Opinion | My Great-Grandfather Knew How to Fix America’s Food System
Grandpa Dad and Grandma Mom, Iva Howard, chose to buy the groceries they needed and food they didn’t grow from a mom-and-pop store in town. They served on boards for the local church, irrigation district, land bank and hospital.
Grandpa Dad’s stewardship was also a very intimate and personalized thing: He cared deeply about the health of his land and animals, and opted to keep his farm small so that he could maintain more complex, diverse rhythms of care. For example, he devised an irrigation methodology (like today’s computer-maintained surge irrigation) that helped prevent soil runoff and water waste and manually moved irrigation lines to safeguard the soil.
It wasn’t all for the good. There were many environmental choices made in Grandpa Dad’s time that harmed our climate, ecology and soil and water health. Many farm communities made up of white farmers oppressed and mistreated minority farmers and workers. And federal policy, maintained over decades, resulted in the theft of millions of acres of land, pushing Black farmers and landowners off their property.
During the pandemic, many people have become more aware of our interconnectedness and revived locally focused food habits practiced by people like my Grandpa Dad. Many planted victory gardens, sought out beef and chicken from nearby farms or signed up for a C.S.A. (community-supported agriculture) share. In addition to growing vegetables, my husband and I bought a quarter-cow from a local farmer this summer and helped a family member butcher some chickens so that we could have a few in payment.
We need to foster more diversity and resilience on our nation’s farms, to have greater accountability for big agribusinesses and to better protect the rights of America’s food workers. Farm co-ops and other collaborative farming efforts have been springing up in response to the pandemic, with members pooling resources to address sales, distributing, processing or packing needs. These efforts mimic — and in many ways, improve upon — the ways Grandpa Dad and his neighbors once helped one another during harvesting seasons.
After last year’s disastrous bottlenecks, Americans across the country are fighting centralization by supporting the sorts of small, local and regional agribusinesses we’ve lost in recent decades — seed companies, slaughterhouses and other food processors. Efforts to grow a more diverse array of crops, to increase perennial agroecosystems and to conserve water through better irrigation and farming practices all build on Grandpa Dad’s efforts to care for our land and water.
Fixing many of our food system’s problems will require national policy solutions and systemic change. A bill by Senator Cory Booker aims to take on harmful agricultural monopolies. Both the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission can direct antitrust officers to break up the most harmful agribusiness mergers, and the F.T.C. could also establish fair competition rules that would work to prevent corporate dominance.
