by Maureen Ogle
Scholars and university faculty, especially rural sociologists, most of whom worked at land grant institutions, also supported and enriched the alternative agriculture ethos. Like so many scholarly fields, sociology was transformed by the activist idealism of the 1960s and 1970s and by the Hightower critique of land grant research agendas. As important, by that time, many sociologists had concluded that the Green Revolution—the global project to transplant modern agriculture to impoverished countries—was harming rather than helping communities, farmers, and the environment; they communicated their findings and their dismay in scholarly journals and at conferences. All of it inspired sociologists to ponder the negative social and economic consequences of industrial agriculture. Although Americans prided themselves on feeding the world, these academic critics argued that everyone paid a high price for that accomplishment, whether as family farmers run off the land, rural main streets lined with empty shops, or environmental damage. Like alt-agriculturalists and environmentalists, many sociologists framed their work around a holistic perspective: farmer and field could not be isolated from the “natural” environment or from communities near, dependent on, and catering to agriculture.
Numbers and diversity gave the nascent alt-agriculture alliance the clout needed to gain traction with the establishment. They pressured the EPA to maintain its scrutiny of agriculture as a source of pollution, and the 1976 farm bill contained legislation aimed at creating more markets for small farmers: “farm-to-consumer” projects, or as they’re called now, farmers’ markets. In 1979, the USDA sponsored a study of organic agriculture in the United States and Europe. “Energy shortages, food safety, and environmental concerns have all contributed to the demand for more comprehensive information on organic farming technology,” wrote Secretary of Agriculture Bob Bergland. The final report “strongly” recommended that the USDA support research and education that would “address the needs and problems of organic farmers.” The 1981 farm bill authorized “multidisciplinary organic farming research projects” aimed at implementing the report’s ideas and recommendations. Garth Youngberg, a political scientist who chaired the organic study team, was hired by the USDA to coordinate those programs.
It’s not clear how much Mel Coleman knew about these activities in the early eighties, but this much we do know: he already boasted a healthy environmental perspective because experience had taught him and his family to avoid using chemicals and drugs on their ranch. Back in the 1930s, a mining company had dumped residue into a creek near Coleman land, killing the water’s fish, an event that stayed in Mel’s memory for the rest of his life. “It will permanently warp you to have to deal with something like that,” he said. In the late 1940s, the family had dusted cattle with the insecticide DDT. The experience left a bad taste in Mel’s mouth and bad air in his lungs: the chemical would soak his coat so thoroughly that he had trouble breathing, even out in the open air of the Colorado range. As for that farmers’ darling of the 1950s, DES, he wanted none of it. The first time he encountered cattle dosed with the hormone, the animals’ strange behavior “made [his] . . . lip curl.” He was equally skeptical about antibiotics, which the family used briefly in the 1960s to protect calves from pneumonia. But in the mid-1970s during an outbreak of “scours,” a form of dysentery, Coleman and his veterinarian dosed calves with antibiotics to no avail. Fifteen percent of the animals died. “I believed that the harmful bacteria had developed a resistance to antibiotics, and that scared me,” he said. “Right there, we stopped using [them].” Make no mistake: in 1979, Coleman wasn’t running a 100 percent “natural” operation. He inoculated newborns and fed his cattle hay grown with manufactured fertilizers as well as protein supplements that contained synthetic materials.
But the family’s operation was more “natural” than most, and so the decision to incorporate Coleman Natural Beef made sense both ethically and financially. Mel was assigned the task of turning idea into dollars. The owner of a small local feedlot agreed to finish the Colemans’ cattle on a drug-free diet, and a nearby meat locker contracted to slaughter the stock and process the carcasses. Persuading retailers to carry the beef was much harder. The obvious outlets were natural food stores, but many catered to vegetarians and weren’t interested in selling meat, natural or otherwise. Other would-be dealers didn’t understand the product. “If you don’t have to buy antibiotics and hormones,” one asked Coleman, “shouldn’t natural beef cost less?” “If I stock your beef and call it ‘natural,’ what does that say about the rest of my beef?” queried another. “That it’s bad because it’s full of chemicals?” By 1982, Mel had landed just two accounts—one natural food store and a Denver hospital—but he’d also exhausted the possibilities in Colorado. His son persuaded him to try California, arguing that when it came to fads, culinary or otherwise, Californians led rather than followed. Off Coleman went, renting a car (which also served as his hotel) and driving from one retailer to another.
The break finally came when he visited the headquarters of Mrs. Gooch’s Ranch Markets, a small chain of Southern California health food stores (“just a bunch of hippies sellin’ food,” according to Coleman). The owners wanted to carry natural meats but had not been able to find a decent product. One look at Mel Coleman, however, who was dressed in his usual Colorado-ranch attire of cowboy hat and jeans, and a company executive knew that he’d found the real deal. The Gooch family signed a contract and spread the word to owners of other health food stores around the country. Two years later, an executive with Grand Union, a major East Coast grocery chain, visited the Coleman booth at a natural foods trade show. That encounter led to a contract to deliver five hundred cattle a week, a quantity that the Colemans could not supply as quickly as Grand Union wanted meat in its refrigerators. But other Colorado ranchers were hanging on by a financial thread, and the family obtained a letter of credit from Grand Union that allowed them to contract with others to raise cattle on their behalf.
Grand Union spared no expense in promoting the meat to its customers, touting beef that hailed from a place where “the mountain air is clear, the water pure, and soil uncontaminated.” Polly and Mel Coleman flew east to help introduce the product, grilling steaks in store parking lots and handing out samples. Not everyone was impressed. One customer accused Mel of wearing a cowboy hat and boots in order to “look like a real rancher.” On another occasion, a man who identified himself as a college professor accused Coleman of lying; it was impossible to raise cattle without the use of drugs. “How do you think we did it in the 1930s?” Mel retorted. But Mel and Polly converted shoppers taste sample by taste sample—one five-hundred-count box of toothpicks a day. Grand Union opened other doors; more orders trickled in. Health food retailers asked for lamb, veal, pork, and rabbit, which the Colemans were able to access from other ranchers. The family built a fabricating plant in Denver (they shipped their product as boxed beef) and moved headquarters from a spare room at the family ranch to a rented room at a nearby motel to a building in downtown Saguache. But the town still relied on an old-fashioned party-line phone system, and express delivery service arrived only twice a week. Practicality trumped sentiment, and the family moved the office to Denver, too.
While Mel Coleman pursued customers one toothpick at a time, alt-agriculturalists battled the establishment and scored wins of their own. In 1985, the same year that Grand Union approached the Colemans, Congress approved a farm bill that authorized the creation of an “agricultural productivity research” program. That bland wording concealed a major victory for sustainable agriculture: a mandate that required the USDA to sponsor and support research into and development of “Low-Input Sustainable Agriculture” (LISA). As is typical of farm bill legislation, the measure itself provided no funding; it was up to the USDA to request money. The department, by then a decidedly Reaganesque body, declined to do so. But in 1986 and 1987, the coalition returned to Capitol Hill and persuaded Congress to part with nearly $4 million to get LISA up and running. Between that da
te and 1992, Congress handed over more than $26 million for the support of alternative agriculture. Add in matching grants and funds from nonprofits, universities, and agribusiness, and all told, LISA’s 183 projects had received $39 million by the early 1990s.
The congressional generosity is all the more startling given the Reagan administration’s hostility to alternative agriculture. Garth Youngberg, the man hired by the USDA after the department released its 1980 report on organic agriculture, was one of the first out the door after Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter in the 1980 election. “The word came down,” Youngberg said, that the USDA was not interested in promoting “organic.” Moreover, the arrival of LISA inspired an extraordinary display of public mockery from many in the agricultural mainstream. A writer for a farm magazine scoffed that the program represented a foolish desire to “replac[e] the mechanical and scientific advancements of the past 50 years with sweat and a lower standard of living.” A ConAgra executive suggested an alternative name for the alternative package: “I’d call it FIDO, fewer inputs, declining outputs. A real dog.” Another agribusiness insider was even less kind. “Our worthless opponents are not constrained [by] honesty.” Otherwise, “they wouldn’t call it LISA, they would call it LILO—Low Input, Low Output.” So the creation of and funding for LISA raise some obvious questions: What happened? How did activists manage to score such an impressive win? Part of the explanation is that by the late 1980s, Naderites had made significant inroads into the USDA and other federal agencies; many had gone from being jeans-wearing outsiders to suit-jacketed insiders, and when reformers lobbied for what became LISA, they were coached by sympathetic USDA employees. But another factor that led to LISA can be understood by examining the legislative machinations that produce the “farm bill.” During the 1970s, that process had been upended, and the ensuing turmoil created an opening that turned the tide for alternative agriculture and won it a permanent seat at the USDA table.
Congressional legislation, whether for agriculture, education, or defense, typically begins life in a committee made up of senators or representatives. Those committee members rely on others—interns and staff, outside experts, and lobbyists—to serve as conduits to the facts, research, and science on which legislation rests. The more informed, reliable, and reputable those conduits are, the more likely it is that senators and representatives will take their advice. The corollaries are two: The more input that groups of experts or lobbyists provide, the more likely it is that the resulting legislation will meet their needs. The more useful and reliable their input, the more likely that a senator or representative will rely on them again in the future. As a result, subsequent bills echo earlier ones, and the information in–legislation out cycle repeats itself.
That’s been particularly true for what are known as the “farm bills.” As we saw in chapter 4, in 1933 Congress passed legislation that provided direct subsidies to farmers. Approximately every five years since, that body has hammered out a new farm bill rich with programs to support agriculture. Critics have long complained that these legislative packages are skewed toward big farmers at the expense of small ones, and crop monoculture at the expense of diversified agriculture. It’s true that from the 1930s to the 1960s, farm bill legislation primarily targeted major commodities such as hogs and cotton because those were crucial to the logic of that first farm bill: in the 1930s, commodities were among the nation’s most important agricultural products and Congress intended to pay for those first subsidies by taxing processors who converted commodities into food and fiber. Those initial farm bills were also structured to encourage farmers to practice factory farming. Indeed, in the 1940s and 1950s, lawmakers, the USDA, and other government departments and agencies actively tried to move marginal farmers into other lines of work, not because agribusiness kept lawmakers and bureaucrats on a leash, but because economic policymakers believed that big farms could provide food and fiber to an urban population more cheaply than small ones. This focus on commodities and factory farming led congressional committee members to rely on experts who could provide reliable information about both. That included USDA analysts who studied crop yields, consumer behavior, and export markets, as well as lobbyists for commodity producers and farmers’ organizations. Among the latter was the American Farm Bureau Federation; the bureau, born in the early twentieth century, had been founded by farmers and manufacturers who supported businesslike farm management and industrial-style agriculture. For some thirty years, this “iron triangle”—the House and Senate agriculture committees, relevant outside experts, and the USDA—promoted, protected, and reinforced legislation aimed at supporting the industrial model of agriculture.
By the 1980s, however, a series of events had shattered the iron triangle. As we saw earlier, during the 1970s many government officials believed that agriculture had become “too important” to leave to agriculturalists. But factory farming itself contributed to the collapse of the iron triangle. The industrial model of farming is predicated on specialization, and as the model became more entrenched, so did special-interest groups—corn growers, broiler makers, cattle grazers, cattle feeders—each of them demanding its share of the farm bill. Factory farming also fostered geographic specialization. Texas cattle feeders had few commonalities with in/out Corn Belt feeders, and Iowa chicken farmers none at all with Georgia broiler growers. Those regional interests prodded their own representatives and senators to make demands on their behalf with the House and Senate agriculture committees. The secretary of agriculture became less important to the bill-making process than the heads of specialized bureaus and agencies who, in their turn, attracted lobbyists’ attention. Congressional committees fractured into multiple subcommittees whose chairs gained their own clout. Negotiations became increasingly contentious as myriad demands by multiple interests spawned farm bills of mind-numbing complexity and detail. As the number of farmers dwindled, the political clout of politicians from agricultural states diminished, and they were forced to garner support for increasingly expensive agricultural legislation by making deals with lawmakers from urban areas. By the 1970s, the “farm” bill had morphed into a “farm and food” bill that included, for example, food stamp programs that primarily served urban populations.
The disarray fractured relations among the triangle’s traditional power players, leaving fissures through which poured consumer advocates, environmentalists, anti-hunger activists, nutritionists, and, of course, alternative agriculturalists, all of them demanding their own share of the farm bill. As Don Paarlberg, a well-known agricultural economist who spent years working at the USDA, put it, the “agricultural establishment had lost control of the farm policy agenda.” The onslaught infuriated many in the old guard. One economist pronounced it “unthinkable” that farm policy had “tilted towards consumers’ interests” and other groups “so completely alien to farmers’ thinking and tradition.” He grudgingly conceded the need for cooperation, but only because he feared that resisting the invaders would lead to “unrest in society.” He didn’t have much choice. Many of those storming the gates were skilled Naderist negotiators who had no intention of being denied a role in shaping such an expensive piece of legislation.
But the farm crisis that began in the late 1970s inadvertently eased the invaders’ way. As we saw in the previous chapter, many farmers who had heeded the call to feed the world’s starving had ended up in debt or foreclosure. The ensuing crisis inspired the creation of the American Agriculture Movement (AAM), a loose-knit but militant, neopopulist group of farmers who blamed government for their woes. In early 1979, the AAM captured national attention when its “tractorcade” descended upon Washington, DC, with demands that Capitol Hill repair what it had ruined. As far as the protesters were concerned, rage mattered more than diplomacy, and AAM leaders proved mostly unwilling to compromise with legislators accustomed to civility and negotiation. For all its missteps, however, the movement grabbed media attention. Talk show hosts, broadcast news anchors, and big-city reporters de
scended on the Midwest. Three actresses who had portrayed farm wives in films testified before a congressional task force. (The spotlight proved a mixed blessing. A staff member of one rural advocacy group groused that journalists were often less interested in facts than in finding “a farmer who [would] cry on camera.”) Given the ongoing tragedy—the number of suicides was sobering—and the attention it received, the senators and representatives charged with putting together the 1985 farm bill found it impossible to be against family farms or programs aimed at helping them.
The alt-agriculture coalition seized the opportunity, and thus LISA was born. The activists’ strategy reveals how adept they had become at navigating the belly of the beast. They framed their proposal as support for “low-input sustainable agriculture” because they knew that “low-input” would appeal to Republican budget slashers. When they returned to Capitol Hill two years later to lobby for money for LISA, the coalition deliberately excluded people and groups that openly promoted “organic” farming. (That included an otherwise enthusiastic supporter, the Center for Science in the Public Interest; presumably the sight of Michael Jacobson would only remind the establishment of his antics on The Mike Douglas Show a few years earlier.) “We warned everybody that you don’t even use the word organic,” explained one of the participants. “If you’re asked, you can answer the question, but you don’t even mention it when you’re up there [on the Hill lobbying].” Instead, the alt-agriculturalists employed more powerful rhetoric: their party of persuaders included two of the nation’s most successful alternative farmers, Dick Thompson of Iowa and Fred Kirschenmann of North Dakota.