Merrigan: I Don't Know What a Factory Farm Is

Aside from USDA Deputy Secretary Kathleen Merrigan's announcement of the US-Canada trade equivalence agreement, there wasn't too much new information that could be taken away from the keynote address at the All Things Organic Expo in Chicago yesterday.

She reinforced the USDA's commitment to organics and sustainable agriculture, talking up the People's Garden and the department's pledge of $50 million in organic transition grants, but the most interesting part of the keynote came in the Q & A session afterwards, when a woman from Organic Valley asked if the USDA will address issues for family farms, or if they'll only be addressing factory farm issues.

Here's what Merrigan had to say:

I'm not exactly sure what a factory farm is, or a family farm, I'm going to be really quite clear about that. We are really quite concerned about farmers at USDA, and we're really concerned about their success for all shapes and sizes, really. The factory farm-family farm, I kind of get what you're saying, but these are terms that I'm not sure that the rhetoric really helps. I think that we need to do better environmentally on farms, and sometimes small farms need to do environmentally better, and sometimes large-scale farms need to do environmentally better.

I'm really about environmental stewardship in farming, I think that's really important. I also think we're all concerned about the disappearing middle in agriculture. ... When we look at the ag census, we're seeing a very strong upsurge in small farms, new farmers coming in and doing a lot of direct marketing. ... That's a really exciting trend, and we're also seeing a lot of large-scale farms doing well, making good profits, but what we don't see are the large number of farmers in the middle. They are falling by the wayside on a daily basis in this country, and that's a very compelling dilemma, a tragedy that Secretary Vilsack and I are very focused on.

-Mark

Comments

[El Dragon]

Merrigan was a Tufts professor. I'm pretty sure she knows what a factory farm is. She's just playing the USDA game: Never criticize a big farm.

According to OTA's tweeter (I believe it was OTA?), Merrigan also said that organics is about to enter "the era of enforcement." If that isn't a heads up to factory farms gaming the organic rule, I don't know what is.