Is farming a political act?

Where does your food come from?

The supermarket? A farmer’s market? A field 20 feet outside your house?

How often do you think about where your food comes from? Is your food local? Is it sustainably produced? Did the famers use fertilizer? Did they responsibly water their plants? 

The rise of the American supermarket coincided with the rise of suburbia in the 1950’s. Before that, farming was confined to a local scale. At the same time, there was a mass advance in farming technology known, ironically, as the ‘green revolution’ . These technologies were mostly world war two technologies, co-opted into farming machines. For example, companies in political warfare went into chemical fertilizers. All this new technology (in addition to massively causing global climate change) made it easier for farms to get bigger and specialize in single crops. Add to this stew of nitrogen and fossil fuels, the subsidies that corn and soybean farmers received under FDR and what do you have total? Huge farms that grow only one crop (usually corn or soybeans) rapidly deplete resources, add a huge quantity of artificial fertilizers to the soil, massively misuse water, and exploit already under privileged workers. The idea of in-season food is virtually non-existent in this system. Do you know when kiwis grow in upstate New York? I’ll give you (the non-existent reader) a hint: never. You can’t grow kiwis at all, period, ever in upstate New York. But they’re sold in New York supermarkets, shipped all the way from Cuba or Spain.

So in this way, local farms that use organic, sustainable practices and treats their workers well are political in nature. Systems of oppression in capitalism are all intertwined and by fighting global climate change and providing sustainable food to the community, the small farmer is by nature fighting systems of oppression. 

But organic food is often overpriced in a way that can contribute to classism and gentrification. I’ve been to some organic small farms that don’t treat their workers very well at all. Some famers complain that even the label of ‘organic’ is expensive to achieve and holds the small farmer at a disadvantage and makes it harder for start up farmers, people who are necessary to combat climate change. So in that sense, is working on a small farm still a political act? I don’t know. 

When I think of political action I think in terms of Martin Luther King and Audrey Lord and the Standing rock protest. The first thing I think of when I think ‘activist’ is a protesters walking down the street stopping traffic and holding large, multi-colored signs. And I know activism is more than that. There’s that quote circulating by Shane Claiborne: “everyone wants a revolution but no one wants to do the dishes” and I think that’s true. There’s a lot that goes on behind the scene with political change and maybe farming is part of that. But I think that (at least for me) it’s not enough. If I work on a farm without learning about local aquifers, without trying to instate an effective composting system, without trying to minimize the farm input and output, then that’s not enough for me. Here are three of my goals for the next two months of residency in Arizona on a farm: 1) Initiate and engage with a composting system that does more than throwing our food scraps to the pigs 2) Be more conscious about buying food off the farm (making sure it’s local, organic, and in season) 3) Learn where our water comes from and how to use it most efficiently.

So I hope next time you go to the store, you pause for an instant before you buy bananas and think about some of these questions. On an unrelated note: did you know government subsidized lesbian farmers are Rush Limbaugh’s worst nightmare?