"Farmers" news and stories

Wal-Mart practically had us at hello with their sustainability announcement yesterday, and we weren't alone. News that the retailing behemoth was launching a new global commitment to sustainable agriculture, with a focus on small and medium-sized farmers had blogs and Twitter feeds ablaze.

The announcement wasn't vague. It outlined specific goals that Wal-Mart is committed to reach by 2015. Among them:

* Selling $1 billion in food sourced from 1 million small and medium farmers.
* Asking suppliers about the water, energy, fertilizer and pesticide used per unit of food produced.
* Implementing a requirement for sustainably sourced palm oil for all Wal-Mart private-brand products.
* Sourcing only beef that does not contribute to the deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon.

"Grocery is more than half of Wal-Mart's business," Michael T. Duke, president and chief executive was quoted as saying in The New York Times. "Yet only four of our 39 public sustainability goals address food.

Fred Kirschenmann, distinguished fellow for the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture and president of Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture told Slashfood he met with Mike Duke in Iowa last month while the executive was visiting a farm committed to sustainable practices.

It's time to pack away your romantic image of farmers clad in overalls, perched atop a tractor. Today's agricultural workers and landowners are a modern bunch, and nowhere is that more evident than online, where they're cropping up on Facebook and Twitter in record numbers. These days, farm equipment includes computers, and, by using status updates and clever one-liners, farmers are educating a whole new community about what life is really like on the farm.

A recent example shows the power of their online presence. After an animal rights group released a video on YouTube of dairy cows being punched and prodded with pitchforks, responses were understandably outraged. But farmers fought back, blogging, tweeting, uploading their own videos and defending the industry on Facebook.

"There is so much negative publicity out there, and no one was getting our message out," Ray Prock Jr., a second-generation Central California dairy farmer, told the Associated Press. Prock halted a family vacation to log on and respond to the cow abuse video.

Sunday afternoon, midwesterners packed a small independent movie theater in Kansas City, Mo., for a screening of the new documentary "Fresh," which takes a close and at times disturbing look at factory farming in the United States. Along with its director, Ana Sofia Joanes, "Fresh" (click the trailer above) is wending its way across the country in the hopes, Joanes said at a panel discussion between two sold-out screenings, of "changing the misconception that we need the industrial food system." This isn't the first new anti-Big Farming flick to hit the silver screen, so we're calling a trend.

"Fresh" follows the lives of four farm families, including a Missouri hog farmer who exterminated his industrial stock after being gored by one of his hogs and doctors found that he was resistant to most antibiotics. Michael Pollan and John E. Ikerd, Professor Emeritus of Agricultural Economics at the University of Missouri, make cameos as talking heads.

The real star, however, may be the swoon-worthy (if you like the rugged type) sustainable Virginia farmer Joel Salatin, who has the vocabulary of a professor and no shame about embracing "the chickenness" of his hens when greeting them with a "Good morning, girls!" each day.

Farmers everywhere are being squeezed by high production costs and low prices for their products. Even malting barley farmers in Ireland are being hit, but they're trying to do something about it.

The Irish farmers, about 400 of them, converged on the famous Guinness brewery in Dublin to protest their situation. The farmers want the brewer to do more to support the industry (which I suppose means supporting higher grain prices?). However, Guinness maintains that they get their grain from an agricultural supplier and has little say in the prices the farmers are paid.

A company spokesperson says that the beer maker also has to do what it can to compete with other beverage choices in a poor global economy. I feel bad for Guinness being caught in the middle. They won't have the grain they need if all the farmers go under, but they also prefer the lower grain prices to keep their own prices down. What do you think about the situation.

We've all heard about CSAs - Community-Supported Agriculture - and many of us have participated in CSA programs in our towns. Essentially, you fork over some cash (usually from $500 to $800), and each month, you get a bounty of whatever fruits and veggies are in season, courtesy of a locally-owned farm.

For some people, the boxes of produce are as close to they get to the farm, though they can feel secure in knowing that they're supporting their local farmers and not supporting grocery store-sold produce. Other CSA participants go a step further and purchase a small piece of the actual farm, which they visit and keep up themselves.

My question: why is the New York Times just now learning about this? A recent article on CSAs calls it "a loose but growing network," making it sound as if they just stumbled upon the movement yesterday. Really? I have friends who have been participating in these programs for years. Perhaps it's just new in more rural areas?

In the meantime, I will continue to enjoy locally-grown veggies, and go back to my love/hate relationship with the Times.