Foodies Pitch Nominees to Barack Obama for Secretary of Agriculture
The effort to nominate food policy figure Michael Pollan never got off the ground, but Pollan and his other American food thinker buds—88 in total including Alice Waters, Rick Bayless, Wendell Berry, Eric Schlosser, Dan Barber, and Marion Nestle—wrote Obama a letter, nominating some potential Secretaries of Agriculture:
1. Gus Schumacher, former Under Secretary of Agriculture for Farm and Foreign Agricultural Services and former Massachusetts Commissioner of Agriculture (website)
2. Chuck Hassebrook, executive director, Center for Rural Affairs, Nebraska (website)
3. Sarah Vogel, former Commissioner of Agriculture for North Dakota and lawyer (Wiki page)
4. Fred Kirschenmann, organic farmer, distinguished fellow at the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture in Iowa, and president of the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture in New York (website)
5. Mark Ritchie, Minnesota Secretary of State, former policy analyst in Minnesota's Department of Agriculture under Governor Rudy Perpich, co-founder of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (website)
6. Neil Hamilton, Dwight D. Opperman Chair of Law and director of the Agricultural Law Center at Drake University in Iowa (Wiki page)
Do you have a take on the prospects? Do you feel like it affects you?
[via New York Times]
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2 Comments:
How about some farmer, that's been doing it(farming ) his whole life, and knows nothing about politics....maybe we would have someone in office that didn't feed us a bunch of B.S.
jword2001 at 9:28PM on 12/05/08
According to Fred Kirschenmann's website:
"He is president of Kirschenmann Family Farms, a 3,500-acre certified organic farm in Windsor, North Dakota, where he also was president (1990-1999) of Farm Verified Organic, a private organic certification agency.
He is a leader of the organic/sustainable agriculture movement, and has served on many boards and advisory committees of such organizations. He has completed a five-year term on the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Organic Standards Board, and has chaired the administrative council for the USDA's North Central Region's Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE) program......
...Kirschenmann is a third-generation farmer...."
And an excerpt from an essay of his:
"If we redesign agriculture to make us more aware of the "most basic details of our own food production," then agriculture might help us become more aware of our dependence on local ecosystems and thereby motivate us to restore and maintain them…. [and] evolve a new production ethic that would combine the need to produce with the need to sustain the means of production. Such an ethic would likely modify the goals of agriculture and end our tendency to reduce agriculture to a production system driven solely by economic forces."
Seems like someone whose been farming quite a while and respects the land he uses. As far as politic experience, it sounds like his has largely been driven by his passion for organic and sustainable agriculture. I doubt he would be your classic B.S. politician.
codeblue at 12:13PM on 12/06/08