The stove was, no kidding, a Warm Morning model. It was as tall as me then and more round than my Great-Uncle Honey. Somehow Dad, despite his city upbringing, knew how to manage this iron maiden for maximum effect in minimum time. In fact, the stove usually radiated heat before the water for his first cup of morning coffee boiled.

But rekindling the fire was only the final heat-promising chore in a whole series of high-heat chores that led to it. There was wood sawing, splitting, hauling, stacking, hauling into the house, lighting, and, finally, hauling the ashes, in our case, to the garden.

Dad, and Mom, too, couldn’t wait until the town’s “furnace man” installed a whole house, thermostatically controlled “furnace” that burned what they called coal oil fed to it by a copper line from a smelly fuel tank in our side yard.

That upgrade brought our farmhouse’s two unheated and, until then, unused upstairs bedrooms into the lives of my three brothers and sister. We four boys were assigned the colder northern room while my sister smiled warmly from the sunnier southern room.

The only problem with the new arrangement was that, despite clear evidence that the new furnace’s ductwork did indeed reach the rooms, there was no evidence whatsoever that any of the furnace’s heat ever did. Winter, for my brothers and me, was the season of flannel sheets and layers and layers of toe-curling woollen quilts.

The farm’s two principal hired men, herdsman Howard and his field hand brother Jackie, had no such problem because they had no such furnace. Their living room stove — our old kitchen stove — glowed invitingly hot in their farm-provided house until they moved to another place in the late 1970s.

Howard was its main attendant and his favourite fuel was southern Illinois coal. Early each winter a local trucker, after delivering a load of cull cattle from our farm to the stockyards, would back haul five or so tons of coal and dump it near Howard and Jackie’s back door. Each winter day, Howard filled a five-gallon bucket with softball-sized chunks to burn in the brick-lined Warm Morning.

Sometimes, the ever-impatient Jackie would top the red-glowing coal with what he called “a chug” of split pecan wood. The wood, almost as dense and BTU bearing as the bituminous coal, could make the stove glow pink at night.

After my father installed a furnace in the dairy barn in the late 1960s, however, neither brother was in any hurry to return to their piles of split pecan and lumpy coal. All the heat they ever wanted was, literally, at their dial-turning fingertips in the dairy barn.

My siblings and I had a similar revelation when we became aware of electric blankets. Our comfort, nay, our very survival, depended on electricity and our parents, downstairs and warm, had given us coal oil? Oh, the cries that went up!

Soon three electric blankets — one for Richard and David’s bed, one for Perry and my bed, and one for Miss Sunshine Across the Hall’s bed — appeared. From then on, our biggest worry each evening was who among us would brave the arctic upstairs to switch on the three, life-sustaining blankets.

Of no concern at any time, however, was being immolated in a roaring fire started by extension cords plugged into extension cords that ran from our toasty blankets under several rugs to each room’s only electrical outlet in a makeshift closet.

Should we have worried? Of course, but I don’t remember worrying about anything once tucked into our pre-warmed nests of flannel, wool, and innocence.

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The piece (not available online) tracked a new, potent shift just beginning to hit: Local meat packers were being squeezed for hogs and markets by other, aggressive packers that were buying and closing competitors to build new, huge, slaughtering plants.

The story was a clanging bell that a shakeout was underway and few had any idea of who would be left standing.

We, of course, now know; what’s left is a handful of massive packers and not enough hog farmers to fill a university basketball arena.

In truth, we knew this within 10 years. By the early 1990s, major stockyards like Omaha, Kansas City, and Chicago were faltering as packers moved to buy hogs “direct” from growers.

That new strategy was made easier since 400,000 hog farmers had exited the business in just the previous decade.

In the mid-1990s, this column and other publications pointed to how the now-powerful packers had integrated hog production into their business model to lock in ready supplies and consistent quality in their 24-7-365 search for efficiency and profit.

By the early 2000s, with the takeover of pork now complete, the packers began to buy each other. For example, in 2001, Tyson Foods, principally a poultry integrator, bought the big beef packer IBP for US$3.2 billion.

Again, none of this occurred in the dark. Every step in the long process happened in plain view of government regulators.

Then, in early 2010, the Obama administration announced the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), along with U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) leaders, would sponsor a series of “workshops… to discuss competition and regulatory issues in the agriculture industry.” The key target was meat packers.

Farmers, ranchers, farm and commodity group officials, industry experts, and consumer groups eagerly told bureaucrats how the “dynamics of competition in agriculture markets” affected them.

The result was, well, not much because there was little anyone could do.

No antitrust laws, in fact, had been broken by these companies. Their climb from being just a cog in the ag machine to becoming the ag machine was, they explained, simply the market at work.

(Until recently, anyway, when several meat packers, Tyson included, agreed to settle civil lawsuits filed by meat buyers who alleged some packers engaged in market manipulation that drove up buyers’ costs.)

Which brings us, again, to calls for the Biden administration to break up highly integrated and concentrated ag sectors like meat-packing.

How?

There is no definitive plan but you can bet the packers will fight in the courts and Congress to prevent one chicken leg or a single pig’s ear to be taken from them without legal cause.

And rightly so. We may dislike or even hate Big Meat but slicing them up looks like a very, very long shot indeed.

A better investment of time and talent is for governments to shower their favouritism — grants, low-interest loans, waived meat inspection fees, zoning assistance, and the like — to foster new, smaller, community-based competitors into the meat game.

For this to work, however, will take time. Remember, it took the Big Boys decades to get where they are today so it will take years before the field tilts anywhere near level again.

But the best way to start is to start: hearings should focus on the future, not the past.

The Farm & Food File is published weekly in newspapers throughout the U.S. and Canada.

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In fact, that person — described, in part, by the titles of the eight undersecretaries and 11 specialist “offices” within the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) — doesn’t exist.

Still, USDA boss is a plum job with excellent pay (US$210,700 in 2019), medical benefits, a defined pension, and sweet perks like an office on the National Mall, invitations to White House parties, and first-class travel to, well, anywhere.

But running USDA isn’t all state fairs and Farm Bureau conventions. It’s a daunting task to manage 33 agencies, 4,300 offices, and more than 100,000 employees while dealing with everything from soup to nuts.

Emphasizing soup and nuts isn’t accidental because the biggest program area within USDA doesn’t deal with farms, ranches, or forests. Instead, it’s nutrition assistance — by far.

How far? Intergalactically far.

According to its “FY 2021 Budget Summary” (if anything 112 pages long can be called a summary), USDA will spend US$98.9 billion of its US$151-billion budget — 65 per cent — on its three biggest food assistance programs, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the National School Lunch Program, and the Women, Infants, and Children program, or WIC.

By contrast, it will spend US$33.2 billion on “Farm, Conservation, and Commodity Programs” this fiscal year, or one-third of what SNAP, School Lunch, and WIC will cost.

Little wonder, then, why so many food advocates often mumble about renaming the Department of Agriculture to something like Department of Food, Nutrition, and Agriculture.

Despite farm programs taking a back seat to assistance programs, six of USDA’s seven 2021 “strategic goals” have little to nothing to do with its biggest program and its biggest cost, food aid.

It’s not that the six — which include areas like farm production, ag exports, and rural development — aren’t important; they absolutely are. There is, after all, no life without food and little food without farmers, ranchers, and rural communities.

Still, many of USDA’s current “strategic” goals sound like something out of the 1970s (“Maximize the ability of American agricultural producers to prosper by feeding and clothing the world”), rather than a hard focus on how to sustainably grow more food in an infinitely more complex environment and increasingly competitive world market.

And that’s true whether or not you overlook USDA’s own “customer” — the favourite metric of current Secretary Sonny Perdue — numbers that show, at best, farm programs (like crop insurance, direct subsidies, etc.) impact about five million Americans every year while SNAP, the School Lunch Program, and WIC are used by a whopping 71.4 million Americans, most daily.

None of this comes as a surprise to farmers, ranchers, or most ag organizations that have fought to keep a “farmer” in charge of USDA despite rising consumer and food aid dominance.

Now, however, they face a change they’ve known was coming for decades. Congresswoman Marcia Fudge, a 20-year veteran of the House Ag Committee, an attorney and former prosecutor, the first Black mayor of Warrensville, Ohio, and a noted expert on child nutrition and food aid programs, is angling to be the next secretary of agriculture.

If government experience, farm policy-making, and expertise in USDA’s largest program area are any measures, Fudge is a highly qualified candidate. Any shortcoming on, say, the inner workings of crop insurance or the Forest Service, can be addressed as they have been by every past secretary: choosing area specialists as undersecretaries or deputy undersecretaries.

Will Marcia Fudge be the next secretary of agriculture?

On the face of it, she should be a shoo-in; her resumé, expertise, and politics perfectly align with what USDA needs and what Joe Biden, the president-elect, preaches. It would, however, be a bold choice.

Are we in agriculture that bold?

The Farm & Food File is published weekly in newspapers throughout the U.S. and Canada.

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Event One: On Nov. 18, the Iowa Capital Dispatch, a not-for-profit news website, detailed allegations on how managers at Tyson Food’s hog-killing plant in Waterloo, Iowa, literally gambled on employee lives as the coronavirus took root last April.

“In mid-April,” related the Dispatch from information contained in a recently disclosed lawsuit, Waterloo’s “plant manager Tom Hart organized a cash-buy-in, winner-take-all betting pool for supervisors and managers to wager how many plant employees would test positive for COVID-19,” as he continued its 19,500-hog, daily kill.

What empowers a plant manager to, allegedly, run a betting pool on how many of his employees will become infected with a sickening, sometimes fatal, virus during the rise of a global pandemic?

Equally important, what do you call a company that harbours such an employee?

A day after the news broke, the Associated Press called Tyson Foods a coronavirus super spreader. The betting pool, it explained, operated “as the virus spread through the Waterloo plant, ultimately infecting more than 1,000 of its 2,900 workers, killing at least six and sending many others to the hospital. The outbreak eventually tore through the broader Waterloo community.”

Event Two: On Nov. 19, one of Tyson’s key competitors, Smithfield Foods, settled several federal lawsuits filed by plaintiffs “who had sued the company over the stench, flies, buzzards, and truck traffic coming from its industrial swine farms in North Carolina,” noted the Food & Environment Reporting Network, or FERN.

In the opinion that led to the settlements, one of the appellate judges who denied Smithfield a retrial, asked a simple question: “How did it come to this?”

Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III’s answer, based on the facts he had heard in the case, was as succinct as his question:
“… The decades-long transition to concentrated animal feeding operations (‘CAFOs’) lays bare this connection… (between) animal welfare and human welfare… ”

In short, “The dangers endemic to such appalling conditions (are) always manifested first in animal suffering” and, afterwards “… the ripples of dysfunction would reach farm workers and, at last, members of the surrounding community.”

Every farmer and rancher knows what the judge meant; it’s a small step from mistreating your animals or land to mistreating your employees, neighbours or, worse, family.

That’s the slippery slope seen both in the Tyson allegations and the Smithfield settlement: The more power given to corporations by lax government or local communities desperate for jobs, the more power the corporations take.

This power underlies the “dysfunction” that Judge Wilkinson warns will, sooner or later, “reach… members of the surrounding community” — you, me and Smithfield’s long-suffering neighbours and, allegedly, Tyson’s Waterloo employees.

Event Three: New research proves it.

According to research made public Nov. 19, the day of the Smithfield settlement, corporate ag’s increasing power “has resulted in numerous negative impacts on farmers, workers and their communities as well as consumers, who have experienced higher prices and less innovation.”

The study, completed by Mary Hendrickson of the University of Missouri, Philip Howard of Michigan State University, Emily Miller of Family Farm Action Alliance, and Douglas Constance of Sam Houston State University, has a singular, inescapable point:

Today’s “concentration of ownership, wealth and power… (is) directly related to who… make(s) decisions in food and agriculture… ”

And, “We observe that these decisions have increasingly migrated from a more community or public arena into the realm of… those within the biggest firms… (who) have their eye on increasing their power… and although this may increase their profits, it does not usually align with enhancing the public good.”

In short, the more power we give corporate ag, the more it takes, and the more it takes, the more it gambles on the people and communities that grow and deliver everyone’s food.

And, as recent events have shown again, that’s a bad bet for rural communities.

The Farm & Food File is published weekly in newspapers throughout the U.S. and Canada.

The post Comment: Gambling on the future of food, rural communities appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

It’s what we do; we panic first and ask questions later.

Well, it’s now later and questions are rolling in. The biggest, “What’s next?” has no clear answer but most national governments have finally seen enough to act.

In their first co-ordinated move, the world’s central bankers informally agreed to lower target interest rates to stave off what many forecast will be a one-half to one per cent, virus-affected slowdown in the global economy.

The high side of that number, one per cent, sounds tiny but it’s actually a US$900-billion hit on the estimated US$90-trillion world economy.

What’s US$900 billion in terms of jobs?

It’s hard to calculate on a global scale but in 2017, Georgetown University estimated that a US$1-trillion infrastructure-spending plan for the U.S. would create 11 million jobs. As such, it’s a safe bet that a US$900-billion hit to worldwide growth would eliminate at least as many jobs.

More importantly, some market seers now claim the U.S. Federal Reserve will make another, and possibly even a third, interest rate cut in the coming (election) year to ensure U.S. companies remain well positioned for recovery.

If so, the Fed-weakened dollar is welcome news for U.S. ag exports. Cheaper dollars lead to more exports, right?

Usually, but this is not any usual time. In fact, forecasts Refinitiv, a financial data firm owned jointly by Blackstone and Thomson Reuters, deep U.S. interest rate cuts are just as likely to fuel “an all-out (international) currency battle” that will worsen today’s tariff-based trade wars as much as help them.

As Refinitiv sees it, few coronavirus-weakened nations can afford to concede crucial global markets to any competitor — including the American elephant — without weakening their already sickened domestic economies. That means they will fight U.S. rate cuts with cuts of their own and, just like that, the world’s economy staggers toward more problems.

It makes frightening sense. Let’s hope it makes frightening sense to the White House, too.

A more focused look at some key commodities proves the virus has already sickened global markets like crude oil. Since Jan. 1, crude futures prices have tumbled from near US$65 a barrel to under US$50 a barrel. Hard-hit Chinese oil imports, estimated one-third lower since the coronavirus struck, are the key cause.

On March 3, traders lifted crude prices off lows when rumours circulated that OPEC oil barons would cut production to thin the oversupplied market. OPEC’s muscle, however, is overmatched as China’s newest export, coronavirus, has now hit oil importers like Japan, South Korea, and Italy.

The waves caused by China’s slow action on its epidemic are now also hitting farms and ranches.

DTN contributing analyst Elaine Kub noted in late February that the “shocking collapse of freight demand out of China, which accounts for 40 per cent of global dry bulk seaborne shipments,” has dropped shipping costs so low that “you can hire a big ocean vessel” — with a two-million-bushel cargo capacity — for “around $500 per day,” or one-third its usual cost.

Kub additionally notes troubling signs of virus-slowed ag exports. U.S. Gulf ship loading in mid-February was only 80 per cent of normal. Also, slow grain sales to the “top five U.S. corn customers have stunted rail movement not only to the ports, but also south across the border.”

U.S. meat exports are backing up too, reports the March 2 Wall Street Journal. Incredibly, nearly one billion pounds of frozen chicken, a 12 per cent increase over normal, currently crowd U.S. warehouses. Frozen beef and pork are now stacking up, too.

All portend a long, slow recovery once the world and the U.S. truly stop the coronavirus’s still mysterious, steady march. That end, however, is nowhere in sight.

The Farm & Food File is published weekly in newspapers throughout the U.S. and Canada.

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There were no carpenters on the southern Illinois dairy farm of my youth. The closest anyone came was my father who, in the shade of a big maple tree one summer, made several tongue-and-groove hayracks. It wasn’t fine woodworking but the racks were square and so solid that each brought good money at his retirement auction more than 40 years later.

When a real carpenter was required, my father called either Elmer N. or Buddy S. for the job. Elmer was younger, faster, more professional, and lived just 12 miles away in an old French town guarded by towering river bluffs. Buddy, whose real name I still don’t know, lived farther away, was older, slower, and loved to chat, joke, and watch the farm’s hired men, cows, and anyone else who might distract him from the task at hand.

There were other differences between the two. Elmer was a no-nonsense builder, someone who tackled the job every morning as if he had spent half the previous night choreographing the next day’s every move to make the most of his effort and your dollar.

Buddy, on the other hand, was more of a remodeller, someone whose patience — others might say slowness — gave him time to know what to do next without ever remeasuring, resawing or regretting.

Buddy also could be humorously absent minded. Twice, for example, I witnessed him saw through the extension cord to his circular saw while cutting plywood. Each time he simply smiled a small, resigned smile and added another lumpy, electrical tape splice to the several splices already in the cord.

Elmer’s extension cord was like Elmer; not one splice. He was a round man with a sharp, aquiline nose and a carpenter’s pencil stuck into his cap just in front of his right ear. He wore matching shirts and pants, always a workman’s tan, heavy leather work shoes, and, if chilly or cold, a matching jacket or coat.

And he was a solo act; no gofer, apprentice or assistant helped, slowed, or learned from Elmer. When you hired him to, say, put an addition onto your house, Elmer dug the building’s foundation, set the concrete forms, then co-ordinated the concrete pour, before singularly completing the framing, wiring, plumbing, insulating, roofing, cabinetry, plastering, and trim work by himself. Alas, he didn’t paint.

Equally impressive, at least to my mother, was how he left his work site each day: it was as clean — maybe even cleaner — than her well-scrubbed kitchen.

Elmer had two other talents that I’ve rarely seen matched. First, he sawed nearly every board by hand. His saw was sharp, his stroke short, and his cut straight and quick.

His other unmatchable talent was sweating. He seemed to sweat from the moment he arrived in the morning until the moment he left in the evening. And, most remarkably to me, anyway, was how the sweat dripped from the tip of his elegant nose, drop by drop, exactly onto the board he was cutting with every stroke he made with his handsaw.

Buddy, by contrast, was an elfish man in overalls, a cotton shirt, and high-top work shoes. He trudged more than he walked, rarely moved so fast as to break a sweat, and wore an infectious smile from morning to quitting time. For years Buddy’s work vehicle was a 1957 Chevrolet Impala whose outside mirrors dangled baling twine like parade streamers when not holding 2x4s en route to a job site.

Despite their differences in appearance and approach, both Buddy and Elmer were well regarded in their communities and by my father. Both were board-by-board, brick-by-brick workmen who literally built their small corner of this nation. Now, like my father, both are long gone.

Their work, however, endures as a lasting testament to their innate talent and quiet lives, and likely will for many decades more.

The Farm & Food File is published weekly in newspapers throughout Canada and the U.S.

The post Comment: A good tradesperson leaves a lasting legacy appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

Still, Dublin’s streets are packed. The lovely Catherine and I are there, too, walking along its central artery, the River Liffey.

We’re in Ireland to visit Catherine’s brother, their Irish cousins, and every Guinness-pouring pub I stumble onto.

Since our last visit in 2008, Dublin seems to have gone global. Our hotel clerk is Latvian, our dinner waitress Brazilian, the restaurant cashier Chinese. We don’t hear a word of Gaelic.

We have a grand itinerary and beautifully grand — grand is Ireland’s favourite adjective — summer weather.

Our first stop is Ballymaloe Cookery School and its adjoining organic farm and gardens. Catherine reveres one of its founders, Darina Allen, the “Julia Child of Ireland,” for her cookbooks.

But Ballymaloe is more: Darina and brother Rory started the school in 1983; her in-laws transformed their manor house into a restaurant in 1964 and, later, a hotel, too; son Toby greets guests in the gift shop; and husband Tim manages the farm and livestock enterprises.

Tim is our private guide. His lively banter and deep knowledge quickly reveal he’s a hands-in-the-dirt advocate for regenerative agriculture as well as the chief supply officer for the school and restaurant. Sustainable agriculture, he offers, is the key to “feeding our nation well, not the world badly.”

A late lunch at Ballymaloe House is a celebration of garden fresh vegetables, made-on-the-spot butter and breads, and delicate, delicious seafood.

Dinner that night in coastal Crookhaven is equally late, equally grand, and unequal in craic. A foamy visit to the village’s only pub, O’Sullivan’s, follows and brother-in-law Bill introduces me to John and Jackie, a husband and wife dairying team with 50 grass-fed Friesians.

Over pints, John shares how a “lovely” (sip) 2017 was followed by the worst winter anyone (sip) had seen in 50 years. “We’re hanging on,” says Jackie, “but we don’t want to get any bigger. Bigger just means bigger problems.” (Sip.) “Still, only the Lord knows what comes next, Alan.”

Amen. (Sip.)

Next, for us, means four sunny days on County Kerry’s broad, blue Dingle Bay. Our rental house has everything, including bleating lambs and ever-listening ewes on thousands of acres of steep mountain pasture out our back door. We day-trip around Kerry, visit locals on rural walks, and enjoy Catherine, Gracie, and Bill’s cooking.

Too soon, though, we’re off to visit Catherine’s cousins, P.J. and Bridie, horse farmers in County Roscommon. When we arrive, however, we find only Bridie; 81-year-old P.J. has taken a “pony” — they breed sought-after Connemaras — to a nearby show.

“Horses are a disease for some people,” Bridie says as she pours tea for her visitors.

The next day, the lovely Catherine and I return to the U.S. A young American banker seated next to me on the plane notes that we visited Ireland during the best stretch of weather he had seen in three years of living there.

The weather holds until we slide into our Illinois bed 20 hours after rising in Dublin. An hour later, a blistering thunderstorm strikes and drops three inches of rain in an hour.

Ah, the luck of the Irish.

The Farm and Food File is published weekly through the U.S. and Canada.

The post Opinion: On the road – Ireland’s farms, food and future appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.