COVID-19 Response: Ecological Change and Family Farms

Carolyn Raffensperger and Pat Schlarbaum started our show with a discussion of Ecological Change -- and how a small change in one species or location has unintended consequences elsewhere.  Our Roundtable of Iowa Farmers Union members responded to the crisis caused by COVID-19 in Meat Processing Plants in Iowa.  Aaron Lehman, Chris Petersen, and John Gilbert described the food distribution system before the "Get Big or Get Out" era of Industrial Agriculture and gave us some ideas about how to adapt it to the 21st century and shared the alternatives that they themselves are implementing. Cornelia Flora ended the program by describing historically, how America developed from being a colony exporting raw materials to developing regional self-sufficiency to returning the colonial model of growing on a few crops and animals feeding into farm value chains controlled by a few large corporations -- leaving our food system vulnerable to attacks -- human or crop diseases or weather.  The decline of local control and the change in rules and regulations at the state and federal level increased the vulnerability of family farmers and we need to use this crisis to try to increase the resilience of our farming systems and rural communities.