Farm to Family Connection - Commentary

FARM TO FAMILY COMMENTARY
---Select commentary from a weekly column by Curt Arens published in the Cedar County News, Hartington, NE

March 2006

Is Cheap Food Good Policy?

Dear Friends,
Is cheap always good? When we say something is "cheap", we often mean that it isn’t very valuable and maybe not of the best quality. Cheap often means shoddy.

I bought a cheap pair of pliers last year and it broke the first time I cut wire with it, standing in the middle of a fairly rapid stream flow trying to fix a creek fence.

But I hear some farm organizations and even individual farmers brag about being an important part of "cheap food" in our nation and helping the nation’s cheap food policy work.

They say this while an ever-increasing number of farmers must either gobble each other up to secure enough land to make a full-time living or family members including spouse, grown children and even the farmer must seek employment elsewhere along with farming full-time to pay the bills.

And all of this has happened in spite of - or maybe because of - unlimited federal farm commodity program payments that supposedly fill in the financial gaps.

So I’ve been asking myself if the cheap food policy really works. If you say that it does, then is it helping the people it’s designed to help? Are we giving consumers what they want or are we selling them short in the name of being cheap?

Obviously, if we really want family farms in existence in this nation raising our food supply like all the surveys say that we do, farmers must be paid for their work.

If that is the case, the value in food should not be in the advertisements, the packaging, the processing or the distribution channels of our food system. The value should be in the raw materials that go into the food itself and the food producers should be the benefactors.

Because our nation’s consumers have become so accustomed to unlimited supply of cheap food, now that specialty foods like organic, grassfed, natural and locally grown food have become more available, consumers turn up their noses at the higher price tags.

It seems they don’t care if it costs family farmers more time and money, not to mention special production skills and expertise to produce these healthful food alternatives. Some are even saying that these specialty foods should be cheap too.

But that would make them just another commodity that could be watered down and quality snuffed out. If that were the case, economies of scale would pretty much lock family farmers out of their family living money in the process.

I do not advocate for cheap food anymore. I think quality food should be affordable and accessible to people of all income levels. But I also think that food you buy directly from farmers, from the farmers market or at the local grocer, especially if it is organic, natural, grassfed or locally grown by family farmers, is more valuable because it is something very special indeed.

If something is too cheap, we don’t appreciate it. I think food has fallen into that category. There is hunger in this country, but most of us have never really been hungry. We don’t know hunger because of war, drought or pestilence like the citizens of other nations, so we take it for granted that our food shelves will always be stocked.

If consumers valued food more and spent a little more of their hard-earned dollars on food, then farmers wouldn’t have to rely so heavily on program payments or off-farm jobs in order to keep doing what they do best.

Food can feed the body and the soul and in my mind, it shouldn’t necessarily be cheap. It should be good. After all, most of the time, you get what you pay for.