Farm Bureau: Farmers Get Trendy

By Stewart Truelsen

According to Phil Lempert, best known as the Supermarket Guru, “Farmers are becoming the latest food celebrities.” He goes so far as to predict that celebrity chefs are out, celebrity farmers are in.
Lempert is an astute food industry observer, journalist and trend watcher. He created a virtual grocery store and consumer information center, Phil’s Supermarket, on Second Life, a rapidly growing online world. If you have time for a second life you might want to check it out. Otherwise there is his website, www.supermarketguru.com. 
The notion that farmers are becoming celebrities is one of Lempert’s Top Ten Food Trends for 2012. He may have gone a bit too far with this one. Most farmers don’t have time to be celebrities, but they do recognize the value in opening lines of communication with consumers.
Lempert believes the “farm to fork” journey has become increasingly important. Shoppers want to know where their food comes from. “We’ve seen ‘buy local’ become one of the most important supermarket offerings; now we get to meet the people who are the producers, farmers and ranchers,” he said in describing the trend.
The American Farm Bureau Federation has facilitated this trend with an emphasis on social media.  AFBF’s FBLog has opinions and perspectives from the nation’s top producers. Want to know what cold-climate farmers do all winter? It can be found there at www.fb.org/blog. 
Farm Bureau also reaches out to consumers with Foodie News, an electronic newsletter that appeals to those most passionate about food and food trends. Individual farms and ranches are represented on Facebook and Twitter and are eager to have friends and followers.
For many years farmers have wanted to tell their story to consumers, but it was always hard to reach an urban audience. Print and broadcast media just didn’t get the job done. The only time consumers paid much attention was when food prices were rising or a drought, freeze or some other calamity affected farmers.  
The growing consumer interest in the “farm to fork journey” and how it is promoted through social media and the Internet is a huge breakthrough for the farming and ranching community, and the trend is only just beginning. 
Lempert isn’t the only one noticing the higher profile or celebrity status of farmers and ranchers. One of The Food Channel’s top trends for 2012 is the rise of the agri-chef, a new breed of chefs who like to grow their own food. TFC expects this trend to evolve from gardens to full-fledged farms. One thing we know for sure is that growers have reached out to renowned chefs, and they are almost as likely to be on the agenda for a major farm convention as an economist.
It’s no secret that people like to visit farmers and ranchers and see firsthand how their food is grown, but it is impossible in today’s world for everyone to do that. Social media connections help make the farm to fork journey possible for more people.

Center for Food Safety Calls on EPA Not to Backpeddle on Its Agreement to Track U.S. Animal Factories

Center for Food Safety Calls on EPA Not to Backpeddle
on Its Agreement to Track U.S. Animal Factories

Much needed inventory would identify animal factories’ locations and manure management practices, allowing EPA to begin assessing scope of national threat to water and food supplies.

(WASHINGTON, D.C.) The Center for Food Safety (CFS) submitted comments strongly criticizing the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) disappointing failure to implement a 2010 settlement agreement it reached with environmental groups and called on the agency not to capitulate to industry pressure and weaken its much needed action.  CFS’s comments were also joined by Friends of the Earth. 

In 2010, EPA agreed to conduct an inventory and profile the largest animal factories by requiring reporting of very basic operational information such as geographic location, ownership, quantity of manure produced, and use of manure.  Despite widespread animal factory farming in the U.S., EPA never previously tracked this data, and thus has no understanding of the scope of the manure problem that is polluting our nation’s waters and placing our food supply at risk. 

EPA recognized years ago that it has absolutely no handle on the billions of gallons of manure annually entering the nation’s waters and food supplies from U.S. animal factories.  A 2008 Government Accounting Office report entitled “EPA Needs More Information and a Clearly Defined Strategy” sharply criticized the agency’s lack of action.  However, EPA’s late 2011 draft rule only required reporting of less than half of the information required by the agreement, without explanation.  Under the EPA proposal, the animal factory industry would be allowed to continue mismanagement of manure and would leave to local communities the burden of enforcing environmental laws. 

“EPA’s proposal is a misguided, head-in-the-sand approach to an issue that the government has recognized as a significant problem for many years,” said Elisabeth Holmes, CFS Staff Attorney.  “EPA’s draft rule is contrary to the Court Settlement, the GAO Report, the Pew Commission recommendations, as well as EPA’s overarching duty to protect the public and the environment.”

Most of the dairy, beef, pork, chicken, turkey, and egg products sold in U.S. grocery stores – and served at institutional facilities such as schools, hospitals, nursing homes, and prisons – comes from animal factories.  Animal factories raise hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of animals destined for human consumption in large-scale, high-density confinements and as a result produce large quantities of meat, dairy or egg products at a low economic cost.  Animal

factories also produce too much manure to fertilize their own fields, and the manure is so laden with pharmaceutical products, animal feed additives and heavy metals that it can actually kill crops instead of promoting soil fertility and moisture.  Animal factories frequently disregard restrictions on applying manure as a fertilizer so over-applications and mis-applications result in manure, pharmaceutical products and additives escaping and flowing into drinking water supplies and rivers.  Manure management is a major operational concern and a constant source of water pollution for every animal factory.  Annually, a single animal factory can produce 1.6 million tons of waste, or more than 1.5 times the sanitary waste produced by the 1.5 million residents of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  One cow can produce 20 times the amount of waste as a single human.  Animal factories store millions of gallons of manure usually in “lagoons”, which are susceptible to breakage and leakage. 

The federal government claims that approximately 20,000 animal factories exist in the U.S., but other data suggests there may be as many as 238,000 animal feeding operations.  Without an inventory and data tracking system the EPA cannot estimate the number of animal factories in the country or their environmental effects. 

Under the current Clean Water Act permitting structure, EPA only requires certain animal factories to report limited information.  The information reported for permitting purposes does not correspond to that required by the 2010 agreement, which was designed specifically to begin meaningfully assessing the scope of the nationwide pollution problem.

“The Center for Food Safety is just as concerned with security issues facing our nation’s food supply as farmers,” said Holmes.  “As the GAO Report and Pew Commission Report on Industrial Animal Farm Production demonstrate, this problem is an immediate threat to our waters, our health, and our food supply.  EPA must require animal factories to report basic operational information that other industries have had to declare for decades, and EPA must make this information available to the public.”