These are tough times for Wisconsin farmers.

Dairy prices are down. And big dairies are making moves to buy from factory farms rather than those operated by Wisconsin families.

Big agri-business is taking advantage of weak enforcement of antitrust laws to consolidate its grip on production.

Trade policies are stacked against Wisconsin farmers and local food processors.

Last week, members of the Wisconsin Farmers Union traveled to Washington to stand with Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders as he and a bipartisan coalition of senators called for legislation to support dairy farmers. Specifically, Sanders is proposing an amendment to the agriculture appropriations bill that would provide $350 million for milk price supports and increased government purchases of surplus dairy products.

The WFU members also lobbied for the Milk Import Tariff Equity Act, which would close a loophole that allows milk protein concentrates to be imported by American dairies in a move that undermines prices for U.S. farmers.

The Farmers Union activists worked with the office of Wisconsin Sen. Herb Kohl, who agreed to pressure the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Department of Justice to examine antitrust abuses by the conglomerates that dominate the dairy products market. They secured the support of Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold, who like Kohl is a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, for the antitrust investigation. And they huddled with Feingold to discuss trade and energy policy issues that concern Wisconsin farmers.

Not bad work.

So what was the Wisconsin Farm Bureau Federation doing?

Griping about a book that is being read by University of Wisconsin students.

The Farm Bureau bureaucracy is all hot and bothered because the UW's Go Big Read program - which seeks to promote a campus-wide discussion about a particular book - selected Michael Pollan's "In Defense of Food" as the text students and faculty will be discussing.

"Pollan has narrow and elitist ideas about how you should eat and how farmers should (or shouldn't) feed a hungry and growing world," argues the federation's president.

Actually, Pollan, whose work has revolutionized the discussion about food and food production in the United States, argues that Americans should eat locally grown foods - especially plants - and should be wary of the claims of "a 32 billion-dollar food-marketing machine" that keeps telling us the best way to eat just happens to be the way that yields the highest profits for multinational corporations.

Pollan - who will deliver the Go Big Read lecture at 7 p.m. Thursday at the Kohl Center and then speak at 10 a.m. Saturday at the Food for Thought Festival off the Capitol Square - also argues that we should "return food to its proper context" by eating breakfast, lunch and dinner at a table with our families and friends rather than wolfing down processed foods in our cars.

The Farm Bureau, with its close ties to big agri-business and that "food-marketing machine," may think this is a narrow and elitist approach.

But it is also an approach that reconnects working farmers with consumers, and that has the potential to both increase income for farm families and create a constituency for farm policies that favor farmers as opposed to multinational agri-business conglomerates.

This is not to say that Pollan is right about everything. It happens that, as one of the few newspapers in the country that consistently take the side of working farmers, we have some differences with Pollan. Much of what he proposes, while appealing in a philosophical sense, is unlikely to be achieved in the short term - or maybe even the long term, since some of us lack the green thumbs to grow the gardens he suggests.

Pollan understands this. He identifies his books as "manifestos." They propose ideas and new ways to think about old issues. His purpose, as he freely admits, is to get people thinking about food and food production.

Pollan recognizes that this is where better policies begin. And he remains remarkably flexible with regard to those policies and the direction of the debate.

Yet the Farm Bureau spin would have us believe that "Pollan's plan would starve much of the world and require the rest to spend more time and money in pursuit of food. In a book littered with unsupportable claims, its conclusion is downright disturbing and immoral."

In fact, the opposite is true.

Bad trade and development policies, which have emphasized enriching multinational import-export firms and speculators rather than working farmers, are currently causing much of the world to starve. Pollan's proposals would restore local production and encourage approaches that provide farmers with better returns for the essential service they provide to their communities and society in general.

Too often, the Farm Bureau leadership in Washington has been on the wrong side of debates about those policies, arguing the free-trade brief of multinational corporations rather than Wisconsin farmers.

Reasonable people can disagree about food and agriculture policy. And there certainly are times when the Farm Bureau gets things right. But the consistency with which it aligns itself with agri-business giants is unsettling.

It is even more unsettling to think that the Farm Bureau bureaucracy's misread of Pollan's book may have less to do with any threat his ideas pose to working farmers than to the "32 billion-dollar food-marketing machine" that the author questions.

No matter what the motivations, no matter whether the misread of "In Defense of Food" is malignant or misguided, the bottom line is that Pollan is not the problem for working farmers. He may, in fact, be a part of the solution. So it is good that his book is being read by UW students and it is great that he is coming to Madison to further the discussion.

It is also great that, while other groups are griping about reading lists, the Wisconsin Farmers Union is keeping its eye on the prize and working to ensure that the interests of working farmers from this state are raised and advanced in Washington.

Add or View Comment

Login to post your comment. If you don't have an account, you may register for one.