Stan Schutte has switched from conventional to sustainable farming, defined as farm practices that don’t deplete the land and natural resources and that provide living wages to farmers and farm workers. Schutte, who sells vegetables, beef, pork and chicken at the Old Capitol Farmers’ Market, the Urbana Farmers’ Market and through his buying club throughout the year, calls it an addiction. Conventional farmers are not going to change…. They’ve gotten lazy. It’s like cocaine. They don’t want to do anything different. And it’s mainly because of the support programs. Until that changes, you’re not going to see a change [in Illinois agriculture].”
“Corn and soybeans are easy! It’s plant, spray, harvest, drink coffee, collect your government payment.”
Advocates of conventional farming (though it’s only been “conventional” for 30-40 years) like to point out that 95 percent of U.S. farms are family owned. Kenner and author Michael Pollan, who worked with Kenner on Food, Inc. say in two public radio interviews that while that’s true, it’s misleading. A few trans-global companies control the market through which conventional family farmers sell their harvest, such as ADM and Cargill, and control the prices farmers are paid. “Everything has to pass through the needle eye of these mega-corporations,” they say. Four companies process 90 percent of American beef.
Conventional farmers not only have to sell to these large corporations, they must buy from them, too. St. Louis-based Monsanto controls “a huge percentage” of America’s seed supply, which they’ve been patenting since the 1980s, forcing farmers to buy new seed every year as opposed to saving seed from one year to plant the next, as had been done since the beginning of crop cultivation.
It’s those huge corporations, say Kenner and Pollan, that diligently attempt to limit consumers’ knowledge about what’s in their food and how it’s raised. “One of the things that was the most shocking to me when we were making Food Inc.,” says Kenner, “was when we filmed hearings…about labeling cloned meat. I didn’t even know there was such a thing. An industry rep stood up and said, ‘We think it would be against the interest of the consumer to give that kind of information — it would just be confusing to them.’ It happens over and over again. The industry fights labeling of fast food menus, GMOs (genetically modified organisms) and fought against labeling transfats. They don’t want you to know what’s in the food because they want you to eat as much of it as possible.”
What about all the crops and foods that aren’t subsidized? Large corporations dominate many of them as well. Arkansas-based Tyson Foods is the world’s largest chicken processor. Eric Schlosser reports in his book, Fast Food Nation, that Tyson is a “vertically integrated company that breeds, slaughters and processes chicken. It does not, however, raise the birds. It leaves the capital expenditures and financial risks to thousands of ‘independent’ growers.
“A Tyson chicken grower never owns the birds in his or her poultry houses. Like most other leading processors, Tyson supplies its growers with day-old chicks. Between the day they are born and the day they are killed, the birds spend their entire lives on the growers’ property. But they belong to Tyson. The company supplies the feed, veterinary services and technical support. It determines feeding schedules, demands equipment upgrades, and employs ‘flock supervisors’ to make sure corporate directives are being followed. It hires trucks that drop off the baby chicks and return seven weeks later to pick up full-grown chickens ready for slaughter. At the processing plant, Tyson employees count and weigh the birds. A grower’s income is determined by a formula based on that count, that weight and the amount of feed used.” “The chicken grower provides the land, the labor, the poultry houses and the fuel. Most growers must borrow money to build the
