Reaching Across the Aisle Isn’t Working for the People

By JIM VAN DER POL

I wrote to Sen. Amy Klobuchar, then-Sen. Al Franken and Rep. Collin Peterson, all Minnesota Democrats, in the immediate aftermath of the November, 2016 bloodbath that installed Trump in the White House, among other regrettable changes.

I had hoped they would think they should start listening to other non-standard voices in view of the disaster. I got a short subscription to the “Graze” newspaper for each, hoping they might see a different approach to farming than that current in the commodity groups. I also called each office each month for most of the first year trying to talk to them about current events and the impact upon farmers and rural communities. And did I succeed in communicating? I think not, though I did get one reply from Paula Sunde, Franken’s agricultural attaché, that seemed hopeful and interested. The other two, Brian Werner and Adam Durand, returned several messages along the lines of “we will do our best when your issue comes up.” Looking at the letter again, I am not sure how they could have known what “my issue” was. I had named several.

One was the way in which the government produces one program after another to “help” young people — my grandchildren for instance — get a start and then ruins it by supporting crop insurance at a high level for established farmers like me, thus tying up the land access they need and continuing the land price inflation.

Another, introduced into the conversation later, was about soil health, and the implications for carbon in the atmosphere of the reduction of organic matter levels in the soil (carbon) from perhaps 10% at white settlement to an average of 2-3 percent today due to increasingly poor farming practices. I cannot do the math easily, but am told by people I trust that a move up toward the 10% mark, admittedly requiring careful farming over a fair span of years, could, should it happen, sequester enough carbon in the soil to change our climate outlook drastically. It wouldn’t be easy, requiring, among other things, a change from annual plants to perennial ones on most of the acres, thus facilitating a large reduction in tillage. It will also require more people on the land making choices and decisions about the careful use of that land. See the first point above.

Developing these perennial plants to feed humans as well as animals is something we should have been working on this past century when we focused upon increasing annual plant yields and inventing crops that could stand up to glysophate (Roundup)

And speaking of glysophate, Sen, Klobuchar’s (and Pat Roberts’) bill a year ago put a label on products that required a smart phone to read, thus ensuring that companies could go ahead and sell genetically modified organisms containing products as GMO free to the rubes. Said rubes are busy people and they will not stand and fiddle with their phone in the grocery store over one product. The bill was an obvious attempt to nullify Vermont’s real labeling bill. It worked. It threw our farm’s little meat supply business, which markets the farm’s livestock, a real curve ball also. The feed mills and elevators out here in western Minnesota didn’t think they needed to sort products and attach a legally enforceable label because the Congress did not take the matter it seriously. Consequently we were sold a load of very oily soy meal, and the soft pork it produced did us out of our most important customer, a 25% reduction in sales. Thank you, Senator.

Access to local markets, specialty production, organic production and sales, relationship marketing and the like has been quietly sold as a kind of consolation prize for those of us done out of the mainstream markets by the government’s decades long unwillingness to enforce anti trust legislation in agriculture and against agribusiness. It quiets us smaller farmers down, the thinking goes, and lets USDA off the hook. Collusion and restraint of trade is now the order of the day in agriculture. We thought our kind of farm and business, returning as it does such a large percentage of its gross income to the local area, was just the direction rural Minnesota needed to head. But not only will the government not bother to enforce anti trust laws that have been on the books since FDR, but judging from recent activities in labeling, it will try to tilt the table even further away from smaller farmers.

It is really no mystery why so many Americans are so skilled and knowledgeable about sports and yet so ignorant about politics. They have a chance to have an impact on sports. A coach or team owner might listen to a sports talk show, thus putting legs under something a caller said on the subject. In politics, by contrast, the gatekeepers stand in the way of any impact any of us want to make. They, the experts, will do it. We are to keep our mouths shut. And we don’t even need Republicans for this. I am represented federally by three Democrats. The jury is out on Sen. Tina Smith yet, but judging by the campaign she ran with all the talk about reaching across the aisle, I am not hopeful. Klobuchar reaches across the aisle too. You see the results. It is as if the election of Trump never really happened. Business as usual. My efforts to communicate were useless.

Jim Van Der Pol farms near Kerkhoven, Minn. A collection of his columns, Conversations with the Land, was published by No Bull Press (nobullpressonline.com).

From The Progressive Populist, February 1, 2019

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