Yes, I know I was supposed to continue with my musings and perspectives on cattle ranching vs. farming this week – but there's been a big news story in the media over the past week or so that brings up a whole lot of issues, so Cain and Abel (or Curly and Farmer Phil) are going to have to wait a week.

That's the big salmonella scare and the massive egg recall that was a result. Could this all have been avoided – and would you, as a consumer, have been willing to pay an extra penny per dozen (that's .01c, folks) to have stopped it from happening?

To me, this whole thing brings up four primary issues:

1. corporate consolidation and increasing control of our food supply
2. the importance of localizing food production
3. the questionable methods used by commercial egg farms
4. the role of our democratically-elected government

Let's look at these one at a time.

Too Big To Fail – Or Just Too Big?

Over a century ago, Republican President Teddy Roosevelt recognized the danger of Big Business getting too damn big. His administration forced the break-up of the largest corporations in the country at the time. This was a good thing for consumers – it forced competition in the marketplace and kept business honest and more responsive to human needs.

Since the early 1980s however, this has all been largely undone – and today, there are corporations so huge and powerful that they are telling sovereign governments (here and abroad) what to do. Focusing on just the egg industry, in 1987 there were 2,500 different companies around the country producing eggs for the retail market. Today, there are only 192. Most of these eggs come from the only five states: Iowa, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and California. What happens is that a few producers sell millions of eggs under thousands of brand names – and when something like this salmonella outbreak happens, it makes it harder than heck to find out what happened, where and why.

If there had been a lot more smaller producers selling under their own name, this wouldn't have been a problem.

Localize

The long distribution chain is also a serious problem. Aside from the costs of transporting food hundreds of miles from its point of origin it's hard to hold a faceless mega-corporation two thousand miles away accountable for anything – and they have little incentive to be accountable. On the other hand, a farmer who depends on his neighbors' good will has a lot of incentive to stay honest and provide a safe, healthy product.

'Nuff said.

Even Birds Deserve Kindness

Like any kind of factory farming, commercial egg farms are not only often cruel (these poor birds are confined to tiny steel cages, stacked several high) but are breeding grounds for disease. Fortunately, this is something that consumers are becoming increasingly aware of; more and more, folks are willing to pay extra for "free range eggs" from producers who let their chickens wander around in the fresh air. (yes I know even free range can be improved, but it’s better that non-free range. Chick steps here folks, chick steps) Unfortunately, not everyone can afford to pay $2.50 - $4.00 for a dozen eggs if the factory-farmed ones are $1.00 - $1.20 a dozen (and that situation is not getting better for a lot of people).

Still, maybe the big boys are getting the message.

Some Regulations Aren’t that Bad?

It's been real popular to bash government for the past thirty years – yet somewhere along the line, Americans have forgotten that the government is supposed to be us. Instead, we've allowed private business to take over completely (and very little of it is even American business anymore).

The difference is, while elected representatives are accountable We The People, corporations are accountable to nobody except the bottom line. A corporation will gladly destroy communities and human lives in order to increase their profits by the smallest margin. (Can you say "Rust Belt?" Can you say "Offshoring"?)

Here's the thing: food producers (and other industries) have resisted regulation, buying off Congress and even writing their own laws (through lobbyists) for years. They didn't want "Big Government" telling them to vaccinate their chickens! Heck, we're the private sector! We can do it better!

Right...so, these conglomerates were trusted to deal with the problem themselves. They chose to cut costs and raise profits by foregoing those vaccinations. Here's the kicker...those vaccinations, which would have prevented this whole thing from happening, would have cost....$.01 per dozen eggs. By the way, if we were more localized, lots more smaller operations, this whole vaccination step probably wouldn’t be necessary.

Now, it's going to cost them a whole lot more.

Even the Pentagon's not that wasteful.

Ever see the musical Oklahoma?

Okay, it's thin on plot (though the songs are memorable – and one even went on to become an official state song), but it dealt with one interesting issue, which was the conflict between cattle ranchers – who  during the period of the show (early 1900s), required hundreds of acres of open, unfenced land – and farmers, who by necessity require fences and boundaries.

In a way, it reminded me of a story in the Book of Genesis. Abel, as you might recall, was essentially a cowman. (Actually, he herded sheep and goats, but it's the same principle.) Cain on the other hand was a farmer. When it came time to offer up a sacrifice to their common Deity, Abel put a lamb on his altar, which was acceptable – and Cain offered his produce, which was not. This made Cain a little upset (and why not? He worked his butt off to grow that stuff and pull it out of the ground).

You know what happened next.

Now, a lot of religious scholars, Jewish, Christian and Muslim, have had their own takes on this story over the centuries. Most Sunday School teachers simply tell children that Cain was jealous because God liked Abel better. On the other hand, some rabbis, using a method of interpretation called midrash, figure that there was jealousy over a woman involved. Other interpretations peg Cain as being just plain evil. But I think all of these people are missing the real point of what this story is about.

With all due respect to the devout among us, I'd like to step out of that religious viewpoint and look at it as an anthropologist or paleontologist might.

Often, what we all like to label as "conservative" and "liberal/progressive" are just words for "old" and "new." (Stay with me here.) For example, the word "pagan" really means "country/rural people" who practiced old ways of doing things. Back in the day, when the first Christian missionaries were heading into the back country of Iron Age Europe from the cities of the Roman Empire, their religion was considered something "new." It threatened those in the countryside who followed the "old" ways.

Now, let's back up another 8,000 years or so. At one time, all people were hunters and gatherers. After awhile, hunters started following herds; eventually, this became what we know as ranching. This is the way people got a lot of their food for thousands of years.

Nobody knows for sure when people figured out how to plant, tend and sow crops. What we call the "Angricultural Revolution" seems to have started in several places at different times – and you can be certain that it didn't happen overnight. Nonetheless, agriculture was at one time, a "new thing" – and because it required fences and a strange new concept known as "private property," it wasn't long before the new agriculture came into conflict with the old herding/ranching lifestyle.

What if the story of Cain and Abel is a metaphor representing this conflict? Since farming was a "new" thing, and therefore threatening to the status quo, it shouldn't come as a surprise that Cain got a reputation for being a bad guy (fact that he murdered his own brother notwithstanding).

This same tragedy was played out in the American West during the latter part of the 19^th Century; the "range wars" are a part of our history (the 1953 movie Shane was set against on such conflict).  Eventually, the government had to step in to make sure that farmers and cowmen could work together and play nice.

I'll have some more thoughts on this next week...

My thanks to Chris Larson on this one. (Not sure how I missed it...but it's been busy around here, because while all the heat may not do much good for you and me, it does wonders for the tomatoes).

Anyway, you can go back and read Mr. Larson's response to my last post. The U.S. Department of  Agriculture Farm Agency publishes facts and figures on foreign ownership of American farmland. The good news is that as of the end of February 2009 (the most recent period for which information has been published), foreign interests still hold slightly less than 1% of all land in the U.S.

The bad news is that the latest figure – 22.2 million acres – is almost double what it was twenty years ago. That figure represents almost 2% of privately held agricultural land in this country. The year before that, it was just under 21 million acres. Six years ago, it was 14.6 million acres – which means that since 2004, foreign ownership of American soil has grown by a whopping thirty percent. (Yes, that's an approximation, but a fairly accurate one.)

Should we be concerned?

Back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, that would have depended on who your asked. A lot of ordinary folks were pretty worried about it, though the "experts" in government and academia didn't seem to think it was much of a problem. One author back in 1979 said the fears were "largely emotional:"

 "Included among the emotional objections to foreign ownership of farmland are the fear of the loss of local control of rural communities, a feudal-like system of land control, a system of absentee landlords, and the demise of the family farm. While people’s fear of these assumed impacts is an important factor affecting legislation, an analysis of historic trends indicates that there is little basis for most of the fear expressed." (Lutrell, 1979)

 Today, the issue seems to elicit some mixed responses. Down in the Escambia region of Alabama, foreigners own about 160,000 acres, almost half of which is forested. This was in an article published at NorthEscambia.com, a local online news source. The responses were varied, ranging from all-out xenophobic rants to attitudes of "who cares?" At least one person pointed out that Americans and American corporations own property in other countries. Another one suggested that the foreign investment in wooded land was a good thing for the American timber industry, since that industry has been having a hard time in recent years.  It should be noted that that nationwide, 58% of the agricultural land owned and controlled by foreign corporation is timberland, and the majority of foreign ownership is Canadian. I'm willing to bet that there's a good amount of land in Canada that's American owned as well.

I guess the bottom line is the question of whether foreigners buying up our agricultural land is a good thing or a bad thing – or if it even makes a difference either way. Sometimes this issue gets conflated with the growing concern that almost nothing is manufactured in the U.S. anymore and the fact that other countries that are not particularly friendly hold a large amount of U.S. debt. Another issue that raises its ugly head is the use of these lands as tax havens by wealthy individuals who simply don't want to pay their fair share in their home country – or for the privilege of doing business in the U.S.A.

More on this to come...

A couple of things caught my eye this week. One of them was a bumper sticker that read: "How can ours be a free country if it's all for sale?"  The other was an item over at Agriculture.com about how the government of Brazil is starting to put severe restrictions on foreign ownership of farmlands in that country.

Issue of the disappearing rain forests aside, there has been a virtual land rush by foreign investors to buy up Brazil's agricultural resources – and responding to some genuine concerns about this state of affairs, Brazil's Agrarian Development Minister (roughly analogous to our Secretary of Agriculture) has announced the government's intention to "tighten restrictions on foreign ownership of farmlands." This is actually going to require an amendment to the Brazilian constitution however – which if you know anything about constitutional law, is no small thing – and the details as to how and when such restrictions will go into effect are a bit sketchy at this point.

Now, we know that a whole lot of U.S. infrastructure – our roads and toll bridges, power generation facilities, natural resources and more – have been sold off to foreign corporations in recent years, and it's stirring up some real resentment among ordinary Americans – as well it should. However, what's been happening to American farmland is a lot less clear.

Just for kicks and giggles, I did a few quick Internet searches on "foreign ownership of U.S. farmland." What I found was that the issue was of great concern about thirty-five years ago, but that a relatively small percentage of U.S. farmland was actually held by foreign corporations and investors. Back in the 1970s, several states passed their own legislation, prohibiting and even outlawing foreign ownership of local agrarian lands. However, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the issue of foreign ownership of U.S. farmlands was a relatively minor one, and the state laws that were in effect hadn't had much effect.

By 1987, foreign corporations and investors owned about 12.5 million acres of U.S. farmland – which still represented less than 1% of all privately held agricultural property in this country. To be sure, American land is still a heck of a bargain compared to land prices in Europe and Japan, and despite all the ballyhoo about taxes, corporations operating in the U.S. have some of the lowest tax burdens in the world (which is why you and I as working human citizens wind up having to pick up the slack – but I digress...)

Here's what I found a bit disturbing however. All the information that was close at hand was at least 20 years out of date. At the moment, I'm having a devil of a time trying to find current data on the topic of foreign ownership of U.S. farms. It's probably out there, but it's obvious that for whatever reason, I'm going to have to dig a lot deeper to find out just how much of our American farmland has been handed over to foreign interests.

Hopefully, it isn't much...stay tuned...