I recently ran across a piece by Sarah Mock linked on Linked In, (8/27/26). The post links her 2/10/25 piece on substack, “The Food System and the Farm System are Not the Same.” https://sarahmock.substack.com/p/the-food-system-and-the-farm-system Sarah is an “ag reporter” and author of the book Farm and other F Words: The Rise and Fall of the Small Family Farm. For me, the essay is a shorter, more concise way to summarize a variety of aspects of her approach to farm and food issues. For that reason, I’ve written this review.
We live in a puritanical society where we we can hardly avoid watching TV shows exposing people to ridicule. There are nonfiction and fiction crime shows, (especially murder,) hoarders, judge shows, Jerry Springer type shows, (You ARE the father!) and more. Really it’s puritanism itself that needs to be exposed.
Related to that is the mass of criticism going around on social media. (I’m part of that.) But in addition to critical thinking, we also need empathic thinking. This is epeciallky true in social movement work.
I disagree with Sarah Mock, in part, on these grounds. First, that there are many food activists paying attention to the farming system and the farm bill is an awesome thing, especially to farmers who find out about it. There is a need for reformative and especially restorative change in these areas, to address agriculture’s huge problems. Farm activists have never had an opportunity like this, to welcome in urban-side activists. It IS ‘sexy.’ The glass IS more than half full!
It can also make a huge difference. Of course, to make a difference institutions are needed, not ‘lone-man-against-the-system.’ Here, too, what we find are a multitude of sometimes major new institutions bringing masses people together over food and farm systems. Sarah seems to have left that out.
Ok, much in our stores does not come from U.S. farms. (It’s dumped into our country by the agribusiness megamachine to drive down farm prices.) The way to fix this is to build a large, informed, skilled, interconnected Farm, Food and Nonfood Movement. This article does the opposite, through myths.
Of course, a major chunk of our farm acres go into food and other products for other countries. The problem here is a lack of acequate farm and trade policy, where our farmers lose money on exportss, just as we do on domestic sales, (below full economic costs).
A rising alternative paradigm is local food, where your purchases do matter. It’s tiny, but growing, and your purchases do make a difference, besides generally being much better products. Chefs have been especially valuable to this movement.
Yes, most cropland, (if not farmland,) is NOT used to feed people. The key point there is that that’s a very good thing, (as “we have way too much farmland to only grow things we eat”). Otherwise we have oversupply. (And oversupply is a somewhat complex matter that’s rarely discussed in detail and context.)
Yes, “The farm system is not the same thing as the food system.” The family farm system is, in fact, quite sexy. It should not be narrowly viewed in terms of reductionist economics and technology. It’s not just a way of life, it’s a pattern of history and culture, a “megatrend,” (Naisbitt,) that originated as a major “transformation,” (Mumford). The family farm system is a “lifestyle brand.” So is the history and ideal of the New Deal farm bill Commodity Title, the “Parity Title.” Parity is a lifestyle brand. It was and needs to be the “Farm Justice Title.” Tragically, however, none of this is known today to either the dominant conservative narrative or the dominant progressive narrative.
As it turns out, much more than 1% of corn acreage is used for food, especially for certan meats and poultry. Of course, soybeans also go into food, as do 100% of our hay, (including alfalfa,) and pasture. It’s an absurd bias to deny this.
I agree, of course, that we certainly need to focus on “shifting tactics.”
First, the “hard-nosed agribusiness people, no-nonsense industrial-scale farmers and ranchers, and ethanol manufacturers” are not going to lead the way toward fixing anything. That’s for our own movement to do. “Those hard-noses, the farmers and feeders, the biofuel-makers and cotton ginners, those are the people” do not really have “the power to alter millions of acres of corn, soybeans, cotton, or alfalfa with the stroke of a pen.” And the farmers are essentially the opposite of the other categories, such as the giant CAFO companies and processors, and farmers have a long and large history of activism to prove it, along with masses of data. And the agribusiness input and output “middlemen” do not “tend to be mid-sized.” They’re huge! And they certainly have not “excaped notice and pressure” over the past 150 years, (pressure from farmers, though few know that today)!
Ag journalists are not likely to get “propositions” from farmers if they don’t adequately understand farm issues. They especially can’t expect this if they write to present your “farm” as an “F Word,” rather than as a sexy “lifestyle brand.” The truth is that farmers have long been at odds with the farm press! Just ask the farm justice elders of the NFO or the 1980s farm crisis! This is another forgotten aspect of the two dominant narratives of today. It’s agribusiness that represents “empty lust,” “wanton hedonism,” and “a kind of reckless hunger that demands immediate and overwhelming satisfaction.”
The scale of the farming system remains teeny tiny compared to agribusiness.
On the other hand, the sexiness of farming has depended, in important ways, upon the adequacy of federal farm policy, that once ideal Commodity Title. Over seven decades Congress reduced and ended it. Where once we had market management, (acreage reductions and minimum farm price floors,) with no subsidies, then, later, over the past 30 years, we had no market management, only irrational and inadequate subsidies. This caused increasingtly massive psychological trauma to farmers, eventually adding political damage to the economic, social, agronomic, environmental and medical damage.
I do agree that we need to “stop talking about the food system like the whole farm system is contained within it,” and also add the non-food category. It’s the agribusness system that’s the “shark” that has relegated farmers to the category of “a remora fish attached to its belly, eating the scraps that fall from its mouth.” And yes, “If you want to change the farm system, accept that you’ve got to go head to head with a shark.” But the new urban Food and Environmental sectors are very important to t his change. Learning, finally, to adequately listen to the farm justice elders who have gone before, and who seem to be the only ones today who know what’s been going on, is, however, a mandatory requirement for achieving this “leverage.” It is essential for this to be done quickly, as we’re rapidly dying off.
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