The American public owes farmers gratitude for how little it pays for food, and farmers have been unfairly villianized by the media, says Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack. "You may never need a police officer. I hope you never need a police officer. But every day, two or three times a day, you need a farmer," Vilsack told a Senate committe Tuesday.
The former Iowa governor also took issue with a recent segment of MSNBC’s Morning Joe talk show featuring Spencer Wells, a geneticist, anthropologist and author of Pandora’s Seed, which argues that growing grain crops "made humans more sedentary and unhealthy and made the planet more crowded," Phillip Brasher of the Des Moines Register reports on the Green Fields blog.
Vilsack said he was so annoyed by the segment, which he said portrayed agriculture as "the worst thing that ever happened to humankind," that he asked the network for equal time to rebut the position. A spokeswoman for NBC Universal told Brasher the network had received no such request.
Part of the blame for negative portrayal of farmers goes to newspapers, Vilsak said, explaining they are "reducing staff and reducing it in agriculture at a time when agriculture is so fundamentally important." (Read more)
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