“The farm bill is making kids sick.” That is according to Ann Cooper, the visionary chef whose former clients include the Grateful Dead and Hillary Clinton. Ann is now the director of nutrition services for the Berkeley Unified School District, and gets up at 3:30 every morning to prepare healthy food to school lunches. She also says that the USDA is not interested in feeding kids healthy foods—they just want people to consume commodities.

Since the Dust Bowl and Great Depression, every five years or so Congress passes a Byzantine, omnibus piece of legislation generically referred to as the farm bill. Even though tens of billions of dollars are paid out annually, most people have little or no awareness of how it affects them, their families, their health, rural America, rural Mexico, the environment and a host of other things. Michael Pollan suggests that the farm bill be renamed the “food bill” so that the general citizenry will make those connections.

50 percent of farm bill funds go toward reducing hunger through food stamps, WIC coupons, etc. 33 percent of the funds go to farm subsidies, the most controversial aspect of the farm bill. Growers of commodities like corn, cotton, rice, wheat, soy are provided payments by the government, which, once upon a time, were initiated to keep farmers on their land, but are now unjustified payouts that are rife with abuse and come with devastating consequences.

Subsidy payments, which total around 11 billion dollars annually, encourage overproduction, which drives prices down. Take corn, for example: Cheap corn is feedstock for cows. Cheap feed discourages pasturing cows, and encourages concentrated feedlot operations (CAFOs).

Pastured cows produce healthier animals whose and meat and milk contain higher levels of omega 3, less cholesterol, higher quality protein, and a stronger resistance to
E.coli: 157:H7. Grazing cows naturally spread their manure over a large area, supporting the fertility cycle of the pasture.

CAFOs can have up to hundreds of thousands of cows densely confined, essentially living in their own waste, concentrating manure to toxic levels, which leach into waterways—creating a pathway for contaminating downstream irrigated crops like spinach with E.coli:157:H7. Conditions in CAFOs create health problems and accelerate the transmission of disease from one animal to the rest to the herd. The industrial agricultural response to this self-inflicted problem is to treat the animals sub-therapeutically with antibiotics, a method that has been linked to antibiotic resistance.

Cheap corn has also led to the development of the highly industrial product (I hesitate to call it a food) high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), which is now the ubiquitous sweetener of choice by food producers because it’s cheaper than refined sugar. Research shows that HFCS creates a more extreme imbalanced insulin response than even that of refined white sugar, and because HFCS is so poorly metabolized by the human body, it fuels the obesity and diabetes crisis.

Which brings us back to Ann Cooper’s statement that the farm bill is making kids sick. The Center for Disease Control (CDC) statistics back up her protest. According to the CDC, one third of all Caucasian kids and half the Black and Latino kids born in the year 2000 or later will be obese and /or have diabetes before they graduate from high school. That same group is the first generation in American history to have a shorter life expectancy than their parents.

Subsidy payments benefit the few, further concentrating land and wealth. According to Ken Cook of the Environmental Working Group, 10 percent of the farm subsidy recipients receive 72 percent of the funds. As beneficiaries of such largesse, agribusiness is able to consolidate its grasp on the status quo by spending $100 million on lobbyists each year to convince Congress to keep the program going.

A December 21, 2006 Washington Post article, “Federal Subsidies Turn Farms Into Big Business” said, “The very policies touted by Congress as a way to save small family farms are instead helping to accelerate their demise, economists, analysts and farmers say. That's because owners of large farms receive the largest share of government subsidies. They often use the money to acquire more land, pushing aside small and medium-size farms as well as young farmers starting out.”

Organic agriculture only recently has begun to receive but a pittance of any farm bill money (not in the form of crop subsidies). For the most part subsidy payments reward some of the most environmentally destructive farming practices: high mechanization, extensive chemical use and genetically engineered crops. Industrial agricultural runoff, predominately from the Midwest cornbelt into the Mississippi River, drains to the Gulf of Mexico and has created an 18,000 square kilometer seasonal hypoxic zone that does not support marine life.

In the 1990’s NAFTA, which opened the door to cheap subsidized American corn, put 1.5 million Mexican farmers out of business. Every hour 60 Mexican men, women and children leave their homeland to migrate north looking for work.

All this is what our tax dollars are buying in the form of farm subsidies. The farm bill does have provisions that support conservation practices on farmlands, but often they are woefully under-funded. The economic resource of the farm bill could be an enormous asset supporting ecologically minded, innovative farmers, rural communities and healthy food for schools. If you agree with Michael Pollan that the “Food Bill” affects all of us, now is the time to let Congress know.