growing trust 117can educate consumers about a supply chain that’s as healthy or un-
healthy as we choose to make it.
That information doesn’t fit in a fi ve- syllable jingle. And those growers
will never win a price war either. The best they can hope for is a market-
ing tactic known as friendship, or something like it. Their task is to com-
Paying the Price of Low Prices
A common complaint about organic and local foods is that they’re more ex-
pensive than “conventional” (industrially grown) foods. Most consumers don’t
realize how much we’re already paying for the conventional foods, before we
even get to the supermarket. Our tax dollars subsidize the petroleum used in
growing, processing, and shipping these products. We also pay direct subsidies
to the large- scale, chemical- dependent brand of farming. And we’re being
forced to pay more each year for the environmental and health costs of that
method of food production.
Here’s an exercise: add up the portion of agricultural fuel use that is paid
for with our taxes ($22 billion), direct Farm Bill subsidies for corn and wheat
($3 billion), treatment of food- related illnesses ($10 billion), agricultural chemi-
cal cleanup costs ($17 billion), collateral costs of pesticide use ($8 billion), and
costs of nutrients lost to erosion ($20 billion). At minimum, that’s a national sub-
sidy of at least $80 billion, about $725 per household each year. That plus the
sticker price buys our “inexpensive” conventional food.
Organic practices build rather than deplete the soil, using manure and cover
crops. They eliminate pesticides and herbicides, instead using biological pest
controls and some old- fashioned weeding with a hoe. They maintain and apply
knowledge of many different crops. All this requires extra time and labor. Smaller
farms also bear relatively higher costs for packaging, marketing, and distribu-
tion. But the main difference is that organic growers aren’t forcing us to pay ex-
penses they’ve shifted into other domains, such as environmental and health
damage. As they’re allowed to play a larger role in the U.S. agricultural economy,
our subsidy costs to industrial agriculture will decrease. For a few dollars up
front, it’s a blue- chip investment.STEVEN L. HOPP