MONTEVIDEO, Minn. — The bankruptcy and subsequent shutdown of the Pure Prairie Poultry processing plant in St. Charles, Iowa, has once more laid bare the dangers and the inadequacies of our industrial farming structure.
“Too big to fail” is no longer just a condition of the financial sector, it is now a concept that is reaching deep into our farming and rural communities. The Pure Prairie Poultry plant closure on Oct. 2 left 128 people without jobs, over 200 creditors with hundreds of millions in unpaid bills and dozens of farming families with a total of over 1.3 million chickens that no longer have a viable path to our food supply.
Consolidation of our farming systems forces farmers to get big or get out, and still leaves them with the burden and the risk, which becomes exponentially higher when bigger is deemed better. Contract growers like those utilized by Pure Prairie supply the labor, the facilities and the risk with little control over the process, planning or business oversight. And because the growers do not even own the birds in their care, they have been left with few options when the owner of those birds, Pure Prairie, ceased operations with little warning.
The failure of Pure Prairie and its ripple effects across farming communities in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Iowa are an unfortunate consequence of a corporate-controlled food system where contract growing schemes and consolidation are the order of the day. Ag consolidation creates a brittle system where if one block is lost, the whole tower comes down, leaving destruction in its wake. As state and federal authorities step in to stabilize the situation, taxpayers are now picking up the tab, wasting public resources at a time when we should be focusing on investing in local food systems that are not only more resilient but spread both the risk and the benefit to a larger community.
The Land Stewardship Project continues its policy and program work to champion seeing more farmers on the land, building healthy rural communities and investing in local food infrastructure. These changes, along with others, are needed to ensure that farmers and communities will not carry the burden and suffer the negative results of a corporate-control food chain.
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