Family Farm Defenders

Each year Family Farm Defenders (FFD) is proud to host the John Kinsman Beginning Farmer Food Sovereignty Prize – named in honor of John Kinsman, one of the founders and longtime president of Family Farm Defenders who passed away at the ripe old age of 87 on MLKJ Day, 2014. John was not only an early pioneer of organic grass-based dairying in the Midwest, but was also a tireless champion of civil rights, social justice, and food sovereignty both in the U.S. and around the world.

T o be considered for the prize, nominees must meet the following criteria: engaged in own farm for less than five years; engaged in small scale livestock and/or vegetable and/or fruit production; market products locally; practice sustainable management of natural resources; promote healthy soil; conserve biodiversity; and support food sovereignty principles.

FFD will then send a short application with several questions to all nominees. Board members then review those applications submitted. The final winner(s) receive a cash prize ($2500), as well as public recognition at an award dinner and ceremony held in conjunction with the FFD annual meeting which is usually in early or mid Nov.

If you have someone you would like to nominate for the 2024 John Kinsman Beginning Farmer Food Sovereignty Prize, please send their name and contact info (phone, email, address) to: [email protected] or call: 608-260-0900

You can also make a donation! Each year FFD invites individuals and other supporters to help sponsor the John Kinsman Beginning Farmer Food Sovereignty Prize. All sponsors are given honorable mention in publicity for the award ceremony, and those making a donation of $100 or more can also receive a complimentary ticket to the award banquet, as well as a FFD t-shirt!

We hope that you will consider supporting this unique effort to honor the spirit of John Kinsman, by not only nominating a worthy beginning farmer you may know, but by also providing financial support for this amazing celebration of food sovereignty! For more info: https://familyfarmers.org/

Previous John Kinsman Beginning Farmer Food Sovereignty winners include:

2011: FL Morris of Grassroots Farm, near Monroe, WI, and Daniel and Hannah Miller of Easy Yoke Farm near Millville MN

2012: Nancy and Jeff Kirstein, Good Earth Farm, Lennox SD and Tracy and Dick Vinz, Olden Produce, Ripon, WI

2014: Blain Snipstal of Five Seeds Farm near Sparks, MD and Jed Schenkier and Will Pool of Loud Grade Produce Squad in Chicago, IL

2015: Carsten Thomas from Moorhead, MN and Emmet Fisher and Cella Langer with Oxheart Farm near Mt. Horeb, WI

2016: Donald (Jahi) Ellis from Vidalia, GA and Polly Dalton and Oren Jakobson with Field Notes Farm near Custer, WI

2017 Eduardo Rivera of Sin Fronteras Farm near Stillwater, MN

2018 Tommy and Samantha Enright of Black Rabbit Farm near Amherst, WI and Craig and Lauren Kreutzel of Meadowlark Farm near Wonewoc, WI

2019 Curtis Whittaker of Faith Farms in Gary, IN and Joseph & Abbie Monroe and Caleb & Kelly Fiechter of Valley Spirit Farm in Campbellsburg, KY

2020 Jazmin Martinez, Nadia Sol Ireri Unzueta Carrasco, and Viviana Moreno with Catatumbo Cooperative Farm in Chicago, IL

2021 Tacumba Turner with Oasis Farm & Fishery in Pittsburgh, PA, Jenny Hoople and Raul Casique-Montes with Bountiful Beloit in Beloit, WI and Rachel “Nami” Kimura with Hinata Farms in Chicago, IL

2022 Naima Dhore of Naima’s Farm near Alexandria, MN and Heather Gayton of ZanBria Artisan Farms near Friendship, WI

2023 Hannah Frank and Justin Thomas, Rue de Bungaloo Farm, Athens, WI; Nia Nyamweya, Beauty Blooms Farm, Montgomery County, MD, and the Bad River Food Sovereignty Initiative, Odanah, WI

Factory farms on land and at sea have become breeding grounds for drug-resistant microorganisms.

By: Anthony Pahnke (vice president of Family Farm Defenders and associate professor of international relations at San Francisco State University) and Ryan Horwarth (fisherman and founder of Pacific Cloud Seafoods, based in Buffalo, NY)

Originally published by the Progressive, Aug. 6th, 2024

If you’ve ever caught a fish, you know that keeping hold of them is hard.  

Now imagine taking a syringe and injecting that fish with antibiotics—not just a difficult task, but a strange one. This is exactly what some large-scale fish farms do, along with dumping antibiotics into densely packed pens or mixing drugs into feed. Like concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) on land, industrial fish farms administer antibiotics to stem the outbreak of diseases that fish contract from living in such cramped spaces. 

But solving one problem creates another. Factory farms on land and at sea have become breeding grounds not just for livestock, poultry and fish, but also for drug-resistant microorganisms such as Salmonella and E. coli. The World Health Organization (WHO) has criticized CAFOs for this reason. Some estimate that more than 70 percent of the global supply of  antibiotics are used on animals in these kinds of operations.

This arrangement benefits pharmaceutical companies like Merck, which employs hundreds of lobbyists each year to convince consumers and policymakers that factory farming is a necessity. Its subsidiary, Merck Animal Health, is an officer company of Stronger America Through Seafood, an industry group pushing for the development of intensive finfish aquaculture in U.S. waters, which would export the factory farming model from land to sea.

Despite the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) prohibiting the use of antibiotics to promote animal growth, there was a 12 percent increase in animal antibiotic sales between 2017 and 2022. This development, and, with it, persistent concerns about human health, led Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey, in July to send a letter to the FDA calling on the agency to provide information about its efforts to manage the growing antimicrobial resistance crisis and the overuse of antibiotics in concentrated animal agriculture operations.

The truth is, neither farming nor fishing need to be done this way. We both come from families with farming and fishing traditions centered on treating animals with respect. When you operate on a smaller scale, it’s more feasible to use holistic practices, and you don’t need the same industrial solutions—like intensive antibiotics use—as you do for factory-style food production.

Legislation currently being debated, namely the Improving Agriculture, Research, Cultivation, Timber and Indigenous Commodities (ARCTIC) Act and the Processing Revival and Intrastate Meat Exemption (PRIME) Act, would create opportunities for community-based fishing and farming families like ours to provide high-quality, drug-free food to local markets.     

Both bills include provisions to improve processing, which is often a bottleneck when it comes to keeping food supply chains localized and transparent. The Improving ARCTIC Act creates pilot grant programs to strengthen domestic seafood processing and working waterfront economies in coastal communities. The PRIME Act allows small farmers and ranchers to slaughter and process their livestock at local, custom slaughter facilities. In expanding processing options and infrastructure, both acts allow small-scale food producers to better plug into local markets and get more nutritious local food to consumers. 

Currently, the PRIME Act is in both the House and Senate versions of the Farm Bill. The Improving ARCTIC Act could also find its way into the mega omnibus bill as it meanders through Congress.

Let’s do what we can to keep fish, and other animals, off drugs. An important step in achieving this is to empower traditional and small-scale food producers that have holistic, stewardship-based relationships with the animals, lands and waters they work with. The legislative tools are there, that is if our lawmakers want to care for the health of our shared lands and waters, our food supply and us.  

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These treaties harm both farmers and consumers by squeezing food systems for maximum profit.

by Jim Goodman, board member, Family Farm Defenders, retired organic beef/dairy farmer from Wonewoc, WI

Published by the Progressive, Feb. 21, 2024

Trade agreements are part of a global economy. The United States is party to fourteen international free trade agreements involving twenty countries. Note that they are “free” trade agreements, (which, in theory, are supposed to expand marketing opportunities for producers) not “fair” trade agreements. If they were “fair” trade agreements, producers would be paid a fair price no matter where they live or what they produced. In fact, these agreements do little to increase prices to small scale farmers, or wages for workers, because they do not directly enter the global market. Rather, their work, their production is sold into a consolidated market where the profit is sucked up by the multinational corporations – all at the expense of the people. 

It is no secret that those agreements, negotiated between governments, are heavily influenced by corporate lobbyists to ensure that the regulation of pretty much everything—such as labor, food safety, the environment—will favor corporate profit above all else. And that, in sum, is the problem with free trade: a greater concern for making money than for the wellbeing of people, on both sides of the deal.

Because trade agreements cater to corporations, worker incomes are negatively impacted in both developed and developing nations. That said, the burden of these free trade agreements come to bear most heavily on the world’s poorest inhabitants. Profit comes by keeping wages low, centering pollution and environmental damage in the poorest countries, and by controlling the global food supply.

As noted by economist Joseph Stiglitz, “We could have ensured that globalization benefited all, but corporate greed was just too great.” Pitting workers around the world against each other will, of course, drive wages down—one of the results sought by multinational corporations.

Control of the food supply was another goal, paying farmers as little as possible, managing their market access through consolidation, and selling through highly consolidated consumer markets to ensure maximum profit. Financial speculation in agricultural commodities and land, volatile weather, and people’s inability to determine where and how their food would be grown only exacerbated the problems caused by unfair trade.

“Hunger isn’t caused by a scarcity of food, but a scarcity of democracy,” writes Frances Moore Lappé of the Small Planet Institute.

Did we learn anything from the global food crisis of 2007 and 2008? Apparently not the lessons we should have. When commodity food prices on international markets in some cases doubled, causing food riots and starvation, farmers saw little price increase even as multinational corporations increased their profit margins. Corporate grain and meat processors are more consolidated and still make vast profits at the expense of farmers and consumer choice. Governments still use food as a weapon whether aimed very specifically, as in Gaza, or more broadly in wars and conflicts.

Perhaps rather than allowing those who control global markets to decide who will eat, what they will eat, where their food will be grown, and who will grow it, a different more democratic approach is needed. Food Sovereignty is a concept that allows people to make decisions about their food locally, for their benefit. Under this system, farmers and farm workers are valued for what they grow and the knowledge they pass on, and nature and the environment are respected as the source of life. In defining the concept of Food Sovereignty, economist Raj Patel noted that “People could eat well only if their governments were free to adopt policies that supported domestic production and consumption.”

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Let’s end this foolishness of “feeding the world” a Western diet just because it’s profitable. Give peasant farmers, Indigenous farmers, and farmers of color the ability to farm their own land and feed their own communities. Loss of local control through “land grabs” worldwide holds small farmers and their communities captive in the global food economy.

Similarly, let local fisher folk have access to fishing grounds and the fair market access that is increasingly being denied through “ocean grabbing.” Whether in the Americas or off the Horn of Africa, local fisher folk are denied the right to make a living and feed their communities.

Resistance to corporate domination of food, unfair trade agreements, and efforts to protect food producers and consumers is gaining traction even in the partisan, grid-locked halls of Congress. The ARCTIC Act, introduced by Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, supports Alaska’s farmers, fishers, and local food. And a rare bipartisan effort, mandatory country of origin labeling (MCOOL) sponsored by U.S. Senators John Thune, Republican of South Dakota; Jon Tester, Democrat of Montana; Mike Rounds, Republican of South Dakota; and Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey gives farmers and ranchers the right to use a United States “country of origin” label. Acts like these can begin to give people a connection to their food and those that produce it. People want and need to be part of a community that supports everyone.

Undoubtedly, corporate lobbyists are busily mounting their opposition to both acts because they protect local farmers, ranchers, fishers, and food systems—rather than corporate profit. Officially, Canada and Mexico previously filed disputes against U.S. Country of Origin labels on meat, and no doubt will again. Conversely, U.S. trade negotiators have filed a dispute against Canada for protecting their dairy farmers against U.S. dairy imports, as well as a dispute against Mexico for protecting Mexican farmers and consumers against U.S. imports of genetically modified (GM) corn.

Maybe the United States should stop forcing unwanted dairy into Canada and GM corn into both countries. Then Mexico might let U.S. farmers and ranchers label their meat so consumers could choose U.S.-grown meat. Seems like a win for food producers and consumers in all three countries. 

And all of these measures are permissible within the text of the U.S.- Mexico-Canada trade agreement.