No electronic or mechanical reproduction of the Farm and Food File is permitted without direct consent of the author. Farm and Food File for the week beginning Sunday, May 5, 2013 Planting a seed The first good corn planting day of spring finally arrived at my central Illinois farmette April 30. Like the month’s previous 29 days, however, no one within 100 miles used it to plant because near-record rains had washed April away. So now it’s May and it’s late by any corn planting standard. On the big southern Illinois dairy farm of my youth we sometimes finished planting corn in June but we always started in April. Those long ago planting seasons—all seasons, in fact—always marched to a two-step tune: the very predictable, twice-a-day milking of 100 Holsteins and the very unpredictable rise and fall of the nearby Mississippi River. The river was in God’s hands; the cows in ours. That meant the acres planted any day were limited to the acres Dad could “work”—field cultivate while applying a pre-plant herbicide—ahead of the planter between morning and evening milkings and at night. It wasn’t much, usually 50 acres most days and maybe 60 in a big day and long night. Jackie, the farm’s loyal hired man, was the planter jockey. He worked 6 am to 6 pm six days a week without fail. He had no watch because he couldn’t tell time but he did have three times—starting time, quitting time and dinner time—programmed into his DNA and, like him, it never failed The Oliver 77 he drove was nearly as faithful. Gas-powered with both hydraulics and a PTO, it was his go-to tractor for planting, manure spreading, baling, and pulling grain and silage wagons. It ran like the watch Jackie didn’t own. The planter, an Oliver of mid-1960s vintage, was very different. It was the worst piece of engineered iron ever sold to anyone. It never completed one round—be it a quarter mile, a half mile or, like most of our fields, one mile—in a corn field without some minor or major breakdown. If, by some miracle, its chattering collection of ground-driven chains and rotating planter plates held together long enough to actually plant six rows up and back, Jackie, a world class cusser, could be seen on his knees in the middle of the headland praising the miracle. Oh, the miracle wasn’t on the level of Lourdes or Knock; it was bigger. The planter stuck around as long as Jackie and my brothers and me. Since my father never ran it he seemed to overlook the fact that its main design feature was failure. To him, most of the planter’s failures were operator failures: we were going too fast or too slow; the ground was too wet or too dry; we wore our caps too low. Huh? The planter’s final spring came in 1978. That cold, wet, forsaken season I planted every kernel, row and acre with that forsaken planter. But I was more then the corn planter that year; I also was the planter monitor. Four or five times every round I climbed off the tractor to check every sprocket, chain and planter box to make certain it could make it another 400 or so yards. If reassured, I’d climb back on the tractor and off I’d go. For another 400 yards. Then I’d stop, climb down and check it all again. Often on my way back to the tractor I’d smack the implement’s tongue with a hammer just to let it know I still was alert. Late that winter, I took a freezer full of food, a new interest in writing and the lovely Catherine back to the Big U and off to a different future. A couple of months later, my father, threatened with the prospect of planting corn with a machine he had fixed—and everyone else had cussed—daily for 15 years, traded the planter for a six-row John Deere MaxEmerge with a Dickey-john monitor. Had he made the swap in 1978 I might have stayed. Wait a minute, you don’t think… © 2013 ag comm Farm and Food File for the week beginning Sunday, April 28, 2013 SNAP bites back Two of the greatest ironies of living in the richest, strongest nation in the history of the world are how many poor people remain in 21st century America and how vulnerable—as the Boston bombings showed again—we are to evildoers. The two are not linked. Evil is evil and it has no cure. Poverty, and its key byproduct, hunger, however, can be addressed through private and public assistance. The hand-outs are intended to be hand-ups, bridges over troubled times to better educations, better jobs, better housing, better medical care, better food, better lives. The U.S. Department of Agriculture manages the federal government’s biggest helping hand, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, formerly known as Food Stamps. In Fiscal Year 2011, according the Congressional Budget Office, SNAP doled out $78 billion—double the program’s funding in 2008—to one in seven Americans. Two-thirds of that growth can be attributed to one fact: A decade ago, only 50 percent of those eligible for SNAP even applied; today it’s 75 percent and climbing. A second cause is the still-felt 2008 economic downturn. SNAP is a young/old program; 45 percent of recipients in 2011 (the latest data) were under age 18 and 9 percent were over age 60. Moreover, only 12 percent of all SNAP households received “welfare” payments of any kind and the average household income of SNAP families was just 60 percent of the 2011 national poverty standard, or about $9,100 per year. (Read more at http://www.farmandfoodfile.com) Big as SNAP is, its average benefits are small. In 2011 the average SNAP benefit per household was just $281 a month. Forty-one percent of all SNAP households received the maximum family benefit of $668 per month while 8 percent received the smallest, just $16 per month. Despite its growth and growing impact, both the Senate and House versions of the 2012 Farm Bill proposed cuts to SNAP; $16.5 billion over 10 years in the House bill, $4.5 billion over the same period in the Senate bill. Since neither bill became law, both chambers will, again, attempt Farm Bills in 2013. The House version, kept entirely under wraps by its Republican chairman, Oklahoman Frank Lucas, is to be unveiled May 15. News reports suggest House Majority Leader Eric Cantor is pinching Lucas for reforms. Cantor wants “workfare,” SNAP benefits tied to work and jobs. Cantor’s reasons are purely political. He sees a link between food aid and work as an enticement to conservative House members to vote for any Farm Bill. Maybe, but it puts House Ag Boss Lucas in a tough spot for several reasons. First, the biggest reason any Farm Bill passes any House any year is because urban district members vote for SNAP. Any changes to basic SNAP rules—and workfare is an enormous change—would draw the nays of this majority and, likely, sink any House Farm Bill. Second, SNAP is a huge economic driver at the local level. According to USDA, “Every $5 in SNAP generates $9.20 for the local economy.” This nearly two-to-one bang for every buck is behind strong—and growing—local support for SNAP even in the reddest of red states. In fact, many communities see SNAP as one of the biggest jobs and sales tax generator they have. And, better yet, both come courtesy of Washington, D.C. Third, farmers and ranchers benefit, too. According to most food assistance experts, 10- to 11-cents of every SNAP dollar flows directly to U.S. farm income. As such, cuts to food aid will cut farm sales and profits. And, finally, SNAP cuts in the proposed 2012 Farm Bills were so small relative to overall spending that when each was re-examined by the Congressional Budget Office this past March the forecasted savings virtually disappeared. They were meaningless—except to the poor and hungry. All should make full funding for SNAP a snap for farmers, ranchers and Congress. © 2013 ag comm Food and Farm File for the week beginning Sunday, April 21, 2013 Paying for a loser Chicago Cubs baseball fans and American cow-calf ranchers have two things in common. First, they can’t win for losing and, second, they pay heavily for the right to do just that. For example, on April 15, Tom Ricketts, chairman of the Cubs, announced plans to update the 99-year-old home of the team, Wrigley Field. The $500 million renovation includes a new hotel, “more extended beer sales,” and a 6,000-sq.-ft. scoreboard above Wrigley’s hallowed centerfield bleachers. “If this plan is approved,” boasted Ricketts, “we will win the World Series for our city.” Given the plan—to spend a half billion bucks on beer and bricks and not one cent on anyone who can actually play baseball—it’s no surprise that the Cubs have not won a World Series since 1908, have not played in a Series since World War II and, just 13 games into the 2013 season, wallow five games under .500. The Cubs of the cowboy set are cow-calf folks, the broad base of the $67 billion cattle sector. These folks pull calves in February blizzards, make hay in July heat and fight feedlot owners for a fair price every day. And every time they move a feeder or stocker animal off the ranch they get nicked a $1-per-head by the beef checkoff, the now 27-year-old, non-refundable federal program that has spent upwards of $1.7 billion to research and promote beef. Trouble is cowboys don’t sell beef; they sell calves, animals that will be fed for slaughter (almost always) by someone else. Meatpackers don’t pay the checkoff but do sell beef. Any value delivered after a generation of checkoff “investment” by ranchers and feeders on new products or new markets goes directly to their pockets, not cowboy saddlebags. The cowboys know it. That’s why more than 96 percent of ‘em choose not to join the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, the meatpacker-heavy group that has been awarded about $1.3 billion of all checkoff money since 1986. NCBA claims to be the “national trade association representing U.S. cattle producers,” yet its own membership numbers, if believed, show just “28,000 individual members” out of an American cowboy universe that tops 700,000. This Big Beef Club is one of those unique, two-faced organizations you see only in American agriculture. While it cannot exist without—by law—the apolitical, $50 million or so of beef checkoff money it receives each year, 82.5 percent of its operating budget, it is purely a political organization known on Capitol Hill and state capitals for its sledge hammer lobbying. Those lobbying efforts extend to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, too. On April 3, USDA released overdue results of its years-in-the-making “Oversight of the Beef Research and Promotions Board’s Activities.” The review, claimed the report from USDA’s Office of Inspector General, proved that the checkoff “complied with legislation.” That’s a remarkable statement in light of the following admission just six pages later: “We found that AMS”—USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service, the oversight agency for all 20 federal commodity checkoffs—“had not developed its management procedures to adequately make determinations that the beef checkoff funds were collected, distributed, and expended in accordance with the Act and Order and to ensure transparency.” In fact, it’s worse than that: After nearly 27 years and $1.7 billion, AMS has never audited the beef checkoff to see if the producer money was collected and spent in “accordance” to the law to “ensure transparency.” Not even your church’s Sunday School leader gets that kind of pass. So how does USDA know that NCBA complied with checkoff law if it never audited NCBA’s books? Why do cattlemen continue to support a program that sends part of their hard-earned income to a political organization far more in tune with packers than producers? Why did 2.9 million fans pay to go to Wrigley Field last year to watch one of baseball’s legendary bad teams lose 101 out of 162 games? It’s a mystery—although that last one, I’m guessin’, might have something to do with beer. © 2013 ag comm http://www.farmandfoodfile.comhttp://www.farmandfoodfile.comshapeimage_2_link_0

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