I think we have to invest in it. I should be clear. This is not an area of super expertise for me. I'm an anti-poverty activist at heart who is organizing in low-income communities through food, because food is a powerful way to connect people, and also work on some of the big, seemingly intractable problems of our time, as I said, climate change, public health, and inequality. I am not going to pontificate on the dimensions of how our national food policy supports a thriving organic system.
What I do know is that my experience with those who have tried to buck the trend is that it can be done, but there are practically no resources put toward helping it happen. Again, I haven't crunched the numbers, but when I talk to a person who is farming 100 acres of land and able to take $35,000 or $40,000 gross out of it, and get his kids together, off to school, family is good, and make money—and I pass rows and rows of farmland all dedicated to soy and corn, a lot of it for ethanol, a lot of it for livestock—when he talks to me about the land around him, he says basically, “I have sugar, meat, and processed food all around me.”
There is a burgeoning crew of young farmers who want to get on the land and grow in a very, very different way, and there is a market for that. My concern is, you know, the question that you raised around it: how do we democratize that good food? How do we make sure that all of us have access to more expensive food, because our food needs to be more expensive for it to take care of the environment and to ensure that it's healthy for us.
That's the dilemma. The more we can create supports by a government in a regulatory framework that pushes and encourages farmers to grow that way, the better.