John Kinsman was recently interviewed by Daniel Tucker, editor of Farm Together Now, before a packed audience as part of the Rethinking Soup lunch series at the Jane Addams Hull House Museum. Cedar Grove’s Family Farmer Fair Trade Cheese was featured on the menu. You can watch the interview by Daniel Tucker on YouTube at:
For more info on the Jane Addams Hull House Rethinking Soup series, visit:
http://www.uic.edu/jaddams/hull/_programsevents/_kitchen/_rethinkingsoup/rethinkingsoup.html
Posted 10/5/11 on the Center for Media & Democracy’s Food Right Network
This month, the Center for Media and Democracy’s Food new Rights Network launches a series of interviews with “food and farm heroes.” It’s easy for an organization dedicated to exposing corporate spin to focus on negative corporate propaganda with its ubiquity, but we would be remiss not to highlight courageous people who fight corporate agendas and spin in other ways, large and small. Some devote their lives to it.
In the world of food and farming, the contrast between corporate agribusiness “farms” and small, sustainable family farms — farms that, to adapt a phrase of Michael Pollan’s, our grandparents would recognize as food-producing places — is especially clear. Among the farmers who live and work in these places, the CMD’s Food Rights Network is featuring some of the heroes: farmers who are making an incredible difference in the farming community, on our dinner tables and in the world around them.
John Kinsman in his garden, September 15, 2011
The first hero we feature is John Kinsman, a dairy farmer from Lime Ridge, Wisconsin. He is a pioneer of rotational grazing, a strong proponent of small, diversified agricultural operations, and an activist since the 1970s.
To read more and watch the actual interview with John Kinsman, visit:
http://www.foodrightsnetwork.org/2011/10/food-rights-network-interviews-food-farm-hero-john-kinsman/
By: Rebekah Wilce, PR Watch, 9/8/11
Attendees of the Democracy Convention in Madison in late August were treated to panels on a host of different issues, from democratic media to racial inequality. The Center for Media and Democracy was one of the sponsors of the convention, and our own Lisa Graves and Brendan Fischeraddressed democracy activists. At panels on food sovereignty, we heard from a range of experts, including local Wisconsin dairy farmer Jim Goodman, Massachusetts food and farming activist Barbara Clancy and Jim Tarbell of the Alliance for Democracy (publishers of Justice Rising), andRonnie Cummins, leader of the Organic Consumers Association.
At a Friday morning panel on “Using Local Laws to Create Food Sovereignty,” Jim Goodman defined the seven principles of food sovereignty (a term coined by members of Via Campesina, the “International Peasant Movement”) as:
Barbara Clancy described the successful fight for food sovereignty by several towns in Hancock County, Maine. They established local food governance by means of town ordinances. In this county where all the farms are family farms, and all but one sell all of their food in-state at an average of $20,000 of product a year, these farmers succeeded in passing the “Food and Community Self-Governance Ordinance of 2011” in four towns.
Clancy stressed that Maine is a strong home rule state, with a strong tradition of self-reliance and attachment to local traditions and local governance. Residents feared that the federal “Food Safety Modernization Act,” which President Obama signed into law on January 4th, 2011, could shut down cottage producers of jam and pickles made from backyard garden produce and church pot lucks without these local ordinances to protect them.
Towns that were considering or had passed the ordinance received letters from the state agricultural commissioner informing them that “the ordinance is preempted by state law.” But farmers in Hancock County, Clancy said, are prepared to go to court should the ordinances be challenged.
At a Friday afternoon panel entitled “Land and Food vs. Corporate Rights and Dirty Fuels,” Jim Goodman spoke again, accompanied by Jim Tarbell and Ronnie Cummins.
Goodman and Tarbell reminded us that just as the Commons were taken in the Scottish Highland Clearances of the 18th and 19th centuries, corporations are now buying up land in Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia, which was farmed in common and often farmed to produce food for the community, in order to aid corporations’ focusing on selling “biofuels,” like ethanol. According to Tarbell, this “disrupts economies, taking the land away from the traditional landowners and pushing them out into starvation and poverty.”
Tarbell told of a land lease that had been signed in 2008 in South Sudan, immediately prior to independence. Mukaya Payam leaders had supposedly made a deal granting “a 49-year lease of 600,000 hectares of land to US-based firm Nile Trading and Development Inc. . . . For a sum equivalent to around US$25,000, NTD has full rights to exploit all natural resources in the leased land during this period.” However, post-independence, Mukaya Payam leaders, upon becoming aware of the deal signed in their names and for their land, appealed to Members of Parliament and the president of South Sudan, in a letter that stated, according to the Guardian, “We the chiefs, elders, religious leaders and the youth of Mukaya Payam unanimously, with strong terms, condemn, disavow, or deny the land-lease agreement reached on 11 March 2008 between the two parties.” Confirming the power of the people over corporations, President Salva Kiir responded: “This issue has to be addressed according to your will. You are the government and you have powers.”
Ronnie Cummins, National Director of the Organic Consumers Union, discussed the problems of turning food-growing land over to the production of corn for ethanol, which because of inputs, he said, is twice as bad as burning diesel. “Now ethanol-ready corn has been approved by Obama. Even food corporations had urged him not to approve it, because it can get into food supply and has the chemical profile of an allergen. GMO ethanol-ready corn is a sum total of ten percent more efficient than regular corn, so basically, now it will only be 1.9 times as bad as diesel.”
According to Cummins, “the United States is now using forty percent of our GMO, subsidized, energy intensive corn crop for fuel. That’s 4.9 billion bushels, enough to feed 350 million people. But this only amounts to three percent of the total gasoline we use in our cars.
“Scientists tell us we’ll have to reduce fossil fuel use by at least ninety percent by 2050,” he said, but neither corn ethanol nor palm ethanol is an acceptable way to do it. As an alternative, however, Cummins told the story of Vermont organic farmer Will Allen (not to be confused with Wisconsin urban farmer Will Allen ofGrowing Power, Inc.), who grows sunflowers and uses their oil for fuel.
A major difference between these examples is that one is industrial and the other is small-scale. That’s important, Cummins says, because “the number one cause of greenhouse gases in the world (around 35%) is industrialagriculture. . . . But sustainably managed agriculture and forestry lands can sequester carbon and reduce carbon dioxide by fifty parts per million.”
Cummins also brought up the importance of water to the future of food sovereignty by telling the story of Saudi Arabia, which briefly grew all its own wheat and was self-sufficient in that area, until agricultural practices dried up an aquifer and they returned to importing wheat.
In India, Cummins said, the melting of the glaciers threatens the regular availability of glacial meltwater. The headwaters of the rivers that now bring this water seasonally are in Pakistan, threatening, he said, a new war over water, especially as India is currently mining its aquifers. What happens, he asked, when the hundreds of thousands depending on fossil aquifers (non-renewable, “with no appreciable modern recharge and which cannot discharge naturally”) and over-pumped aquifers in India and China run out of water?
Because of unsustainable methods of food production by agricultural corporations, Cummins said, there are tremendous amounts of desertification in Mongolia and China. “Both China and India are economic and ecologic time bombs waiting to explode, and we’re indebted to China. When will they come asking for wheat and other commodities?”
In keeping with the themes of the Democracy Convention, the consensus of these panels was that the solution is to return the growing of food to the realm of real people (not corporate “people”) on small farms and in gardens.
Tools like “Local Food and Community Self-Governance Ordinances” may help some communities fight one-size-fits-all regulations written to advance the bottom line of large corporate food producers and which sometimes criminalize home- and community-scale food producers.
If you grow food on a small scale (in your backyard, on your porch, or at a community garden), you can joinVia Campesina, which “defends small-scale sustainable agriculture as a way to promote social justice and dignity. It strongly opposes corporate driven agriculture and transnational companies that are destroying people and nature.”
The food panels at the Democracy Convention reminded all that the fight for food sovereignty is both local and global.
Update 9/9/11! Several truckloads with over 10 tons of hay have already been delivered to OK and TX, thanks to the generosity of Wisconsin family farmers and Teamster truck drivers, as well as coordination assistance from Farm Aid. More loads are going out this week. Let’s keep the solidarity rolling!
For Immediate Release:
Fri. Aug. 19th, 2011
Contacts:
John Kinsman Family Farm Defenders #608-986-3815
Randy Jasper, Family Farm Defenders #608-553-2203
Joel Morton, Farm Aid #617-354-2922
Lorette Picciano, Rural Coalition #202-628-7160
Willard Tillman, executive director, Oklahoma Black Historical Research Project Farmers Co-op #405-201-6624
Ralph Paige, executive director, Southern Federation of Cooperatives #404-765-0991
Oklahoma is in the grips of its worst drought since the 1920s, and in response Family Farm Defenders, with support from Farm Aid, Rural Coalition, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, and the Southern Federation of Cooperatives, are organizing an emergency Midwest hay lift.
This rapid response mirrors earlier solidarity efforts which delivered over a dozen Wisconsin tractors to Federation farmers in Mississippi and Louisiana following the destruction of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.
Wisconsin farmers were compelled to take action after hearing first hand accounts of parched farmland and starving livestock from their Oklahoma colleagues attending the Farm Aid Concert in Kansas City, KS this last weekend.
“If we can get enough hay to some of these farmers to save their animals it may help to save their farms. Desperation sales of livestock are usually a disaster. In the past farmers from other parts of the country rushed hay shipments to help Midwest farmers suffering from a drought. When other farmers face the prospect of being driven off the land we need to do something in solidarity,” said John Kinsman, president of Family Farm Defenders.
“Oklahoma family farmers, and especially, African American and American Indian producers, are very grateful for the support of the producers of Family Farm Defenders and other groups who have stepped up to save our farms in this time of need,” said Willard Tillman, Executive Director of Oklahoma Black Historical Research Project, who is coordinating distribution in OK in cooperation with Randall Ware of the Kiowa Nation.
Livestock auctions in Oklahoma are being overwhelmed as ranchers get rid of their animals before they starve, and these desperation sales are hurting prices for other livestock producers nationwide. Predictions of depressed crop harvests across the Panhandle are also wreaking havoc in the commodity markets.
Teamster truck drivers are being recruited to deliver the hay to Oklahoma from Wisconsin as soon as tractor-trailer trucks can be secured. Hay and other feed supplies will be delivered to 2620 Coltrane Rd. in Oklahoma City.
Any type of quality hay – small bales or large round/square bales – is welcome. Those wishing to donate hay should contact John Kinsman #608-986-3815 or Randy Jasper #608-553-2203 for the exact time and location for drop off.
Financial contributions are also welcome to support the hay lift effort. Send checks to: Family Farm Defenders, P.O. Box 1772, Madison, WI 53701 with “hay lift” in the memo line. FFD is a registered charitable organization so any gift is also tax deductible.
By: JOHN E. PECK, executive director, Family Farm Defenders
Captimes (Madison, WI) – Sunday, August 14, 2011
Joel Greeno gets up early each morning to milk his 48 cows in the rolling hills near Kendall, Wis. He’s a young farmer by U.S. standards, still in his 40s, with a new baby, a small daughter and a wife who also works off farm to help make ends meet. He’s proud to be his own boss and works hard to preserve his independence, grazing his cows on pasture as much as possible to limit feed costs and rejecting synthetic chemicals and expensive biotechnology that would contaminate his milk and the land.
Like every farmer, Joel worries about the weather. But an even larger force beyond his control that threatens to destroy his life every day is the unprecedented market power of agribusiness and the reckless commodity speculation that occurs behind closed doors.
Just 250 miles southeast of Kendall, a small trading elite also heads to work each day in Chicago — their job: trying to beat the market on everything from soybeans and carbon credits to fertilizer and timber. Founded in 1898 as the Chicago Butter and Egg Board, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) has since grown into the world’s largest privatized trading clearinghouse. In 2002 the CME began issuing its own stock, and by 2007 acquired the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) for $8 billion as one of its designated contract markets (DCMs).
Within a year, the CME Group bought out another rival, the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) for $8.9 billion, and later absorbed the Dow Jones Indexes. By the end of 2008, the CME was posting over $2.5 billion in annual revenue, handling over a billion contracts worth $1,000-plus trillion dollars.
While some bidding is still done by humans in the “pit,” over 70 percent of CME trading is now quietly conducted by algorithms through its Globex electronic platform. Craig Donohue, the current CEO of the CME, took home almost $44 million in compensation over the last five years, which — according to Forbes — places him among the wealthiest 400 Americans.
To make matters worse, not just agriculture commodities, but farm land itself has become the latest “hot” commodity for these speculators. In fact, investments in farm land since the 1970s have yielded higher average returns (12 percent plus) than the S&P 500, which is why hedge fund managers, carbon credit traders, and other financial carpetbaggers are flocking to gobble up farmland in the U.S. and across the globe. According to a June 2011 expose by GRAIN, even U.S. pension funds like TIAA-CREF and CalPERS are now jumping on the land-grabbing bandwagon. The retirement of a rural school teacher will soon depend upon bankrupting the future of the farm kids in their own classroom.
Century-old legislation such as the 1890 Sherman Anti-Trust Act and the 1922 Capper Volstead Act have much to say about racketeering and other unfair market practices, but are seldom enforced in a setting like Chicago. In fact, who has ultimate authority over the CME appears rather murky. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CTFC), the U.S. Dept. of Justice (DoJ) and the Illinois attorney general all have a regulatory finger in this lucrative pie. The CME, though, remains first and foremost a private corporation with its primary interest being to its shareholders — and these shareholders enjoy much political influence within the hallways of Washington, D.C.
According to the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO), on any single day just two traders account for two-thirds of the CME spot market for block cheddar, which accounts for less than 2 percent of the total cheddar cheese output in the U.S. Yet this CME cheddar trading is used by the USDA to determine the fluid milk price for Joel and every other dairy farmer in the country. In economic terms this is a “thin market” and an ideal scenario for profiteering. Within the black box of the CME, the tail literally wags the dog, affecting the lives of billions of farmers and consumers across the globe.
Back in 2008, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission found Dairy Farmers of America (DFA) and its two top CEOs guilty of manipulating U.S. milk prices through the CME cheddar market, and fined them $12 million. And in 2009 the DoJ blocked Deans Food’s buyout of Foremost Farms, arguing it would create a quasi dairy monopoly in Wisconsin and other parts of the upper Midwest. Other ongoing investigations of insider trader shenanigans at the CME have languished in limbo for years.
Which is why last year hundreds of family farmers, consumer advocates and others testified at a series of workshops hosted by the U.S. Dept. of Justice and the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture (USDA), focusing on creeping corporate control of the U.S. food system. Joel Greeno was among those who spoke out against Monsanto’s seed monopoly in Ankeny, Iowa, on March 12, 2010, and again about price rigging by the dairy giants (Deans Food, DFA, Kraft, Land O’Lakes) in Madison on June 25, 2010.
Despite a rising epidemic of farm foreclosures and even some farmer suicides blamed on chronic below cost of production prices, the DoJ and USDA have yet to take any substantive action based upon all the compelling evidence they gathered.
Like the “vulture funds” that have long preyed upon economic crises in poorer countries of the global south, the same predatory financial tactics have now come home to roost in America’s heartland. As long as federal regulators and elected officials remain asleep at the wheel and allow commodity speculators to profit from rigged markets at the CME, the hope of Joel Greeno and many other family farmers for a fair price for their hard work will remain but a cruel daydream.
