Federal bill helps huge farmers, not California's innovative ones

The San Francisco Chronicle reports:

In the upside-down world of farm programs, California produces twice as much food as any other state, but mostly without crop subsidies because fruits, nuts and vegetables are ineligible. Fresno County alone produces more food than South Dakota, but South Dakota gets more than 10 times as much federal crop money.

That's the way it's been since the 1930s, and that's pretty much the way it would stay under the $286 billion farm bill that passed the House in July and the Senate is now considering - yet another five-year plan for agriculture, billed as a temporary remedy for stricken farmers 75 years ago, renewed by Congress as farm income breaks U.S. records.

Within a 200-mile radius of San Francisco are some of the most innovative farmers in America - conventional and organic - in a region that has become the hotbed of a movement beginning to reshape American farms and food.

It aims to bring the forces of creative destruction to agriculture - to displace the industrial model of factory farms and processed foods with a web-style network that reconnects small, local farmers directly with consumers.

Emerging spontaneously among entrepreneurs who often came from outside agriculture - Coke took up farming when he was diagnosed with cancer - today that movement is reaching a critical mass.

Organic farming is the fastest growing segment of agriculture, led by California. Conventional growers who scoffed at organics are quietly working on experimental plots or making total conversions. As big companies go organic, the movement is evolving to locally based food chains.

In Northern California, the foundation-backed Roots of Change project has embarked on a radical rethinking of California's food and farm economy. The goals: fresher, healthier, less standardized food, a more vibrant rural landscape and pesticide/herbicide-free farms that now cover a quarter of a million acres in the state - or about half the size of San Mateo County.

Standing athwart this change is the federal farm bill.

Billions of dollars in public money flow to farmers who don't need it, enriching often prosperous individuals. The entire superstructure of federal support for agriculture - a mind-numbing array of programs packed in an 860-page bill that dictates crop prices to the third decimal point - is bent toward propping up a system rooted in the past.

It's time to separate agriculture from state.