Guests feasted on foods grown right on the farm, with a heaping helping of food systems thinking.
Tag: Senator Kirsten Gillibrand
One of Senator Kirsten Gillibrand’s latest efforts to support New York producers took place on Capitol Hill earlier this week when she hosted a “New York Farm Day” in an effort to “tastefully remind Congress, the Administration and others that New York is a major agricultural state, and agriculture is a major part of the state’s economy.”
Why New York’s junior senator could be the best hope for our nation’s broken food policy.
In the 1930s, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt saw that American farmers were producing too much; they weren’t earning off their extra work or surplus. In came the New Deal with the first-ever Farm Bill, set to end overproduction by paying farmers to grow less. In the ’70s, a man named Earl Butz, Secretary of Agriculture at the time, thought that idea was nuts, and so he paid farmers instead to “get big or get out”–referring of course to farming by the thousands of acres and those devoted to just a few crops. It was a perfectly good idea at the time for a country still discovering the value of its land and thenew global marketplace, which seemed to have no problem taking on the surplus. We couldn’t know then what has happened, which has also included farmers growing more crops for secondary, inedible products like corn syrup and cow feed rather than feeding us.
AMAGANSETT–Last Sunday morning, despite torrents of rain, more than 100 farmers, chefs, winemakers and concerned…
As renewal of the Farm Bill approaches in 2012—renewed every five years or so, it…
