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This fall, Monsanto and the American Farm Bureau Federation (with additional funding from the American Soybean Association, National Corn Growers Association, National Cotton Council, United Soybean Board and U.S. Grains Council) have teamed up to produce a piece of propaganda designed to whitewash the true story of industrial agribusiness in the United States.

America’s Heartland is a weekly television series that these shills of industrial agriculture intend to offer to more than 300 public television stations for airing in September. The 20 half-hour episodes claim to help “raise awareness of the significant contribution American agriculture makes to the quality of life here and abroad.” However, the failure to include any group representing America’s traditional family farmers raises suspicions that the series is nothing more than a public relations ploy by corporate agriculture interests.

We have drafted a letter (below) to alert public television station managers to the bias behind this rogue gallery of corporate players presuming to represent the state of agriculture in rural America. It is critical that those who make programming decisions for America’s public television stations understand that there is another, more destructive side to industrial agriculture.

Please join us in this effort by having your organization sign on to this letter. Also, pass it along to other organizations that might want to join in. A final letter, signed by all supporting groups, will be distributed to every public television station manager in mid-July.

Please RSVP your support to Chris Cooper at GRACE ([log in to unmask])

Thank you!

GRACE (Global Resource Action Center for the Environment)
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«GreetingLine»

In the next few weeks you will be solicited to carry a television program produced by KVIE Public Television entitled America’s Heartland. Contrary to the producers' press release, this program is not a celebration of our nation's agriculture. Instead, it is a piece of bald-faced propaganda from those who make their money from corporate agriculture - the Monsanto Company, the American Farm Bureau Federation, the American Soybean Association, National Corn Growers Association, National Cotton Council, United Soybean Board and U.S. Grains Council.

The destruction of America’s rural communities and the disappearance of its small farmers is an important story that needs to be told. This story, one of rural depopulation, dwindling economic opportunities, industrial levels of pollution and their attendant health and social concerns, is the ugly reality of the excesses that come from the unregulated large-scale industrialized agricultural system promoted by corporate America. America’s Heartland is being produced to put a friendly face on the very forces that are causing these problems.

Policies promoted by Monsanto and the American Farm Bureau, if successful, will place the US food supply into the hands of a few major corporations. This would devastate independent family farmers who will be priced out of the market not because they can’t compete, but because corporate farms are specifically structured to capture government subsidies.

Lobbyists for corporate agriculture and the Farm Bureau use political pressure to direct federal subsidies to corporate farms where a significant part of these subsidies then flows directly to Monsanto from the purchase of genetically modified seed and artificial hormones (to increase milk production at mega dairies) that put small farmers out of business. The American Farm Bureau, which sells insurance, supports this strategy by investing its assets in corporate agriculture while claiming for lobbying purposes that its 5 million insurance policyholders are active Farm Bureau members. (There are less than 2 million actual farmers in the US and many don’t belong to the Farm Bureau).

There is a growing backlash in both rural areas and urban and consumer markets against the practices advocated by Monsanto, the Farm Bureau and the owners of factory farms. Shoppers are flocking to organic products in an effort to escape the health consequences of the kind of agriculture these groups promote. Traditional family farmers are working to expose the corporate whitewashing of industrial agriculture. The program you are being asked to show is an important part of a strategy to silence this backlash by making American consumers think that corporate farming practices are harmless and inevitable. Nothing could be further from the truth.

We ask you to please make a fully informed decision about America’s Heartland and either not air it or, if you elect to show it, schedule it alongside a program presenting the alternative point of view as you would for any other piece of propaganda. There is another side to this story and the public deserves to hear it.

Sincerely,
[NAMES OF SIGNATORIES]