Author encourages to buy local food

Austin Frerick encourages people to purchase more of their foods from farmers markets and small producers. He hopes the shift will be noticed by many food-based corporations that he thinks have been corrupt and created undesireable conditions for employees and products.

Frerick was The Warren Cultural Center in Greenfield’s Successful Communities Speaker Series April 7. Frerick is a Fellow at the Therman Arnold Project at Yale University. A graduate of Grinnell College and the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Frerick has been a Fellow at The Harkin Institute for Public Policy and Citizen Engagement at Drake University.

His agriculture research focuses on competition policy and anti-trust enforcement, which has led to his first book, “Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry,” which focuses on restoring the balance of power in the American food system in favor of farms, workers, small businesses and communities.

He highlighted his book showing various corporations that are somewhere in the food production chain and the images or data created as the corporation grew. He began with a western Iowa hog confinement facility that was questioned by a person how deceased animals were disposed. He said there was no response from the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, but things changed after Omaha, Nebraska, television stations were involved.

“This is what rural Iowa has become because of corporatization of agriculture. We have the world’s best soil but it looks like the New Jersey Turnpike. The countryside doesn’t feel like the countryside anymore.”

Frerick referred to how the thousands of heads of hogs in a confinement facility have risked soil and water quality because of how the animal waste is disposed. It is common for the manure to be applied to farm ground as a fertilizer, but it can only be applied in certain conditions and at certain amounts risking soil and water. He claimed rural North Carolina, where the hog confinement concept facility began, had rural churches paint their exterior every few years because of the wind that blew the manure as it was being applied.

Frerick said the mass production of livestock began with chicken. Upton Sinclair’s novel “The Jungle” published in 1905 was about the conditions of the Chicago stockyards. Because of the public response, the U.S. Pure Food and Drug Act was passed in 1906, and conditions in American slaughterhouses were improved.

He said the poultry industry was not included in the regulations. That was the basis for growth of chicken production in the South. He even criticized the poultry industry as he said the producers are given feed and the birds, but don’t own the bird. Producers have to fund the growing facility on their own.

“When you have a production model that is exploitive, you have a cheap product,’ he said. Frerick said the same concept has since been applied to hogs and it complements the desire to sell as much corn seed and butchering as many animals as possible.

“It’s been a race to the bottom,” he said.

Frerick noted several corporations and their issues but he also talked about government policy including the Farm Bill.

The Farm Bill is federal legislation reviewed and renewed every five years. The existing bill has been extended because of legislative issues, but he said even the bill’s intent has been damaged. Crop insurance regulations are included in the Farm Bill.

“I call it the Wall Street Farm Bill. It’s designed for Wall Street and no one else. It picks favorites now.” He claims the bill is overprotective of grain production and is only a price guarantee for producers. A large majority of the funding in the Farm bill is for food assistance programs.

Frerick said as the food production corporations have grown over the years, the quality of the product has diminished. He said the more food is held in storage or travels from the field to a distributor to a store, it loses taste and quality. He used the berry industry as an example as a berry distributor strategically uses places to grow the fruit based on the time of year.

A solution is to encourage consumers to buy more foods from farmers markets and local producers. Typically, those products are better quality and funding a provider which will boost the area’s economy.

“My vision for the American food system is that any American can sit down in a local restaurant and enjoy a meal where those that grew, picked, processed, transported cooked and served it all make reasonable living at a fair price.”