I’m beginning to feel like a stalker. Let’s see what our friend Secretary Vilsack is up to this week.

First, Tom Vilsack, The New Face of Agriculture gave an interview to the Washington Post.

Food during my early years was a very difficult issue for me. I grew up in an addictive family. My mother had serious problems with alcohol and prescription drugs. I was an overweight kid. I can remember back in those days there weren’t the strategies that there are today to deal with those issues. So my parents put this very nasty cartoon of a very overweight young kid with a beanie cap and pasted it on the front of the refrigerator. So every time I opened the refrigerator I had to look at that picture.

Food is a fairly significant aspect of my life. I have struggled mightily with food. With my weight. And I’m conscious of it. So I have a sensitivity to people who struggle with their weight. That’s one aspect people don’t fully appreciate. I don’t want youngsters to go through what I went through.

There are ways we can go do a better job of educating young moms and dads about the vital role they have as the child’s first teacher. I think there are ways in which we can partner with local school districts and states to do a better job to provide nutrition options at school. It’s our responsibility to get this health-care crisis under control. I think if people understand that history and how serious I am about this and look at the record in Iowa — the real record in Iowa — they would be less concerned than they were.

Wow. As somebody who loved and lost a brother who had a childhood all too similar to Vilsack’s, I just want to give him a big hug.

More below…

Vilsack wrapped up his WaPo interview by saying that the USDA is America’s “first energy department” – not because of biofuels but because food powers us, the American people.

A few more money quotes:

In a perfect world, everything that was sold, everything that was purchased and consumed would be local, so the economy would receive the benefit of that. But sometimes that stresses the capacity: the production capacity or the distribution capacity. Especially since we don’t have yet a very sophisticated distribution system for locally grown food. One thing we can do is work on strategies to make that happen. It can be grant programs, loan programs, it can be technical assistance. [emphasis mine]

the vision [of the USDA]: a sufficient, safe, nutritious food supply produced in a sustainable and environmentally supportive way.

I can get behind that. Of course, it depends on how you define words like “sustainable” and “environmentally supportive” and “nutritious.” Because I don’t include Splenda or GMOs or the Luna bar whole grain cookies in those categories. I hope Secretary Vilsack doesn’t either.

Jim Goodman, a farmer and an occasional blogger on La Vida Locavore, published a response to Secretary Vilsack on Common Dreams:

USDA Sees a Problem, Not the Solution

USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack has stated his mission; “the government must get Americans to eat more healthful foods while also boosting crop production to feed a growing world population.”

Since the end of WWII, every USDA Secretary has embraced boosting crop production as a means of feeding a growing world population. Unfortunately, this policy has meant increasing acreages of corn and soybeans and increasing world hunger.

Fully half of the corn and soy grown in the US is fed directly to livestock. By 2012, one third of the corn crop will go into ethanol. Ten percent, give or take, will be exported and likely fed to livestock, with the rest converted into processed foods, corn chips, other snack items and the ubiquitous high fructose corn sweetener.

As Vilsack sees it, the other half of USDA’s mission – “to get Americans to eat more healthful foods” — is decidedly at odds with feeding a growing world population. I disagree, getting Americans to eat more healthful foods could be the first step in decreasing the acreage devoted to corn and soy production.

Hell yeah!

Grist also comments on Vilsack, saying he gets a thumbs up for planting a garden but a different finger for pushing ethanol. In another Grist column, Tom Laskawy describes a speech by Vilsack in front of a bunch of wheat growers. Keep in mind that 2/3 of America’s wheat comes from the very largest 3.6% of our farms – those over 2000 acres (with an average size of over 8000 acres). And just what did Vilsack say to them? Check THIS out!

Vilsack called on farmers to accept the political reality that U.S. farm program direct payments are under fire both at home and abroad and therefore farmers should develop other sources of income. In his remarks to the groups he said he intends to promote a far more diversified income base for the farm sector, saying that windmills and biofuels should definitely be part of the income mix and that organic agriculture will also play an increasing role.

Ha! Vilsack to enormous commodity farmers: Now might be the time to think about going organic!!! Awesome!!!! (That’s my paraphrasing of it, btw – not a direct Vilsack quote.)

This is a bit of an aside, but Treehugger published a bio of Vilsack that included some interesting details:

Tom Vilsack was born in Pittsburgh on December 12, 1950 and abandoned shortly thereafter. Placed in an orphanage, he was adopted one year later. After spending his childhood in Pittsburgh, he attended Hamilton College in New York, where he earned his bachelor’s degree. He went on the Albany Law School, earning his JD in 1975. After this he moved to Mt Pleasant, Iowa where he joined his father-in-law’s law firm.

In 1987, he was elected mayor of Mt Pleasant; and in 1992 was elected to the Iowa state senate. In 1998 he won the governorship of Iowa by a slim margin, a position he held until January 2007. In the most recent election, Vilsack briefly ran for president; after dropping out he supported Hillary Clinton, but quickly and vocally supported Barack Obama after the primaries.

Wow. What a tough childhood. When he should have been loved by a mother in his first year, he was in an orphanage. Then it was his adopted mother who had the alcohol and pill problems and tormented him for being fat. I hope Sec. Vilsack has an excellent therapist, because he’s had a hard life through no fault of his own and there’s probably a LOT to deal with. It really speaks volumes about his resilience that he’s had such an overwhelmingly successful adult life.

Last up – let’s take a look at the USDA’s press releases for the past week or so:

• Livestock sellers to receive $2 million for animals they sold to now-bankrupt Agriprocessors. Agriprocessors is the Iowa kosher meatpacking plant that was found with immigrants, including many who were underage, that they overworked and abused. They went bankrupt, and didn’t pay several producers who sold them livestock. Under the Packers and Stockyards Act, there’s a trust fund with money that is designated to go to producers when packers fail to pay them. That’s where the money is coming from to pay the producers that Agriprocessors owed.
• The USDA and Dept of Energy are jointly funding up to $25m in biofuels research. These will be awarded as grants – details are in the press release.
• USDA is FINALLY starting to allow commodity growers to grow other stuff. In my opinion, this is a first step to achieving the goal Jim Goodman stated – decreasing the acres we grow of corn and soy and increasing the land devoted to real food that people eat. This is a pilot project, and it’s limited to a certain number of acres in 7 midwestern states. The USDA is putting limitations on the farmers who take advantage of this program – it’s not a free-for-all in which a farmer who grows corn now can suddenly start a CSA. But it’s progress. Let’s hope there’s more progress.
• Vilsack put out a statement about USDA employees using animal drugs. Often animal drugs are identical to human drugs, just cheaper. Apparently some USDA employees in Ames, Iowa figured this out – and used veterinary credentials to write prescriptions for themselves. This was reported last week by Obama Foodorama.
• The USDA doesn’t want PCA (Peanut Corporation of America) to do business with the federal government. Great news! Amazing that Halliburton, KBR, and Blackwater still ARE doing business with the government. And PCA? Well, they are now bankrupt anyway. Not like they’ll be applying for any more lucrative government contracts.
• The USDA release 10 year agricultural projections (PDF). You can find out more about these projections here – and expect a diary on it on my site very soon. If you want to read just the highlights of the report go here.
• Vilsack spoke to reporters on January 26 and the transcript is available at the link. Vilsack begins by discussing ethics and civil rights issues, then goes into a few things he overturned from the Bush administration, and lists out a number of priorities – combating child obesity and child hunger, climate change, biofuels and other renewables, implementing the 2008 farm bill, enforcing the Packers & Stockyards Act (yes!), and upgrading the USDA’s IT systems. then he took questions from reporters.