I finally had a chance to sit and read the article linked in the Tom Philpott piece I mentioned a few days ago. Heather Rogers provides a good overview of the issues facing small, sustainable farmers, and the whole thing is worth a read. Especially vital to learn was that one of my senators, Saxby Chambliss, overtly opposes USDA support for operations like these (Chambliss signed a letter with two other senators stating, “American families and rural farmers are hurting in today’s economy, and it’s unclear to us how propping up the urban locavore markets addresses their needs.” — I love how they’ve turned “small family farming” into “urban locavorism”, definitely a culture war dog whistle about those dastardly elites and their ridiculous eating habits.)

Rogers’ conclusions, as policy issues go, are roughly:

• USDA extension help at the regional farming level
• Regulatory changes tailored to small, localized dairy and meat processing
• Support for local distribution
• Tax changes to help farmers hire workers and keep/buy land

The regulatory issue is a big one, and has been addressed a little bit in other industries that confront an emergent small vs. large issue. In the renewable energy industry, hydroelectric power requires extensive review and permitting for operations larger than five megawatts, which makes sense since operating on this scale can require dam construction or rerouting waterways, to say nothing of the impact of huge turbines in fish and wildlife, impact to wetlands, and so on. There’s an emerging market for what’s known as micro-hydro, smaller, high efficiency turbine rigs that can operate in relatively shallow and even slow-moving waterways and which could provide a more decentralized energy infrastructure, especially in rural areas where a home, farm, or ranch may well have usable waterways on the property.

FERC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, spent a few years reviewing its guidelines and developed a less onerous (and less expensive) permit process for microhydro. (Full disclosure: I do freelance research and grant/permit writing for a small renewable startup from time to time.) The system isn’t perfect, but FERC and related agencies have taken important steps to support the notion of scaling down instead of scaling up, and given space for an emerging energy market to grow.

So there’s a model in place for how government can react, at least on the issues of small scale, locally focused dairies and abattoirs (i.e., slaughterhouses — I never know if I’m trying to conceal something potentially unpleasant when I get French with it.)

This is an interesting dynamic that’s playing out across many sectors in the economy. For a generation or two, American commerce has been scaling up to maximize efficiencies and regulations have been implemented to reflect massive-scale production, processing, and distribution. And in general, they’re effective. Americans don’t typically die of food-borne illness despite the fact that most of our food is processed and packaged in just a handful of plants — millions of bushels of produce all lumped together before being carted out to grocery stores nationwide. One infected batch could potentially sicken hundreds or thousands of people across a wide region. Tight regulations prevent that, and the costs associated with that are rightly considered a cost of doing business.

But when your scale is a few employees with low turnover instead of a few hundred with a lot of churn, and a few hundred or thousand customers instead of millions, and a handful of farms are supplying your operation, the equation is simply different. The regulations and guiding authorities for a restaurant kitchen and for a packing plant for processed food are not the same, but the goal is the same: consumer safety. So it’s up to consumers to insist that the regulatory environment recognize and accommodate scale.

As for me, I’ll be getting in touch with Senator Chambliss’s office to advocate for smaller government. He says he’s for that, but somehow that usually seems to mean smaller government for big corporations, and big government for the rest of us.