Saving the Right to Photograph Farms

It is not sur­pris­ing, then, that leg­is­la­tion mak­ing it ille­gal to pho­to­graph farms recently came up for state sen­ate con­sid­er­a­tion in four dif­fer­ent states: Florida, Iowa, New York and Minnesota—the ori­gin of which is still unknown.

Fortunately, food advo­cacy group Slow Food USA was alerted to the fact before it got very far. “The news came to us from one of our board mem­bers, Kurt Friese, who is in Iowa City, Iowa,” Emily Vaughn, Associate Program Manager for Slow Food USA and one of the project leads in defeat­ing the leg­is­la­tion, told Organic Connections. “He wrote about it exten­sively in the Huffington Post, and he was the one who let us know what was going on. We started talk­ing to part­ner orga­ni­za­tions to see if they were active on it, and it seemed like hardly any­one had heard of it or was doing any­thing about it. We real­ized this was some­thing that we needed to put a lot of atten­tion on so that we could defeat these sense­less bills from passing.”

Unlike the indi­vid­u­als or cor­po­ra­tions try­ing to sneak this leg­is­la­tion past the pub­lic, Slow Food USA went into very pub­lic action. “The first thing we did was start a peti­tion,” Vaughn said. “We addressed it openly because we knew that bills were going to con­tinue to crop up in other states, and we wanted to give our­selves wig­gle room and not phrase it to only sen­a­tors in a cer­tain state. So we came up with a peti­tion that any­one could sign that basi­cally said, ‘We urge you to oppose these bills. As a con­cerned con­sumer I’m inter­ested in know­ing where my food comes from,’ because we do believe it’s a right for peo­ple to know where their food comes from and to be able to sup­port that right. We had over 45,000 peo­ple sign the peti­tion. Our board mem­ber Kurt Friese hand-delivered it to three sen­a­tors in Iowa, and we e-mailed the signed peti­tion to sen­a­tors in other states.”

While it isn’t known what pri­vate inter­ests lob­bied for these bills, their moti­va­tion is clear. “In terms of what they were try­ing to accom­plish and why would they do this, you have to ask your­self who stands to ben­e­fit from these bills,” Vaughn remarked. “A well-managed farm has noth­ing to hide, so these bills would have ended up hid­ing the true story behind our indus­trial farm­ing sys­tem. It seems that Big Ag is not pleased with the way its true prac­tices are depicted in the media—environmental con­di­tions, human rights con­di­tions, ani­mal con­di­tions, ani­mal hus­bandry con­di­tions. They were hop­ing to draw a cur­tain across farm­ing in America and just sort of black out the truth.”

In addi­tion to the defen­sive action of the peti­tion to block the leg­is­la­tion, Slow Food USA took an offen­sive tack as well. “We fol­lowed up the deliv­er­ies of the peti­tion sig­na­tures with the more pos­i­tive side of our cam­paign,” Vaughn con­tin­ued. “Instead of just antag­o­niz­ing what we don’t want to see, we cre­ated an oppor­tu­nity for peo­ple to cel­e­brate the farms that peo­ple want to see more of. There are plenty of farms out there that are pretty darn pho­to­genic, and our tax dol­lars should be going to sup­port those farms instead of the ones that we’re not even sup­posed to be able to see. So we invited peo­ple to sub­mit pho­tos of the farms that they want to see more of to a Facebook page and called it the ‘farmer­azzi’ com­po­nent of the cam­paign; peo­ple were act­ing like paparazzi for farms and show­ing and cel­e­brat­ing the good that does exist in our food sys­tem. We had over 450 pho­tos submitted.

“We ran a con­test so that peo­ple could ‘like’ their favorite pho­tos, which helped it spread to a larger audi­ence. A whole lot of farm­ers wrote in to thank us for run­ning this cam­paign, because although they don’t sup­port tres­pass­ing (and nei­ther do we), they did want to encour­age peo­ple to come and see how they pro­duce things. They were proud of their pro­duc­tion meth­ods and were proud of the farms that they were running.”

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After sev­eral months of hard cam­paign­ing, all four bills died before they even made it to a vote. “I have heard from sev­eral sen­a­tors that pub­lic opin­ion out­cry did play a role in the depri­or­i­ti­za­tion of the bill,” said Vaughn. “In New York State, for exam­ple, it never made it out of the sen­ate; there was no assem­bly spon­sor for the bill. It does seem like it some­how made it to the level of being some­thing in com­mit­tee or for floor debate, but it was never a priority.

“There was also a heap of issues that were legit­i­mate pri­or­i­ties; for exam­ple, two states were delayed pass­ing their bud­gets and entered into extended ses­sions, and until they were able to rec­on­cile bud­get demands, there really wasn’t time on the sched­ule for any­thing else. But the fact that there was so much oppo­si­tion from vot­ers I think helped ensure that other things were pri­or­i­tized. If this had been a pub­licly demanded issue to pass, they would have paid more atten­tion. Instead what they saw was that no one who was in favor of these bills was vocal about it—there were very few peo­ple who weren’t cor­po­rate spokes­peo­ple who were in favor of the bill; and the peo­ple who were pay­ing atten­tion were food advo­cates who thought that it was absolutely a step in the wrong direction.”

Despite the win, Vaughn says we must remain vig­i­lant on the sub­ject. “The fight may not be over,” she said. “The bills were rapidly copied in three other states from their ori­gin point, and a sim­i­lar bill could be intro­duced in any other state at the begin­ning of the next ses­sion. We’re con­fi­dent that it’s dead at least for this year, but the lobby money is still there and the farm­ing prac­tices are still there. Big Ag hasn’t changed its posi­tion on want­ing these farms kept from pub­lic vision, even though we have a right to see what goes on in farm­ing in America.

“In our ‘far­marazzi’ pho­tos, we got so many great com­ments,” Vaughn con­cluded. “They were along the lines of, ‘I’m so glad that there is still some­thing out there; there’s some glim­mer of hope for our food sys­tem.’ And I truly believe that there is; there is so much beauty in our food as well as in our farm­ing sys­tem that we should be able to cel­e­brate it. This is a moment for peo­ple to both take an oppo­si­tional action to some­thing they wanted to see fail and also take a moment to just rec­og­nize how much good there is.”

To find out the lat­est on Slow Food USA and their many activ­i­ties, visit www.slowfoodusa.org.