facts

I spent several days in the company of well established conventional farmers recently and it drove home the truth to me that the country may be ungovernable at this point. These folks knew, in considerable detail, as it turns out, about the troubles surrounding a Minnesota dairy farmer who seems to have sickened several people by selling them raw milk, but they had simply not heard anything about the DeCoster egg empire and its troubles with salmonella. They didn't dispute the facts as I related them to the best of my knowledge, they simply had not heard.

If your source of national news is Fox and your source for farm news is a typical "prices and farmer jokes" serving, you are simply going to be looking at different facts from someone who reads newpapers, some of them foreign, on the internet and gains farm information from several listservs. Some of what is available to each is fantasy, no doubt, but I am thinking now about facts. Fox and the conventional farm press are going to assume that DeCoster's problems are merely a glitch in an otherwise excellent system of large players, and my listservs will take the approach that the eggs problem is symtomatic of a rotten food system. These opinion based "fact screens" will have to do with what gets noticed and what gets repeated. We will hear different facts. The country does not become governable until we deliberately and calmly share facts, which does not seem likely to happen soon.

It could be said, for one thing, that the scale of these events are vastly different. The dairy farmer, if he is found to have caused a sickening of customers, will only have exposed perhaps several dozen people. DeCoster's eggs were available to millions. On the other hand, many more Americans depend upon the likes of DeCoster for their eggs than are served by farms like ours and many others. This has implications in a democracy for food safety rules, inspections and so forth.

Surrounding the entire question is the matter of what kind of country and agriculture we want to build for the future. Is our future an endless series of DeCoster empires, or will there be an increasing number of opportunities for folks to connect more closely with their food, as our customers do?