Science News Review

The ‘08 Farm Bill and Improving America’s Diet

Jun 2 at 4:04pm by Aileen

The 2007 Farm Bill - now the 2008 Farm Bill, was passed by both chambers of Congress, vetoed by President Bush, then the veto was overridden by both houses and is now the ‘Law of the Land’. Politically, the bill isn’t perfect, there is still too much pork and payments to rich agribusiness concerns for their poor farming practices, and not enough clarifying guidelines for biofuels production and organic farming.

But it’s a lot better than no bill at all, which would have kept the last support bill in place for the foreseeable future. The new bill has incentives to clean up residue discharges in important watersheds, and supports for best practices in crop rotations, cover crops and low-chemical input farming. It’s still strong on commodity production (corn, wheat, rice), but does put some real support into farmer’s market promotions and expansion of organic markets. It does somewhat limit subsidies to near-millionaire commodity farmers, requires more fresh fruit and vegetables to be available in schools, increases food stamp benefits as tied to the price of food, allots priority funding to research into the bee die-off situation, and supports rural enterprise and microenterprise investments.

Research into the “typical American diet” and its relationship to serious health issues and obesity informs us that Americans eat way too much junk and not nearly enough healthy food. Which, in a country that rations health care by income level and allows insurance companies to exclude people who actually need health care, would seem to be an important issue to address with education and real food availability in public institutions such as schools.

In 2005 the University of Michigan’s Integrative Medicine Clinical Services published a new food pyramid based on “healing” foods. Which emphasized fresh, unprocessed fruits and vegetables over grains, legumes (beans) and the more fatty foods at the top. The Agricultural Research Service published this past weekend a study that showed alkaline-producing fresh fruits and vegetables help preserve muscle mass in older men and women.

And researchers from USDA’s Sustainable Agricultural Systems Laboratory have released findings that demonstrate organic farming methods including crop rotation complexity can offer a 30% greater yield than simple corn-soybean rotations.

As demand for organic meat, milk and basic commodities rises about 20% per year in this country, improvements in the technology of organic production will serve to increase availability. It has long been known that reduced use of herbicides, pesticides and chemical fertilizers (most with highly questionable ‘inert ingredients’ such as toxic waste from industry) will also improve water quality and the general fertility of our ‘breadbasket’ agricultural base land. It is hoped that the new farm bill, by emphasizing changes that need to be made in these directions, will speed America’s switch to sustainable practices and improve citizen’s health significantly.