As America’s Industrial Ag. megalith continues to pump out lousy food and toxic chemicals into our bodies, the natural response to use local farming is growing like there’s no tomorrow.

From a USA Today news article here.

“The “local” movement — buying and eating food produced locally rather than shipped from thousands of miles away — has been gaining steam with the steady growth of farmers markets and a phenomenon called community-supported agriculture. CSA members purchase shares of a farmer’s crop for the season. The government doesn’t track the numbers, but Local Harvest, a nationwide directory of small farms, farmers markets and other local food sources, estimates that tens of thousands of American families belong to CSAs, and supply trails demand. The number registered with Local Harvest alone indicates how quickly CSAs have multiplied over the past decade: The directory’s listing has increased from 374 farms in 2000 to 3,660 today.”

Additionally, the Farmer’s Market phenomenon where urban areas set up local farm bazaars, normally once a week, is also growing.  From the USDA this:

Historically, in the worst of our times strong leadership not only acknowledges the difficulties, they also talk of the opportunities.  Leaders who constantly and consistently remind the public of hope, of opportunities, can energize their citizens against unexpected setbacks. 

President Obama, whose last book was called “The Audacity of Hope,” needs to return to exactly what got him the Presidency.  It’s time he again remind America of hope, and of the tremendous opportunities before us now more than ever before.

With all the mis-steps in the economy right now, it may sound counter-intuitive to talk up hope and opportunities.  The truth is it’s not only the right thing to do, it’s a no-lose position politically.

The financial meltdown and severe recession, the British Petroleum deep water oil rig disaster, the nasty and divisive health care reform fight and other problems have pushed politicians into endless rounds of finger pointing and negativity.   No one talks of opportunity.  Hope has been banned to the locker room.

Now is precisely the time to talk of opportunities.  But where, exactly, should Obama focus these positive attitudes?

In a word, jobs.  Not just jobs for next Friday, but long term jobs that will pay well and be sustainable.  The nice reality is that there are many opportunities to accomplish these goals.  And most citizens understand these things don’t happen overnight.   This realization, if the discussion turns to hope and opportunity, helps take some pressure off the next election.  Adults understand that gratification may need to be postponed in order to make the big gains.  

It’s not just about “me,” and it’s not just about “now.”

So get back to talking about them.  Use some of the setbacks as foils to highlight hope and opportunity.  We can be cleaning up an accidental oil volcano and Wall Street while spotting the opportunities and working on them.  They aren’t mutually exclusive.  In fact, cleaning up the oil volcano and Wall Street are part and parcel of understanding where the opportunities are.

The oil accident can shed a spotlight on the sustainable energy opportunities.  It is a perfect foil for explaining how America can free itself from such disasters, and along the way create entire new industries.  Industries that leverage America’s world leading technology to create corporate profits, livable wages and stability. 

A bank system that is out of control blows up with tremendous negative consequences for an economy.  This everyone understands all too well.  Reining in speculation and unethical behaviour makes the markets more transparent and reduces volatility.  And most importantly, stability reduces the cost of doing business.  Uncertainty is very expensive.

What’s a Wall Street cleanup a foil for?  It’s a foil for returning the focus to investment in the opportunities instead of just casino like speculation.  A nation not distracted by turbulent financial markets is one that can better identify where the next generation of growth is likely to come from.

What about the deficits?  Where’s the opportunity there?  The opportunity is jobs.  If American leverages its natural optimism and identifies the opportunities, then the new jobs and wage gains will eliminate the deficits.  Having smarter government spending helps, but the main dynamic that balances budgets comes from innovation and job creation.

And above all it’s not about tax cuts.  It’s about new jobs.  Businesses don’t go out and buy new equipment and hire new workers because the government gives them a tax credit.  They buy new equipment and hire more people because there are new opportunities.

At bottom, this is why the focus on opportunity needs to be kept front and center, particularly when politics seems all about a lack of hope and no one seems capable of looking for opportunity.  

Whether it’s tackling new energy industries, or building new railroads, or building new cars, or improving our farm system to produce better food, just asserting we have all this work to do and we’d better get about it will be a self fulfilling prophecy.  

Time to stop whining.  Time to get back to work.  Talk about the opportunities, Mr. President.  People are forgetting how many are right in front of us.

No one can confidently predict future events but everyone can confidently predict how to prepare for future events.

For example, we know that anywhere from 82 to 93 cents of our food dollar goes to marketing and distribution, leaving 7 to 18 cents for the farmer.  We also know that energy cost increases impact the food industry just like any other industry.

In the food industry we know that the processing part is most vulnerable to energy cost increases, seven times more vulnerable than the farmer himself.  Consuming fewer processed foods would make overall food costs less vulnerable to energy price increases, in other words.

We also know that many foods travel thousands of miles going from the farm to the consumer.  Shorter supply chains, therefore, would diminish the impact of energy price hikes.  One way to shorten supply chains is to encourage local farming, particularly if the farming can be located around urban areas.

Producing synthetic fertilizers is energy intensive.  Using compost or other natural means of fertilizing soil would reduce negative impacts on food prices caused by rising energy prices. 

Shorter supply lines, less use of synthetic fertilizers, less consumption of processed foods:  What this describes is organic farming.  Which as it happens is currently the fastest growing segment of the food industry.

The primary argument against organic farming is that conventional farming is more efficient–that larger farms, larger processing facilities, more use of fertilizers and other artificial inputs like growth hormones, produces more food in total at less cost. 

Two points here.  The first involves this article’s first sentence and its emphasis on preparedness.  Smaller, more plentiful and diverse farms, whether purely organic or not, may be a food system more resilient against unforeseen shocks.  Industry models built on the traditional manufacturing definition of “efficiency” through mass production may be wringing out the food system’s ability to survive unforeseen, negative shocks.

The second point involves recent research that directly challenges the claim that the industrial model is more efficient, even when using the classic efficiency metrics that don’t consider the costs incurred by unforeseen negative shocks.  Studies are showing that modern organic farming techniques have increased production efficiencies that, with many base grains and other foods, surpass those of conventional farms.

The question is are there government policies that can encourage a more diverse farming system, one more resilient to unforeseen shocks, and be efficient too?  And would it be wise to experiment with these types of policies, even if there aren’t any shocks, unforeseen or not?

Why not?  We already do this for conventional, monoculture farming.  Right now we subsidize corn farming to the tune of between $4-$7 billion per year.  From the measurement of increasing production, this subsidy has been wildly successful.  Because of the subsidy, corn production is at historic highs, surging even when the farmers aren’t making money.

Why not do the same thing for organic farming?  If such a subsidy has a similar impact on organic farming that it has had on corn farming, could that be considered a bad result?

Would it be a bad thing to have more nutritious, diverse, non processed foods produced by more numerous, smaller farms closer to consumers?  Of course not.  It would be a tremendously good thing.

That we don’t do this as a country shows that we have not yet learned, despite a number of unforeseen shocks to our economic system, the value of preparedness.  In economics the price of not being prepared is called a “tail risk.”  The most recent meltdown of our financial system was a classic example of underestimating not only the probability of unforeseen shocks, but of underestimating the damage of such shocks.  As a result the nation lost trillions in wealth and millions of jobs.

If you think that was bad, consider the impact if the meltdown had come in the food industry.  We may not be able to predict the future, but we can understand the impact of an unforeseen negative event and be prepared.

So subsidize organic farming.  We need a more resilient food system than we have now.  We need to be better prepared.

In 1900 diabetes was rare.  A doctor could spend an entire career and not come across diabetes.

A century later in the US there are 24 million people with diabetes and another 56 million or so who are pre-diabetic.  Americans spend an estimated $116 billion annually treating diabetes.   Although it’s not currently believed that diabetes is infectious, the startling rise in the number of people with it has risen to the levels normally associated with pandemics.   Houston, we have a problem.

There are two basic types of diabetes.  Type 1, called juvenile diabetes, commonly shows up in young people and happens suddenly.  One day you seem to be fine, the next day you’re thirsty and peeing all the time and you go to the doctor and find out you have Type 1 diabetes.  And you have it for life.

Type 1 is labeled as an auto-immune disease.  Your body suddenly decides pancreas cells that manufacture insulin are bad and attacks them.  Human beings can’t survive without insulin.  Diet and insulin regimes are used to control the problem, but to date there’s no real “cure.”

Type 2 usually appears later in life, is associated strongly with being overweight but unlike Type 1, Type 2, if identified early, can be slowed or even reversed by lifestyle and diet changes.

While there are important distinctions between Type 1 and Type 2, there are themes common to both.

Take the environment.  Not just the flora and fauna around us, but our personal environments.

Compare the lifestyle we lived for the hundred thousand years, or so, before we started farming. For most of our existence, we’ve been hunter gatherers.  Back then we exercised regularly, what with having to run around to hunt and gather.  That means we were outside more than we are today.  It means babies were fed their mother’s milk.  And it means we ate food unpolluted by man made artificial fertilizers, pesticides, anti-biotics and growth hormones.  

So let’s visit this list of differences and see if they might be, as the police are fond of saying, “persons of interest” in a crime.

Take the exercise and outdoor exposure we got as hunter gatherers and compare it with our existence today.  Many of us spend the vast majority of our day indoors under artificial light.  Low Vitamin D levels are strongly associated with diabetes.  Exposure to natural sunlight is what creates Vitamin D in humans. Someone who lives in Maine is more likely to have diabetes than someone living in Florida.  Globally, diabetes is found at much higher levels in northern, temperate climes compared to those found in equatorial regions.

People who regularly exercise burn off more calories and tend to have more muscle than those who don’t.   Type 2 diabetes is strongly associated with being overweight and physical inactivity.  Measure your waist size at your belly button level.  If it is equal to half or more of your height (in other words you’ve got a “pooch”) your chances of developing Type 2 increases dramatically.

Consider our diets today versus the diet we had when we spent time outdoors hunting and gathering.  Back then there were no processed foods and very little sugar and salt added.  No Dunkin Donuts or Cheetos or processed foods of any kind back then.  Processed foods invariably are packed with sugar and sugar creates huge spikes in insulin levels.  They are also packed with fats, many of these fats long identified as being unhealthy.  What they don’t have is fiber and fiber is known to be necessary for good health.

Back then there were no man made fertilizers in the food we ate.  No man made growth hormones.  No man made pesticides to ingest.  For more than a hundred thousand years of our evolution as humans, we didn’t eat any of these things.  And genetically, we’re still the same humans today as we were then.

So who do we take a good hard look at, other than ourselves, for consuming all this stuff our bodies never had to deal with until very, very recently?  Who are the enablers?  The “people of interest?”

That would be government, by its policies, and the food industry.  Our government, as just one example, spends anywhere from $4-$7 billion per year subsidizing corn.  As a result of that we have corn coming out the whazoo.  Problem is, corn is starchy and high in sugar.  There are many, many other vegetables far more healthy for us than corn.

But corn it is, our government has decided.  With the subsidy it’s cheap and in America as elsewhere price is everything.  So our cattle are fed corn instead of what cattle are supposed to eat, which is grass.  That makes them fat and unhealthy.  But cheap.  So we Americans consume cheap beef that’s unhealthy for us because corn is cheap because the government has decided it should be thus.  And it’s not just the fat.  We end up feeding the cattle growth hormones so we can slaughter them earlier.  And we end up pumping them full of anti-biotics because we force them to eat corn, which makes them sick.   And we have slaughterhouse factories where these poor beasts live, literally, shoulder to shoulder hock deep in their own excrement until the day they are marched to their slaughter.

If you want some more about corn (including the massive use of high fructose corn syrup in just about everything you can find on your supermarket shelves) and how its subsidy has warped our farm system and our food supply, you can type in “corn subsidies” in the web search box to your right.

Interestingly, young people who grow larger, faster, are statistically more likely to develop Type 1 disease.  One can only wonder if there’s a connection to all the hormones we now eat (chicken also get hormones because, just like cattle, we can fatten them up quicker that way) and rapid growth among some young adults.  They are getting a good dose of growth hormones because of what they eat. 

Another concern is that our environments, paradoxically, may be too clean.  This, some think, may cause our immune systems to weaken.  Also, mother’s milk contains plenty of immune enhancing ingredients.  So breast feed your kids and when they’re old enough, make sure they get a lot of outdoor exercise and nibble a few mud pies.  And while you’re breast feeding them, lay off the packaged foods and industrial ag produced meats.  If you must eat meat, buy pasture fed beef, free range chicken and wild caught fish.  What the mother eats gets pumped into the baby, whether it’s still attached to the umbilical cord or the mother’s teat to feed.

Oh, and while we’re on the subject of cows, let’s consider dairy.  Don’t do dairy.  It’s thought that infant baby formula using milk tinkers with the child’s developing immune system.  And a number of nutritional experts recommend everyone reduce their dairy intake.   If you want to see previous posts about the problem with cows and dairy, just type ”dairy” in the search box.

If you want a quick article listing the five suspects in creating our diabetes pandemic, you can go here.  If you want a book length discussion of the diabetic pandemic, read Dan Hurley’s “Diabetes Rising: How A Rare Disease Became A Modern Pandemic, And What To Do About It.”

And if you want to start eating healthier, both for yourself and for your children, know beforehand it’s going to be tough to do in America.  Almost everything on your local supermarket shelf is supercharged with high fructose corn syrup and fat and contains pesticide residues both inside and out.  And all the meats are laced with fat, growth hormones, and anti-biotics.

Fast food eating is definitely out.  You might as well take up smoking and heavy drinking instead. 

If you have a health food supermarket nearby, such as Whole Foods or Trader Joes, you’re halfway home.  But you still need to more carefully plan your meals, and for most of us who’ve grown up the past 40 years or so, that’s a lifestyle change all by itself.

And get some outdoor excercise, particularly if you live in a northern clime where clouds are more common than sun.

The good news is that if you even do half of this, your chances of developing Type 2 are lessened dramatically.  And if you’re pre-diabetic, you can actually reverse the development.

Finally, contact your Congressperson and tell them to end the corn subsidy.  Subsidize healthy foods instead.

Unemployment is about 9.7% (15 million people) and when you add underemployment it’s close to 17%.  Every one’s wringing their hands about this sorry state of the economy and scratching their heads about what to do to create more jobs:  Especially jobs that pay a living wage–the most disturbing statistic about our economy is that 47% of people who do have jobs, don’t make enough to pay, net, income taxes.

Conclusion: We need more jobs that pay better.

It’s easy to identify where we don’t need more jobs.  We don’t need more low paying hamburger flippers, for example.  We don’t need more low paying service jobs, such as maids for hotels. Adding WalMart greeters isn’t the answer either.  We have plenty of those already and they make up a good proportion of those 47% of working Americans who don’t make enough to pay any income taxes.

We’re not likely to get much relief from residential construction because that market has collapsed and traditionally recovery there takes five to ten years.  Commercial construction is smaller, but has been hard hit as well.  And like residential construction, it will take years for commercial construction to recover.

The simple truth is that the manufacturing sector and related suppliers in mining, technology, and transportation are where the better paying jobs exist.  The purchasers of what manufacturing produces also include many jobs that pay well.

Unfortunately, government policies for domestic manufacturers encourage exports–including the export of capital investment overseas.  Many manufacturers have closed domestic plants and relocated them, along with the jobs they represent, to foreign soil.   There are estimates that the NAFTA agreement alone has resulted in the loss of more than 600,000 well paying domestic manufacturing jobs.

To make matters worse, because of these policies the US imports more goods and services than it exports.  ”The U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, through the Department of Commerce, announced today that total February exports of $143.2 billion and imports of $182.9 billion resulted in a goods and services deficit of $39.7 billion, up from $37.0 billion in January, revised.  February exports were $0.3 billion more than January exports of $142.9 billion.  February imports were $3.0 billion more than January imports of $179.8 billion.”

Obviously, there are two basic components in domestic manufacturing that need to be addressed in order to boost the economy by boosting more domestic manufacturing.  One is to boost export manufacturing while holding down imports.  Two is to boost manufacturing for products consumed in the US. 

In both cases, smart government policies combined with smart subsidies, focused tax incentives, and smarter trade policies and enforcement can accomplish the goal of increasing the number of well paying jobs for Americans.

Start with domestic manufacturing aimed at domestic markets.  We all realize we need to build up domestic energy capabilities.  That’s smart policy.  The most promising area appears to be natural gas.  Supplies are plentiful, and new drilling techniques have actually dropped the cost of natural gas.  Government tax subsidies to this industry will create jobs immediately.   Not only in the natural gas production and delivery industries, but also in the industries that use natural gas such as utilities and transportation.

We don’t need any more subsidies for Big Oil (we do $14 billion in annual subsidies currently), but allowing that industry new domestic opportunities for exploration and drilling would provide high paying jobs.  Nuclear energy falls into this category, as well.

But in the long run it’s the sustainable energy industries that will have the greatest positive economic impact.  The government should put a “floor” under sustainable energy prices through subsidies–such as those provided now for corn–a program that has had immense success in terms of boosting corn production.

Sustainable energy production will not only provide higher paying jobs, but it will at the same time create entire, new industries and new technologies.  It’s hard to assess the magnitude of what these new industries will accomplish, but it will certainly be huge because energy use ripples throughout every industry in any economy. 

With a subsidized “floor” under these fledgling, sustainable energy industries, private investment will flow in because the risk of loss will be reduced dramatically.  Compare this type of subsidy to the $3 trillion in direct and indirect subsidies the country has just made to the banking industry–hardly a new industry that creates new jobs.

From a Wall Street Journal article: “Many countries have adopted feed-in tariffs; some are as much as five times the wholesale price of power. The governments typically reduce the rate by a few percentage points yearly. But the cost of renewable energy is falling far more quickly than that; the lifetime cost of producing some types of solar power fell 50% during 2009; most other renewable technologies fell 10%, New Energy Finance says. Moreover, once a renewable-energy producer has locked in a rate for a particular project, it gets that rate for the full life of the subsidy.”

Critics of subsidies always use current oil prices in their models that say for every sustainable energy job you lose an oil based job.  But that’s a false assumption.  Fossil fuel prices are certain to increase over time, sometimes in dramatic, sudden fashion.  In contrast, clean energy prices are certain to decline over time. 

Ask yourself what $14 billion in annual sustainable energy subsidies would accomplish.  It would certainly create new jobs.  And it would create jobs that stay domestic, particularly if the government (taking a page from China) would require foreign companies wishing to locate in the US to take on a US partner and that the new facility would export half of its product: A double win because this would attack the trade deficit problem too. 

Transportation is a huge industry and a huge energy user.  Subsidies aimed at expanding the train infrastructure would save energy and reduce the cost of manufacturing, making manufacturers more competitive.   Government policies–including R&D subsidies–could encourage more fuel efficient cars and trucks, which would save energy and again reduce manufacturing costs.

Even farm subsidies could be better used.  We now subsidize corn and we have corn coming out the whazoo.  But more nutritious and more diversified foods would result if the $4-$7 billion in corn subsidies were directed instead to organic foods.  This would also multiply the number of farms.   Which would increase the demand for agricultural machinery .

Compare these costs to the cost of providing unemployment benefits.  Just the extension of benefits recently passed by Congress is estimated to cost $100 billion.  That’s just in one year.  Just the extension.

Better to spend this money subsidizing more jobs that pay living wages.  This is the best and quickest way to end that most dismal economic statistic:  47% of workers don’t make enough to pay income taxes.

Not to mention that we’d once again have a strong manufacturing base, cleaner more reliable energy and more diverse and nutritional foods.

Plus one other nice result.  Private corporations will book billions in profits.

About $4-$7 billion in annual corn subsidies will expire at the end of the year unless they are extended by Congress.  There is already a bill in Congress to extend the subsidies for another five years, and it could come to the floor as early as next month, according to CNBC reporter Jane Wells in a report this morning.

Beezer has written several times about the ill effects of this subsidy on the nation’s health, here,  here and here.  If you want a full list, just go to the search box to the right and type in “corn subsidies.”

To make a long story shorter, the subsidies have basically destroyed our small farms and thus our food diversity, engendered the mass production of less nutritious food and, in the case of beef and chicken in particular, resulted in food that’s laced with hormones and antibiotics.  The results of this is proving to be incredibly expensive as we’re having an epidemic of obesity and diabetes. 

It’s also enriched the big corporations in what is commonly referred to as “Industrial Ag.” Industrial ag is yet another big corporation dominated industry–a classic oligopoly which seeks to use government power to inhibit competition and thus fatten profits.

It would seem to be a no brainer that if we’re going to subsidize farms, we should use the subsidy to encourage growing healthy food, and growing a wide variety of healthy food.  It would seem obvious that having a healthier population being fed nutritious food is excellent policy.

As we’ve already witnessed in health care reform, are witnessing in finance reform and will no doubt witness in this corn subsidy battle, getting good things done in Congress (particularly in the Senate) is incredibly difficult when the opponents are entrenched oligopolists who dominate the industry.

This isn’t really about just one vegetable, corn.  This is about our entire food supply.  Mono cultures never survive.  And we are rapidly being turned into a mono culture.

Consider this paragraph in a March Newsweek article that touches on the upcoming battle.

“Of course, none of these efforts will change a thing if we don’t overhaul what we eat (too much fat, sugar, and salt) and how we eat it (supersized portions). Take one highly publicized ingredient, high-fructose corn syrup, which is derived from corn and has made its way into a multitude of the foods and drinks we consume—ketchup, sodas, and even the presumably good stuff like salad dressing and yogurt. A formidable contingent of nutritionists believe that agricultural subsidies for corn and other crops have contributed to the obesity crisis by making fattening foods cheap and ubiquitous. They want the subsidies expunged. Others, including USDA economists, argue that the effect is small and that eliminating them won’t solve the problem. It’s unlikely, given the outsize power of farm states in the Senate, and of Iowa in choosing presidential nominees, that the subsidies will be axed. But you’re certain to hear a lot more about this in the run-up to the 2012 farm bill. In the meantime, here’s something to chew on: a new study out of Princeton University found that rats who consumed high-fructose corn syrup gained significantly more weight than rats who ate plain old table sugar—even when they took in the same number of calories. Sign them up to testify on the Hill.”

All the internet blogs in all the world plus all the votes in this country may not be enough to bring common sense to America.

But we can try.  Subsidize healthy food, not just corn.  First Lady Michelle Obama, your organic White House garden, and the nation’s health, awaits you.