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National Family Farm Coalition 
Tue Jan 12, 2010 at 12:25:58 PM PST
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Check out this article by John Nichols in The Nation. http://www.thenation.com/doc/2...
Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, Iowa's leading farm organization, and urban organization, has been recognized as Most Valuable Grassroots Advocacy Group. Iowa CCI is a member of the National Family Farm Coalition. It has done a great job of bringing inner city urban folks together with farmers. I've heard farmers say things like, the next time you're fighting a drug pusher in your neighborhood, (an issue they discussed,) I'll come and help!
Iowa CCI has also taken this into Chicago's National People's Action (NPA), where large actions urban/rural actions in DC, (and recently in Chicago) have brought these two groups together to go after USDA (ie. Sec. Veneman) as well as urban and combo problem leaders (ie. Karl Rove, Newt Gingrich)
Also, historical family farm icon, Mark Ritchie, founder of IATP, won (for his newer role as Minnesota Secretary of State,) Most Valuable State Official.
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Mon Dec 14, 2009 at 08:54:46 AM PST
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Often when non-farmers speak out about agriculture, we get painted as "anti-farmer." I've been outspoken about my dislike of concentration in the seed industry (and, for that matter, a number of industries in the agricultural sector) and I want to share a press release (below) with you from a number of farmer groups who are also upset about seed industry concentration and the resulting higher prices for the seeds they have to buy. The Farmer to Farmer Campaign on a Genetic Engineering has just put out a report on the subject called Out of Hand: Farmers face the consequences of a consolidated seed industry.
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Sat Dec 05, 2009 at 21:57:28 PM PST
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This past week, Obama held a forum on jobs and economic growth, and he included Ben Burkett, President of the National Family Farm Coalition, Mississippi farmer and director of the Mississippi Assn of Cooperatives, and Rhonda Perry of the Missouri Rural Crisis Center and Rural Coalition among the invitees. You can find a full transcript of the event at the link, or a statement made by the National Family Farm Coalition below.
I am very glad that family farmers were represented in the jobs summit because I believe that increasing the number of farmers is not only vital to helping with our nation's high unemployment, but it's also vital to fixing the problems in our food system. It's not possible to feed our country without increasing the number of farmers - unless you either import food or use destructive production methods and produce unhealthy foods (all of which we are doing). Increasing the number of farmers (and decreasing the size of farms) would also do quite a bit to revitalize the economy in rural areas.
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Thu Apr 16, 2009 at 21:09:42 PM PDT
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Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved, recently gave a talk about the global food crisis at the 2009 Ecological Farming Conference. Raj is not someone I've met, nor have I read his book. Reading his (paraphrased) words from his recent talk (entitled "Food, Financial Stability and Democracy in Crisis") makes me think that he's someone I should pay more attention to. (I received notes on the talk from Ethan G and I'd like to say a big thanks to him for the time he took typing everything out.)
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Sun Feb 01, 2009 at 10:00:00 AM PST
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Dairy farmers are hurting right now. Hurting bad. My first hint was jgoodman's diary Hard Times in Rural America. Then Tom Laskawy wrote a wonderfully titled piece called Stop Making Milk or the Cow Gets It:
For those who need a handy case study on the insanity of our agricultural subsidy system, I give you the dairy industry's solution to falling prices caused by a "milk glut": kill the cows.
No joke. A dairy cow "retirement" program almost went through in the House stimulus bill - but the beef industry freaked out at the thought of what that might do to beef prices. Laskawy further explains the dairy oversupply problem as follows:
Cows aren't assembly line robots who can be switched off when their output isn't selling. They need to be milked every day. So when you have a subsidy regime that tends to encourage over-expansion when times are good (to cash in on high prices) and over-production when times are bad (through payments that offset losses and provide an incentive for farmers to attempt to recoup as much as possible), you apparently discover that the only exit runs through the slaughterhouse.
I'd add that it's not ONLY an issue of too much milk - it's also an issue of the use of cheap milk substitutes, namely MPC (milk protein concentrate), which lower demand for the real thing.
More below...
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