Food Fight — Best Practices

25 Ideas Whose Time Has Come

1. More closely align Farm Bill crop supports with USDA nutritional guidelines.
2. Fully fund, expand, and refine the Conservation Security Program that rewards stewardship and sound farming rather than surplus production.
3. Design subsidies to function more as safety nets, loans, crop reserves, and stewardship incentives rather than direct giveaways.
4. Establish an effective cap limit on individual subsidy recipients and close loopholes to provide greater equity to all farmers.
5. Shorten the food mile component of the current farming and distribution system by rebuilding the infrastructure for community-based and regional food supply chains.
6. Expand affordability and access to high-quality healthy foods for everyone, particularly in rural and urban communities where resources and options are limited.
7. Launch a national healthy lunch and fitness program that generates incentives for local and regional farms, features a salad bar and school gardening program in every school, and strives for meals made from scratch.
8. Keep small farmers on the land by working for fair prices for all crops.
9. Expand farm and ranchland preservation programs that buffer communities against sprawl, maintain habitats, and keep valuable agricultural lands in production.
10. Provide expanded funding for the preservation (as well as strict penalties for the plowing) of remnant native prairies and functional grasslands.
11. Shift incentives away from corn- and soybean-based feedlots and toward a grass-based livestock economy.
12. Target research and incentives toward reductions in farm-related global warming emissions, such as organic and perennial agriculture.
13. Include global warming reduction goals in Farm Bill titles whenever possible.
14. Restore incentives, start-up loans, and respectability for future generations of farmers and food producers through beginning farmer programs.
15. Establish conservation standards for Farm Bill-funded ethanol or other bio-based energy crops.
16. Expand set-aside programs (Conservation Reserve Program, Wetland Reserve Program, Grassland Reserve Program) with nationwide goals for restoration and watershed protection.
17. Fund more on-the-ground technical conservation assistance and enforcement.
18. Increase oversight and accountability of taxpayer funded crop insurance programs.
19. Promote growth in farmers’ markets throughout the country as well as farm-to-school, farm-to-hospital, farm-to-health care provider, and other farm-direct distribution arrangements.
20. Increase funding for farm-scale and utility-scale renewable energy projects, with continued emphasis on conservation and energy efficiency.
21. Expand research into energy-saving agriculture methods, including alternatives to synthetic fertilizers.
22. Continue to work toward campaign finance and lobbying reform.
23. More closely integrate and reward forest owners as part of the agricultural landscape.
24. Include native pollinator habitat restoration and invasive species removal as regional and nationwide conservation goals.
25. Integrate food and farm policy goals with other key legislative programs: transportation, energy, health, national defense, immigration, minimum wages, and so on.

Excerpted from Food Fight: The Citizen’s Guide to a Food and Farm Bill by Daniel Imhoff, © 2007 Watershed Media, distributed by University of California Press.

Print-friendly download

Back to Top