Family Farmers Support Bernie Sanders for President Over Hillary in Record Numbers: International Trade and the Fight to Save Rural America

By Nebraska Farmer Ruth Chantry,

While delivering our eggs to a neighboring grass-fed dairy’s little store last week, the herdsman and I were discussing Bernie Sanders, discussing trade deficits and the direct link to food security and food and farming sovereignty (for us each and for our whole country).

Those reflections bear sharing with others, to connect dots that seem abstract in hurried moments when we are deciding whether to get the more or less expensive apples, ham, milk, bread, eggs at our store/farmers market/wherever we can … or if we can get them at all. If we can buy them, one may want to know where they were grown, how they were grown — and for many of us — will they support our neighbors’ good work across the field or across the country.

For the first time in anytime that I can remember, Bernie Sanders has given me reason to be excited about someone attentive to the farmers and the trades. Bernie Sanders has been working since 1993 and earlier towards the greater good, when he opposed vehemently and vociferously that NAFTA was the first of many bad trade deals in how it would affect the American working class.

Bernie Sanders consistently cares and votes in the most beneficial direction for farmers and the people that work with their hands every day, in the soil, in the barn, in the factory, in the food system. With admirable tenacity and persistence stretching more than three decades, Bernie Sanders also opposed a trade deal with China in 2000, the Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) because he believed it would be detrimental for American trade deficit. Trade deficits do seem abstract to me as our own farm goods are sold locally, but connecting the dots of the PNTR is just one reason that the abstract hits home even for a small farm in Nebraska.

Think about this — China has just recently (early 2016) bought the largest Australian dairy, a large concern especially because milk-based baby formula is already in short supply in parts of Australia because of demand in China. China also made a $43 BILLION bid for Syngenta, the world’s largest agrichemical/seed company that does a huge amount of business in North America. Also recently, China bought North Carolina-based Smithfield Foods (The Bank of China heavily backed the deal and paid more than its value.)

In turn, Smithfield gave money to some of Nebraska’s own legislators who in turn, voted against Nebraska’s LB 176 — one of the last legislative remnants to keep out vertical integration of meatpacker ownership of hogs in Nebraska. As a Nebraskan, it’s an embarrassment to mention it.

If you think that trade deals and all their abstraction doesn’t affect a small farmer such as me or farm land and landscapes just down the road and 2500 miles away and food in our country at every level, then think again.

Think it doesn’t matter? You throw in trade deficits, and it most certainly does. Think it doesn’t matter? You throw in how (foreign & domestic) corporate decisions affect our landscape, food options, food prices and health EVERY. SINGLE. DAY. and it does. Food sovereignty is food security.

Bernie Sanders also voted against the TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement), an agreement that appears to this farmer to be handing over to corporate and foreign interests, all essence of good family farm and food independence this country has worked generations for (and that’s not even mentioning manufacturing). In essence, this means that corporate rights are more important than farmer and citizen’s rights, and ultimately all the essential means of production are being auctioned off to the highest bidder. In reality, the TPP will allow trade agreements to overrule environmental standards and agreements in our own country, including democratically passed GMO “right to know” labeling currently law in some states. In addition, Bernie Sanders is also currently championing against the “DARK” act, which would disallow states to have more local control over their food and farming landscape and consumer choices. And in the continued light of landscape, food and natural resources, Bernie Sanders voted against Keystone XL, the path of which would have run through Nebraska and across the Ogallala Aquifer, an incredible national resource that needs to be protected always.

Bernie Sanders has been a firm, consistent, compassionate voice in his community and in Congress for a long time — for farmers, for the working class, children, elderly … humanity … equitably for over 50 years. In this time, the choice to move forward as a country that isn’t beholden to nor strangled by domestic and foreign corporate greed over care for our land, for our healthy food production, for our family farmers’ livelihoods, and for our landscape into the future is — for this farmer — absolutely without question, Bernie Sanders.

Ruth Chantry

Common Good Farm

Raymond, NE

Ruth Chantry co-owns Common Good Farm near Raymond, NE with her husband Evrett Lunquist grow organic produce, eggs, plants, a small cattle herd & hogs.