Family Vs Factory Farm

Family Vs Factory Farm

Bob Larson
Bob Larson
Backers of the ‘What’s Upstream’ campaign may be painting an unrealistic picture of what farming really looks like, claiming it’s a defense of family farms and the environment against the corporate farming invaders.

But, Madi Clark with the Washington Policy Center says the generalization that agriculture is dominated by big factory farms is false, when family farms make up over 95% of all farming operations in our state…

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“A lot of time when people aren’t familiar with agriculture, they tend to jump back and go ‘it’s the factory farms taking over, they’re huge, they’re collosal, they’re these monolithic operations that don’t care about the lowly person that’s buying this in the grocery store, when it is still a family operation’.”

Clark says added regulations further the financial burden put on small farms …

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“Research shows that large farms will only have 1% of their sales that will be affected in terms of compliance costs, but for the smaller farms that 6% and 4%, and the FDA even concluded that the smaller farms may have to have off-farm income to offset the cost of being compliant. So, I think we need to remember that this excessive burden that the anti-farming campaign is trying to add is actually just hurting the farmers and hurting the end goal of trying to make farming better in Washington state.”

Clark says of the 2.1-million farms in the U.S., only 3% are non-family operations that contribute just 16% of our nation’s ag production.

 

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