% ethanol, called E15. The product is now taken off the market during the summer in some U.S. regions because of concerns it could add to smog. That leaves the more universally used 10% ethanol blend, E10, as the only year-round choice, though the Trump administration has granted a temporary waiver allowing year-round E15 sales.
Ethanol advocates say the science behind the restrictions is outdated and estimate the higher ethanol blend would generate $14 billion more annually for corn growers and $7 billion more for ethanol producers. That would be good news for Iowa, the nation’s largest corn and ethanol producer. The E15 blend also is cheaper than other fuels for consumers.
But the groups acknowledge its wider year-round availability would be a temporary solution to increasing yields and production. The world is turning increasingly to electric vehicles, even if the Trump administration has slowed that shift in the U.S. for now with measures that include ending tax credits for EV purchases.
The groups are encouraging the Trump administration to enact rules that would enable low-carbon ethanol and biodiesel to be used to make sustainable aviation and marine fuel — qualifying them for a share of lucrative federal tax credits.
Farm leaders urge repealing tariffs, renewing U.S.-Canada-Mexico trade agreement
Saying national leaders do not “fully grasp the depth of the current farm crisis” producers face, a bipartisan group of about 30 farm, business and commodity group leaders sent a letter to members of Congress in February making several recommendations, including:
Ag startups seek streamlining of process that can be a ‘slog’
Former seed executive Paul Schickler sees ag-related startups helping farmers and rural America find long-term prosperity.
Schickler was the president of DuPont Pioneer, the large seed operation in Johnston that’s now part of Corteva Agriscience. He is working with seven companies whose products, he said, “solve problems” and create more money for U.S. farmers.
For example, ZeaKal, based in San Diego, has developed technology to improve plant photosynthesis, boosting the oil and protein in soybeans. “It’s great technology,” Schickler said.
But it’s taken the company seven years to find a seed company to use the technology, a distributor that will sell the seed to farmers, suppliers and agronomists who will work with farmers to take advantage of it and a buyer who will feed the harvested soybeans to its chickens, paying a premium because it will reduce the oil needed to feed the birds.
The company is now ramping up seed production for planting across 100,000 acres next year in the Delmarva Peninsula.
“That demonstrates the hill we have to climb… it’s been a slog,” Schickler said, adding that the company is working on creating a similar system in Iowa for corn.
“Startups are great at science… great at driving innovation,” he said, but the path to bringing ag products to market needs to be streamlined.
“We want to bring innovation to rural American so we can improve the value of crop production,” he said.
Donnelle Eller covers agriculture, the environment and energy for the Register. Reach her at deller@registermedia.com.
This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: Streamlining, ‘small-farmer farm bill’ among ideas to boost ag profits
Reporting by Donnelle Eller, Des Moines Register / Des Moines Register
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