TTT

Interviewee:  Gus Schumacher						   Session #2

Interviewer:  Judith Weinraub					    Washington, D.C.

Date:  October 6, 2009

Q:  This is Judith Weinraub.  It’s October 6, 2009, and I am with Gus Schumacher at his home in Georgetown in Washington, D.C.
	Good afternoon.  We were talking before about the kinds of opportunities and responsibilities to make policy that somebody confirmed to an appointment by the Senate has.  So could you articulate what the expected responsibilities of your job were and the kinds of goals or ideas that you had for it, ways in which you could make an impact?

Schumacher:  Yes.  Well, first, it’s interesting.  There’s not that many Senate-confirmed people in USDA.  There’s the secretary, the deputy, and maybe five other undersecretaries.  So you’re expected to do three things.  One, you’re expected to testify at the will of the Congress.  You have to come up, actually swear that you’ll be up briefing the Congress at any time they wish to call you up and testify both to the House and the Senate on how things are going in your group and the programs under it.  Then you’re encouraged to basically make policy within the framework of the legislative authorities.  Those authorities are very large.  They go back into the thirties.  They’re written fairly broadly, but you are authorized within the legislative framework to set policy.  So there’s a number of things you can do, and that was the intent of Congress, to make it a bit more flexible.  We’ll come back to that under the Commodity Credit Corporation.

Q:  The legislative authority in this case gave you the responsibilities and opportunities to do what?

Schumacher:  We do a whole series of things.  For example, you have the whole international food aid programs, so there’s a lot of flexibility in how you run those programs.  Secretary Glickman and I used those authorities quite aggressively, and at one point we were doing almost 2 billion dollars of food aid.  We’d keep Congress informed, but we didn’t need congressional permission to do that.
	Similarly, we talked earlier about the nutritional program, which is stretching our authorities a little bit, but I discovered there were authorities in the Commodity Credit Act of 1935 that did not specify fruits and vegetables, so it said agricultural products.  Well, fruits and vegetables are an agricultural product, so I asked the lawyers could I not do it.  They said, “Well, you can do it, but no one’s done it before.”  So we said can we do a senior farmers’ market nutrition program, and I would transfer money to the Food and Nutrition Service, 15 million dollars, to start having a million seniors of low income go to a farmers’ market, to promote and stabilize the fruit and vegetable industry by small farmers.  They said, “Well, you know, it’s not been done.  It’s a little stretching the authorities, but you’re not going to get indicted if you do it, as long as you inform Congress five days after you get permission from the President to do it.”  So we created the program, Secretary Glickman signed off on it, the White House blessed it, and we did it.

Q:  When you took the job, did you have some specific goals that you hoped to bring to fruition?

Schumacher:  There were two parts to my work at USDA.  The first three or four years was in the Foreign Ag Service to promote American exports and to do food aid and to keep American exports competitive and to monitor imports and exports, and that was a fun job.  There was a lot of trade negotiations going on, on the Uruguay Round, on NAFTA, on China.  There was a lot of travel to Asia as markets shifted from Europe to Asia.  In the developing countries, I tried to shift our attention in the Foreign Ag Service from Paris and London to Beijing and Jakarta, and there was a lot of resistance to that by the staff.

Q:  Why was that?

Schumacher:  They all wanted to go to Paris and London.  That was the culmination of their career, to be the Minister Counselor for Paris, London, Denmark, Spain, and Rome.  It wasn’t Beijing, Shanghai, Jakarta, Malaysia, and Islamabad.

Q:  Why were you doing what you were doing?

Schumacher:  Well, that was as head of the Foreign Ag Service, to shift the promotion of our exports to the fastest growing markets.
 
Q:  That’s why it was headed toward Asia?  Because they were the fastest growing markets.

Schumacher:  Yes, absolutely.  China takes 50 percent of our soybeans, Japan takes a third of our corn.  At the peak of the market in ’97, ’98, there were enormous numbers of grapes and apples going to Jakarta, and they were being sold on street corners.  It was a very large and rapidly growing market.  Similarly for Taiwan.  The markets were exploding in Asia, and that was the right thing to do.  They are now our largest markets, which is East and Southeast Asia.

Q:  You brought to this the knowledge of an agricultural economist, having spent so much time overseas, so actually it’s hard to imagine somebody who would have understood those markets as precisely as you did, and, of course, you were a farmer.

Schumacher:  There was a lot of staff interest in it, but the senior staff were a little bit more comfortable, as I would be.  Your fantasy is to be the Minister Counselor, sitting overlooking London’s Grosvenor Square, in a gorgeous office next to the Ambassador, with a beautiful home in Mayfair, which was right after the war.  I would have loved that.  But that’s not where the market was.  The market was in the middle-income areas of Jakarta, in Kuala Lumpur, in the Philippines, and especially in Beijing, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Taiwan.

Q:  The job you were doing related to the part of the USDA that has to do with the promotion of American agriculture.

Schumacher:  Right.  And you have to remember that people talk about our trade balance, but in agriculture we’ve always had a positive trade balance.  This year we’ll export 101 billion dollars worth of food.  That’s up when I was at FAS in 1996 over $40 billion to $60 billion.  We only import about $75 billion, even though it’s a lot.  So we were contributing anywhere from 10 to 30 billion dollars in net foreign exchange earnings.  You can’t say that for much of the rest of the economy.

Q:  The other side of responsibilities of the USDA, which have more to do with health and nutrition, had they always interested you as well, or was that something that you gradually—

Schumacher:  It interested me, but it was not under my purview.  It was under the Food and Nutrition Service.  When I became Undersecretary, the job was to basically write big checks to growers for the Commodity Credit Corporation for basically subsidies, to oversee the Foreign Ag Service, to oversee the crop insurance, and oversee the commodity programs.  I then became chairman of the Crop Insurance Board.  So it was a lot of what I call the core part of USDA, which was working with basically the mainstream family farmers on their subsidy programs, on their export programs, and on their insurance programs.  Nutrition was part of the Food and Nutrition Service, but when you look at the authorities, it did appear that there was authority under the Commodity Credit Corporation to transfer money to promote better nutrition by seniors, so we figured out how to do it.

Q:  Specifically seniors?

Schumacher:  In this case seniors, because we already had Congressional authority under the Women, Infants and Children program.  But there was no authority for Seniors.  So we said, “We can do the program for one year.”  So we found authority to do 15 million dollars, transferred CCC [Commodity Credit Corporation] money to the Food and Nutrition Service, worked it out with my good friend Shirley Watkins, who was then the undersecretary, and then they put it in the subsequent year, and it’s been there ever since.

Q:  Did you become more interested in the health and nutrition side of things, or were you always interested in that?

Schumacher:  It went back to the time that I was selling for my brother.  I think we mentioned that in the earlier discussion when that pear box fell apart.

Q:  Yes.

Schumacher:  I just remember that.  Here’s a woman whose husband had left her with two young boys, and here’s fruit that was wonderful, that I was going to take back, I wasn’t going to throw it out, but would bring it back somewhere, and she was in the gutter picking it up.  That kind of stuck with me.

Q:  You must have been impressed that it was fruits and vegetables that she was really seeking out and didn’t have the money to pay for them.

Schumacher:  Clearly, when you run the CD forward three tracks to the early part of this 21st century where 30 percent of our children now are pre-diabetic and obese, up from 15 percent ten years ago, there’s something going on.

Q:  That’s extraordinary.

Schumacher:  So people who are on food stamps are shopping the middle of the aisle rather than the edges of the supermarket, so they’re buying calories because they’re cheap.  A two-liter Coke and a pizza you can probably get for six bucks.  But you go and try and buy pears and apples and broccoli, you’d maybe get three pounds and then there’s a bit of wastage with that.  So they’re going for calories to feed their hunger.  They’re not going for nutrition to be healthy.  That’s a problem.
	On the other hand, the farmers are producing, like my brother was, very wonderful, healthy food here, all kinds of fruits, peaches, pears, apples, raspberries, strawberries on the farm.  We had all kinds of vegetables we were taking to the markets.  You’d bring back a quarter load because you couldn’t sell it and then you’d compost it.  Wonderful stuff, you know.  If there was gleaning, we could have given it away.  But I see the same thing here in Washington where the farmers are bringing in beautiful stuff and taking some home, or more and more, giving it to soup kitchens.
So I thought there must be a better way of handling this to connect the big money in nutrition with the availability of excellent fruits and vegetables grown within thirty miles of major metropolitan areas.

Q:  In terms of shifting your responsibilities, how did you bring some of that under your purview?

Schumacher:  Well, mainly with the senior farmers’ market nutrition program, and then encouraging other programs to link with small farmers through the crop insurance programs, and just having dialogues within the USDA department on this material and these ideas.
	The new Administration seems to be, after eight years of President Bush, Mr. [Tom] Vilsack and Miss [Kathleen] Merrigan and the White House seemed to be encouraging this a lot more than I would have expected, and I’m very pleased about that.

Q:  Had there been many people at high-level positions in the USDA who had been farmers and small farmers?

Schumacher:  A few, but most senior officials had experience from academia or from the farm organizations.

Q:  So you brought real farm on-the-ground understanding.

Schumacher:  Well, my brother and I farmed a little bit together, my father and I farmed, and my great-grandfather, and so we knew how to drive a tractor, let’s put it that way, and also we were in the vegetable business.  The vegetable business is different than corn and soybeans, which is mechanized.  Vegetables, you have to go out and actually pick it.  It’s a lot of handwork with vegetables, hand labor, and then you grow a much wider variety of crops.  So it requires a different skill set.  A corn farmer has a lot of great skills, but it’s very short.  You have to time the planting right and you have to time the harvest right, and then in between the planting and the harvest, you pray, and maybe a little cultivation now.  But with vegetables, you have to grow the starts, you have to time the planting so that it’s just after the frost, you hope.  There’s a lot of cultivation, there’s a lot of weeding, and then you have to care for those plants, and then there’s multiple harvests through the whole thing.  There’s a lot of skill required for both, but you have to be on top of it.

Q:  You traveled around the country a lot, didn’t you?

Schumacher:  Yes.

Q:  When you were traveling around, that was for what purpose?

Schumacher:  When I was head of the Foreign Ag Service, we traveled, did a lot of hearings and a lot of visits to small exporters.  I did not realize that 90 percent of our almonds are exported.  I did not realize that.  Indians love almonds, and so we export a ton of almonds to India.  Between Spain and America, we dominate the world almond market, and that’s still the case.  I did not know that we export so many almonds.
	Then the whole horticulture of apples to the Caribbean at Christmastime is a big market for New York apples, and the Dominican Republic and the islands.  I did not know that the market even existed.  There’s a big market for Massachusetts Macintosh in Liverpool, of all things.  I did not know that.  So you learn a lot.  All the different spices that we import, but we also export, and the whole food-safety issue.  So that was fascinating to see.  When you export 100 billion dollars worth of food, that comes from somewhere and an awful lot of people are involved in that.

Q:  You also met a lot of people as you were traveling around, and you’re a very accessible guy and you seemed to be able to keep track of everybody you met and help people make connections with each other in the future.  That obviously wasn’t part of the job, but that’s part of your personality.

Schumacher:  You make a lot of friends.  I really enjoy getting out and particularly meeting farmers and especially some of the smaller fellows and women farmers that can be a bit overlooked from time to time, but they’re doing some pretty innovative things out there in the countryside.
	Like the Native American tribes, people are fascinated by their specialty foods that they grow on their reservations, so we organized, when we had an overseas exhibit, that the Montana tribes would have booths in Japan and Beijing.  Well, that was a great hit, all these Native American foods never eaten before, like us eating imported sushi.  They’re looking at some of these specialty dried meats and buffalo meats and others, bison, that are handled on the reservation.  So it was a two-way deal.

Q:  So would you say that your goals, as it were, what you were trying to do, changed as you learned more about what was going on in this country?

Schumacher:  Yes.  I just came back from California this past week, and there’s an increasing disconnection, disjoint--I don’t know quite the word--a disjoint between our urban and pari-urban and peri-urban families, and food is beginning to come back a little bit with the explosion of the farmers’ markets.  But certainly in the eighties and nineties, there’s a widening of not distrust, but just didn’t know where the food came from.  Farmers were considered to be kind of greedy.  They were called “spray and pray.”  They were polluting the water.

Q:  What was that?

Schumacher:  Spray and pray, you basically spray your crops with pesticides and then pray that everything is going to work out well.
	A sort of discomfort settled in.  I think part of my job, certainly when I was commissioner and when I was at USDA, was trying to bridge that gap a little bit more.  I worked really hard at that in Massachusetts to make the connection between the consumers, the restaurants, the urban and peri-urban areas and the farmers.  So when there were some difficulties, there was a level of comfort.
	Yet when I came back from California, even now in the twenty-first century, this rural-urban gap seems to be widening.  The consumers don’t trust the agriculture.  There was even a hearing to ban or wipe out the Department of Agriculture in California, which is the largest state in the country on agriculture, and yet some state senators thought that they weren’t doing very much and wanted to eliminate them in the budget.  Extraordinary.
	There’s some gaps that I tried to bridge when I was both as a commissioner and when I worked for the government, and I’m still trying to do it now with the connection with these new programs we’re working on and the vulnerable, not just to buy fresh fruits and vegetables at the Safeway or the Giant, but to buy their fruits and vegetables from the local farmers.  So you’re using nutrition money to work twice, to nourish the consumers but also financially nourish the farmers that developed that on a direct basis.

Q:  When did you particularly become interested in the vulnerable?

Schumacher:  I think that pear box.  I think that that kind of stuck with me, how someone would be groveling in the gutter in Dorchester for three or four pounds of Bosc pears.  I said, “What’s that all about?”  I hadn’t really thought about it much before that, and that just kind of stuck with me.  I said, “That’s not right.”  I think particularly since we had them, we had tons of surplus fruits and vegetables, why should she be in the gutter, taking food out of the gutter?  That’s not right.

Q:  Were you able to act on that in your job at the USDA?

Schumacher:  To some extent with the seniors, but much more importantly since I left the USDA, where we’re trying to link and provide a whole series of programs with vouchers and other technologies to enable WIC and seniors and now food stamps to go to a farmers’ market or go to a market stand or go to a CSA and buy affordable fresh fruits and vegetables produced by family farmers twenty, thirty miles away.

Q:  When did you learn how to work with the press?  Because one of the reasons you’ve been so effective is being able to really talk about what you were doing and communicate with the press.

Schumacher:  I had some friends when I was at the Harvard Business School in 1980, I think it was, or 1970.  I can’t remember what it was.  1980, I think.  There were some Nieman Fellows who were in our classes.  Sonja Hilgren was one of them, and some others.  We all became kind of friends.  They were interested in agriculture, and we just sort of hung out.  I realized these are nice people who are interested in the subject and kind of got friendly.  Then their circle widened and then Sonja introduced me to Ward Sinclair.

Q:  The Washington Post reporter?

Schumacher:  At the Washington Post, and then Peter Milius, one of the editors.  Then when I was commissioner in the eighties, I kept in touch with Ward.  I wasn’t frightened of the media.  As long as you’re open and straightforward and create a little bit of interest, you don’t have to get your name in the paper all the time.  You can call Peter Anderson at the Boston Globe, who wrote a column, and say, “Peter, there’s an interesting story.  Do you know what geotropic flowers are?”
	And he said, “What are geotropic flowers?”
	“Well, they’re grown on Andy Cupp’s farm in Lexington, Massachusetts.”
	And he said, “Well, what are they?”
	“Well, they’re snapdragons.”  You can’t ship snapdragons from Colombia because their geotropic.

Q:  What does that mean?

Schumacher:  You know what a snapdragon is?  It’s a flower.

Q:  Yes.

Schumacher:  If you lie it flat, the top will curl up towards gravity, so you have to grow them straight up and harvest them straight up.  You can’t lie them down, and so you can’t really ship them very well.
	So Andy Cupp was growing all these snapdragons.  So Peter called me back.  He said, “Hey, great story.  Went out and did the geotropic snapdragon,” but then found that he had a great dog and did a dog story.  He got two columns out of it.
	So, again, if you let people know.  As you travel around and you find lots of interesting things that may not be directly related to agriculture, but the press is interested and they have to write a story.
	The second I learned from one of my fellow Commissioners, that you return phone calls and don’t give the phone calls to a media person in the office.  If you don’t know the answer, tell them you’ll call them back.  If you do know the answer and it’s bad, tell them it’s bad and then give them some phone numbers who are your opponents.  That they really appreciate, because most of them earn very little money.  They want to get home.  They earn thirty, forty thousand at the max.  They want to go home for dinner by four.  They don’t want to be hanging around waiting for a phone call to finish their story.  So give them all the phone numbers of the people who don’t agree with you.

Q:  Was that instinctive on your part or did you think it through?

Schumacher:  I don’t know.  Just happened, I guess.  Putting yourself in their position, you know.  A lot of the reporters like here in Washington, the young reporters in the local press or the radio, whatever, live in Takoma Park.  Well, that’s a ways away.  That’s a good hour, forty-five minutes by Metro, and they want to get home by five or six.  They have young families.  Let them finish their story and get on with it.

Q:  You know that very few government officials think like that.  [laughs]

Schumacher:  Well, it was much more difficult when I was undersecretary, but not so difficult.

Q:  Because you were busier?

Schumacher:  What I would do was we called it the ‘solstice interviews.’  You know the solstice?

Q:  Yes.  But tell me what the solstice interviews are.

Schumacher:  Every three months, I’d invite the wire service and the reporters, maybe ten or twelve, say eight or ten reporters to cover agriculture, and I’d invite them to my office when I was head of the Foreign Ag Service and just say, “Here’s what happened the last quarter.”  Clint Eastwood.  Good, bad, and ugly.  “Here’s what I anticipate happening you may want to think about or cover in the next quarter.  Here’s where I’ll be traveling.  Here are the issues of the day.”  Sometimes on the record, sometime just a chat, cup of tea.

Q:  And people came?

Schumacher:  Oh yes, until then someone in the secretary’s office said enough is enough.  It was helpful to the reporters.

Q:  Enormously.  Why did anybody in the secretary’s office say enough is enough?

Schumacher:  Oh, just they were uncomfortable with it.  I wasn’t getting into the press very much, but I think they felt that should be done at a higher level than an Administrator in the Foreign Ag Service.  But it was very, very helpful to President Clinton as we tried to get the agricultural people to sign on to a lot of these trade agreements, and so I would do a great deal of media work.
When I was overseas, it would be twelve hours’ difference between Tokyo and here, and I’d call back on the radio and do live interviews in regional local stations, timing them.  “I’m here at the Tsukij fish market looking at monkfish livers in this place here,” and I’d call back to the radio station, newspapers in New Bedford and they would put me on live.  I said, “I’m here promoting monkfish livers from New Bedford.  It’s a really good market.  We’re going to do some events in New Bedford when I get back.  We’re going to have a monkfish liver dinner.  You all got to come.”  It’s not eaten there, but it’s making our fishermen a bit more prosperous than they otherwise would be.  Well, Barney Frank heard that.

Q:  He heard it on the local radio station?

Schumacher:  On Drive Time, when he was in New Bedford.  He liked that, so he came to the dried fish dinner, the monkfish liver dinner.  It was fun.

Q:  It’s certainly in my experience as a reporter, most government officials are afraid to talk to you and send you through the press office.  But you were more comfortable dealing directly with journalists.

Schumacher:  Yes.  I got burned several times, but you go with the flow.  I mean, there were some reporters that—it was never personal, but they would twist a few things.  But I didn’t try and record everything I said, but I remembered it, and if things were not done right, I would call the reporter back.
	Then also some of the stories were really, really good and really helpful, I’d call the editor and I’d say, “Ward Sinclair’s story on corn was really outstanding.  Would you pass that on?”  Or send a little personal letter to the editor, pass it on that Cass Peterson or whoever was there, but also make it fun for the reporters.  I remember during a tomato tasting in Lawrence, Mass., the first time we did it, I said, “Who can I get to be the judge?  I’ll call up Phyllis Richman.”

Q:  Yes, we talked about that.  That was very smart of you.

Schumacher:  She had a good time.  She came up and she put an article in the food page on tasting tomatoes in Massachusetts.

Q:  That was something that you realized early on, wasn’t it, that articles on the food page could be just as effective as articles on the front pages?

Schumacher:  Frankly, I think it was more effective.  I think that the food editors have more time to write.  They understand food.  They would like to write about policy.  Often their editors just won’t let them.  But if you can make it a food-related story about policy, whether it’s food safety or doing a whole range of things with food, they’ll write them up.  I found it was really helpful to me politically and policy-wise, not so much politically, but policy, because all the politicians, all my superiors, would read the food pages.  It was the second most read paper after Sunday, and often they were at first in color.  I think I mentioned the story with the governor in color in the food page.

Q:  Tell me about that.

Schumacher:  Well, I made a little mistake and I challenged New York and New Jersey to a tomato taste-off, and so I took my tomatoes down to the Union Square Farmers’ Market.  It was kind of a fun thing.  But I didn’t think it was appropriate to tell the press in Boston.  So Marian Burros from the New York Times heard about this and called Sheryl Julian.

Q:  Who was that?

Schumacher:  Sheryl Julian was the food editor of the Boston Globe.  Said, “Your crazy commissioner’s challenged New Jersey and New York to a tomato taste-off next Monday at the Union Square Farmers’ Market.  Did he tell you this?”
	“No, he didn’t tell me that.  That’s a great story.”  New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, the little Gulliver taking on the giants of tomatoes.  She said, “I think I’ll come down and bring a photographer.”  Well, she didn’t tell me this.
Also we had wagons with horses.  We had the New Jersey, the New York, and the Massachusetts carts loaded up with fresh vegetables coming down Broadway—it was lots of fun—to the Union Square Farmers’ Market.  I saw this fellow running around taking pictures.  I didn’t pay any attention to it.  Then I saw Sheryl turn up, doing interviews.  Oh, gee, this is interesting.  Well, she really got into it and did a two-page story in color, lots of color pictures, and that was the first time the Globe used color, but they did it on the food pages.
The next Wednesday that story came out, the governor rang me up and said, “Commissioner, how are ya?”  
	I said, “I’m fine.”
	He said, “I saw you were in New York, out of state.  You lost, too, didn’t you?”
	I said, “Well, I’m sorry about that.  I should have probably told you.”

Q:  You mean the tomato tasting you lost.

Schumacher:  But it was fun, because it put tomatoes—Massachusetts was equal to New Jersey and New York on food.  We had a lot of fun.  Massachusetts vegetables go to New York.  I enjoyed that.  You have to have a little fun at this.
	Well, then he said, “Good, that was pretty good color pictures.  Next time invite me,” because it’s color.  [laughter]

Q:  But you must have consciously realized that by reaching out to the press, you were reaching out to the public.

Schumacher:  Well, it paid off in spades.  It paid off unbelievably well, because what happens was, we were a tiny agriculture in Massachusetts, and 6 million people and maybe 6,000 farmers.  So we were tiny.  I mean micro.
But then some well-meaning young people in Somerville and Cambridge decided they would take on a referendum to ban animal agriculture, PETA people, in Massachusetts, and they managed to get enough signatures in those two cities to go on the ballot, set Question three, that basically banned animal agriculture as cruel.

Q:  Meaning agriculture that would kill the animals?

Schumacher:  No, just anybody raising animals.  They wanted a vegetarian society.  So they thought if they could get a ban passed in Massachusetts, they then could take it to other states on a referendum.
	So that was awkward.  So what we did was, we had every farmer in the farmers’ market publicize “vote no” on question three.  People come to farmers’ markets.  They understood this.  Even though they were veggie growers, they understood the importance of animals.  Then we went to all the editorial boards, and I’d bring a farmer with me.  I’d go to the farm.  I’d ask the reporter to come out with a photographer.  I’d have the farmer wrap himself around a calf or bunny or something and say, “These people take care of their animals.”
	Then I’d go to the editorial board with the farmer and I’d ask them a question.  “You’re Fred Hiatt,” or whatever your name is, “of the Washington Post.  Fred, I’m here with my friend Bob, a dairy farmer, and his son, Harry, and they raise two hundred cows.  They’ve been doing a good job in Rutland, Mass.  Can I ask you a question, Mr. Editor, before we sit down?  How many cases of child abuse do we have in Massachusetts last year, and how many cases of animal abuse by farmers like were sitting here?”
	And he said, “Oh, I don’t really know.  A few cases of child abuse, and thousands of cases of animal abuse.”
	I said, “No, there’s 27,000 cases of child abuse that were reported in Massachusetts and proven, and as far as we could tell, there were no cases of proven animal abuse.  Mr. Editor, wouldn’t it be better if these wonderful young people in Somerville and Cambridge would take care of our children as well as these farmers are taking care of their animals?  Do you understand me?”  It was a killer.  We had to get police protection.  The editors would all write that story, and then we’d have a policeman in front of the house, because the PETA people were furious.  My father and I were the same name, so they were threatening to come out and do damage to our home.
But that was, again, the importance of having the urban and rural people having a little bit of understanding by promoting farmers’ markets, by promoting a linkage between rural and urban, so that when something really bad happened, like a referendum that would ban a part of agriculture, we beat that by 71 percent to 29 percent in the election of 1988.  We beat them so bad in the polls, and that was the year Dukakis lost the presidential election.  The law was that you had to win by more than 30 percent.

Q:  In order to—

Schumacher:  To come back to another referendum.  So they could never come back on an animal rights referendum again in Massachusetts in history, because they lost so badly.  They never broke the 30 percent barrier.  It was very interesting to see.
	We ran that campaign ourselves, not with fancy lobbyists in Washington.  They were furious down here, all the meat people and dairy people.  They wanted to flock in and take the campaign over and put out fancy stuff.  I said, “No, we’ll do it ourselves.”

Q:  What was the campaign?

Schumacher:  It was “Question Three’ on the banning of animal agriculture referendum.  I felt good about that campaign.  That was a political campaign.  We cleaned their clock.

Q:  That was while you were commissioner?

Schumacher:  Yes.

Q:  How long were you at the USDA?

Schumacher:  1994 to 2001.

Q:  What are you particularly proud of or happy with in terms of what you achieved during those years?

Schumacher:  Working on our foreign trade and opening up new markets, shifting from what I call the old Europe to the new markets in Asia and Latin America, rejiggering the way we managed it so there was a more of a balance between fancy places in Paris, London, Spain, and Rome, and less but more aggressive places in the Far East.  Secondly, we worked really, really worked hard, on food crises I mean, the most proud of [unclear] Secretary Glickman and I, I think we’ve talked about this, we’re really proud of the way the USDA acted when there were food crises around the world.
We were able to step up very quickly and help to mitigate food crises, whether it was food aid to Africa, but particularly in two instances, one in ’97, ’98, when there was a financial crisis in Asia when they couldn’t buy food because the banks wouldn’t lend them money.  I went to Secretary Glickman and I said, “We need to use all of our authorities to provide credits so they can buy food, and where they can’t, we’ll give food aid.”
	He said, “Go to it.”  He was very supportive.
There was a wonderful story.  In ’97 I was negotiating with the Koreans, and I gave them my business card.  The Korean Minister of Agriculture, actually we exchanged cards, and I said, “Okay, I know you don’t want to use these credit facilities now, but if you ever do in the future, keep my card and send me an e-mail.”  This is when e-mails were just becoming a little bit useful.
	So December 15, 1998, I walked in the office on a Monday morning, there was an e-mail from the Deputy Minister of Agriculture, Korea.  He said, “Mr. Schumacher, you recall that you said if we ever needed GSM 102, these credit facilities, send an e-mail.  Well, here is the formal request and the formal letter is coming in for 1.6 billion dollars of credit guarantees for us to buy food,” because Citibank cut them off and they couldn’t get open letters of credit.
	So I walked into the Secretary’s office with my colleague, and said, “I’d like to do 1.6 billion dollars worth of credit to Korea.”  Back then, $1.6 billion was chunky.
He said, “Whoa, that’s a lot.”
	I said, “But I’m the President of the Commodity Credit Corporation, and, Dan, Mr. Secretary, you are the Chairman.  We have the authority to do this.”  Again, coming back to those key authorities.
	He said, “Don’t you think we should talk to the President about this?”
	I said, “Let’s give John Podesta a ring and just run it by him.”
	So he lifted up the red phone and said, “John, Gus and Dan.  Gus wants to do $1.6. billion. I think a billion dollars is more in the ballgame.”
	“It sounds good to me.  Do one billion dollars and then ratchet up to 1.6 dollars, send Gus and Chris out there, and then let’s get on with it.”  You know, boom, bang.
	And we did that in a period of days.

Q:  That is amazing.

Schumacher:  Better days.  We went out to Asia, we went to Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Jakarta, and Korea, and then buttoned down all the deals right after Christmas.  So it didn’t take us very long at all.  We did about 3 billion dollars worth of guarantees and food aid to help mitigate the impact of the financial crisis in Asia, and I was very proud of that.

Q:  When you did something like that, were you careful to stay in touch with the press as well about what was going on?

Schumacher:  Yes.  We kept the press fully informed, but there was Christmas and they were interested in the financial side more than the food aid side.  They were interested.  They reported it.  The press that really reported it were the Australian press, because they were asleep at the switch, and so we went into Indonesia.

Q:  With regard to agriculture?

Schumacher:  Oh yes.  They discovered what we did afterwards and went absolutely bananas.  We basically took half the wheat market in Indonesia away from the Australians by getting out there and providing GSM 102, and so there was a bit of a to-do.  The prime minister called my colleague, Chris Goldthwait, “An avaricious looter in the floor of the Parliament,” and so I responded publicly, “While the Australians were sleeping on the beach, we were sleepless in Seoul.”  And that got into the press a little bit.  It was fun.

Q:  When you left that job, how did you see your future?

Schumacher:  First I took six months off just to kind of think what I wanted to do, and then I decided I didn’t want to become a lobbyist or go into a corporation, so I started working with the Kellogg Foundation part-time as a consultant.

Q:  How did you pinpoint them as the logical—

Schumacher:  I don’t know.  They sort of found me through—I don’t quite know it all worked out back in 2002, and we worked out that I would help them find opportunities for them to do grant making in small farmers, mainly focusing on refugee farmers.

Q:  But that must have been your emphasis, not theirs.

Schumacher:  It was mine, but then I got them interested, because it was a very fast-growing place where they could really make an impact.  If they would put up a few grants, we could go back to USDA and have them put more credit guarantees and HSS, just using, again, the authorities that existed to help minority small farmers get their feet on the ground.  That worked out very well.  We did a lot in that over a period of 2000 to 2008, and then we did a bit of work with some other foundations and then evolved into this Wholesome Wave Foundation with Michel Nischan.  So Michel and I got together over something called NAFI, the New American Farmer Initiative.

Q:  What is that?

Schumacher:  It was a group, an informal group, that would find interesting products from small refugee farmers and introduce chefs to them, and Michel would show them how to prepare these strange vegetables, and I’d find where they were, and then we’d develop a little co-op in Western Pennsylvania that would sell them to New York and Washington.  I’d brought some of the stuff down on the plane to Ten Penh restaurant in DC and sold it.  I think you wrote about it, actually.

Q:  I did.  Let’s talk, though, about how things were changing in terms of the general public’s knowledge about food and agriculture at that time.

Schumacher:  I think back in the nineties—well, back in the eighties, there was interest in food, but not in innovative food.  There wasn’t the food movement at the restaurants.  There was no Food Network.  I think during that time, in the late nineties and the early part of the twenty-first century, you had this Food Network exploding.  It didn’t exist very much.  People didn’t watch chefs pounding away at dead fish and cooking it.
	So you had this intersection of interest in food, interest in agriculture.  Young people began to spend as much time thinking about their food system as about their environmental system.  So there was a lot of interest among the youth, whether they were in colleges or in high school, about eating healthier, about where their food comes from.  Their parents would be taking them to farmers’ markets.  So they grew up much more knowledgeable about food than certainly my generation or the generation that came after me.  The generation who were teenagers in the nineties became young adults in the twenty-first century, and they cared about food.  They’re the ones who really got interested in going to the farmers’ markets.
	I was a little surprised to see the numbers.  When I was Commissioner, we had maybe twenty, thirty markets in Massachusetts.  Now they have over two hundred.  Nationally, there was a thousand.  Now they have five thousand.  So there must be ten, twelve, fifteen million people that will go to buy local food on a weekly basis in the month of September.  That’s up from maybe five million or four million when I was commissioner, or even less.  But a lot of interest.

Q:  That’s a change because of greater awareness about, I don’t know, the implications of what we eat?

Schumacher:  Look at all the books and movies.  You’d never think of a popular food book in the airport.  I was coming back the other day from California, and Michael Pollan’s book is still up there among the bestsellers on the racks at the airport.

Q:  In Defense of Food or the—

Schumacher:  Both.  You have all these movies coming out, they’re not top sellers, but people go to watch them.  Then you have the Food Network with 75 million people watching them in a period of time.  You add the TV, you add reading, you add actually people walking with their own feet to a market and buying, you know, something is going on.  Then you add the restaurants, not all of them, but then you add the college dining rooms, who are more and more buying local, buying fresh, buying healthy.  Interesting.

Q:  Do you have any thoughts about why young people got so involved in these issues?

Schumacher:  I don’t.  It would be something for somebody to really think through and do surveys of why someone in their now forties, who were young adults in the eighties, would have a different view of food than someone now who’s in their late teens, early twenties, young adults who are flocking to these markets.  Like the Arlington farmers’ market here in Arlington on a Saturday morning, you can’t move with all the strollers.  Those are people in their late twenties and early thirties, piling their babies into the strollers and schlepping off to the farmers’ market.  I didn’t see that back in the eighties.

Q:  I was going to say roll that back ten or twenty years, and that would have been unheard of it, wouldn’t it?

Schumacher:  They would have been sleeping in or taking the kids to the supermarket and putting them in a supermarket cart with their feet sticking out the front or the back.  Now they put them into a stroller to go to the farmers’ market and put all the plastic bags on the edge of the stroller and push it through the market.

Q:  How else did you envision spending your time, besides acting as a consultant to the Kellogg Foundation?

Schumacher:  I think the Foundation could make a difference.  An innovative foundation like Kellogg or Kresge, now Wholesome Wave, you can be pretty nimble, and then you can explain to government how some of this stuff works and say that’s pretty interesting, again, using the authorities.  So I tried to really do what I call coalitions between foundations and government entities.  One of them was the Farmers’ Market Consortium, where we’d bring in anybody in the federal government of any department interested in farmers’ markets with foundations and just sit together once every three months and kick ideas around.

Q:  You did that after you left government?

Schumacher:  After I left government, yes.

Q:  So under the aegis of the Kellogg Foundation?

Schumacher:  The Kellogg Foundation, right.  So we had the Ford Foundation and the Kellogg Foundation would come, plus other foundations, and we’d sit around a table at USDA for two or three hours every three or four months and just kick some ideas around.  We’d then jointly host meetings in the countryside.  It’s been very productive.  It’s been an interesting exchange of ideas in a non-threatening way, because we can do things they can’t.

Q:  “We” meaning?

Schumacher:  The foundations.  But we don’t have the money to do a major initiative.  We might be able to do a million dollars a year in helping farmers’ markets so they can do 5 to 10 million dollars a year in helping farmers’ markets, if Congress passed the laws, and they did.

Q:  Were you and have you been fairly active in lobbying Congress to help this happen?

Schumacher:  Well, first of all, you can’t lobby as a foundation consultant.  You can advocate and educate.  If you lobby, then that’s a whole different rule.  Foundations are not allowed to lobby.

Q:  Ultimately, what’s the difference between advocating and educating and lobbying?

Schumacher:  Lobbying is asking for change in policy or regulation and then submitting legislation to change legislation or policy.  Informing and educating is basically saying what you’re doing and “Don’t you find of that of interest?”  Keeping Congress informed of what you’re doing is different than asking them to change a law to carry out the policy.

Q:  What else have you been doing?  I know you’ve been doing a great deal.  But in addition to the Kellogg work.

Schumacher:  Mainly focusing on the Wholesome Wave Foundation.

Q:  I mean before Wholesome Wave, because we’ll get to that.

Schumacher:  I do a bit of work with the Kresge Foundation, the Kellogg Foundation, and Roots of Change.  It’s a small foundation that does charitable work in California, and they were very innovative in California.  I like California because it’s so big, and they have such difficulties with the urban-rural connections.  We helped a little bit to bridge  those gaps.

Q:  At Wholesome Wave, you work with Michel Nischan.  How did the two of you meet?

Schumacher:  We were actually introduced by Michael Batterberry.  He knew Michel from Food Arts days and what he was doing with Heartbeat Restaurant and his innovations, and Michael was very supportive of young chefs who were doing innovative things, you know, the Danny Barbers, the Michel Nischans, the young chefs in their late twenties, early thirties, who were innovative.  He would write about them and reach out to them around the country.

Q:  Innovative in the sense of?

Schumacher:  New ideas of cooking.  Danny Barber was very interested in buying local and preparing great meals, and then he went up to Stone Barns and then grew his own food.  Michel, basically, Heartbeat, very healthy food, local, prepared very fresh.  Heartbeat, keep your heart going, so the heart-friendly food.  So Michael found that of interest.  Then I guess he read some of the stuff, or maybe you introduced me to it.  I don’t quite know how that all came about.  So we had lunch down here at 10 Penn, I think it was.

Q:  You and Michael Batterberry?

Schumacher:  I think you were there.

Q:  I don’t know.

Schumacher:  I think you were kind of responsible.

Q:  I’m a little bit confused about time in terms of—

Schumacher:  That was 2001.  Actually, I had met Michael Batterberry years ago when I was Commissioner, and we had lost touch with each other.

Q:  It was before the effort to get immigrant farmers’ products to restaurants.

Schumacher:  Right.  I don’t know how we met.  Then I think he assigned, 2002, 2003, Marian Burros to write a story in Food Arts about my work as commissioner some years ago, and then we get to be friendly.

Q:  Michel was at Heartbeat, and was it that the hotel did not want to support it any longer?  What happened with that?

Schumacher:  As far as I can understand, and Michel is very careful about saying this, but what I’ve heard is that he was buying—in chefdom, you need to keep your food cost 28 to 30 percent of your budget, that’s sort of the standard, and he was doing that.  He was keeping food costs reasonably and he was making money for the hotel.  But then they brought in some nice person, or not-so-nice person, who decided to take over and had a contract with Sysco for the other hotels.

Q:  The other hotels.  W was part of—

Schumacher:  W Starwood group.  So Sysco Food Service was supplying the other hotels, and this was the only one they weren’t supplying a full range of product, because Michel was making money for them, keeping costs at 30 percent or lower, and yet Sysco wanted that business.  So they apparently went to this woman or this person and said, “We want that business, and we can shave you a point if you let us in.”
	So Michel said, “I’m outta here.”  Quit.

Q:  That was a very unusual position for a chef to take, wasn’t it?

Schumacher:  To quit?

Q:  Yes.

Schumacher:  Yes.  He said, “It’s my values.  I’m outta here.  I’m gone.”

Q:  I know we’re talking about him, not you at this point, but then how long was it before he reestablished himself in Connecticut?

Schumacher:  He did some consulting work and then, as most chefs do, they’ll do some consulting work at that level, and then find the next nice restaurant to run.  So he and Paul Newman then connected in some fashion, and then he opened up this restaurant in Paul Newman’s Playhouse, which I think he still runs.

Q:  And all along, you and he were in connection?

Schumacher:  Yes.  He’d speak at some of the Kellogg functions.  I would invite a lot of the young chefs to come to the Kellogg functions and introduce them to a lot of these farmers.  Danny Barber would turn up.  Michel would turn up.  It was kind of a lively period.  I was on the advisory board of Stone Barns to get that going, so there was a lively kind of exchange of, again, what I was doing as Commissioner, but only on a little more national basis with some of the younger chefs who were experimental.

Q:  Was Kellogg, however, providing you with a sort of financial base for part of it?

Schumacher:  Some, yes.  I wasn’t able to earn a full-time living, so I did some other things, but Kellogg at that period from 2002 to basically 2008 was my sort of main work.  Now I’m kind of doing some other things.

Q:  Before we go on with the foundation, though, when you left the USDA, you could, however, have looked for another job.

Schumacher:  Yes.

Q:  But you didn’t go in that direction.

Schumacher:  Boring.

Q:  I see.  [laughs]  I see.  But one could also say this was more educational and sort of good works approach then.

Schumacher:  Just enjoyable.  I wouldn’t use the word “good works.”  I just happened to enjoy doing what I did at the World Bank.

Q:  How would you describe doing what you did?

Schumacher:  Here’s an example.  I had to go to my nephew’s wedding in California this weekend, so I said, “I think I’ll go to San Diego first, fly out a few days earlier, then go to Sacramento and spend three or four days finding out what’s going on,” and looking at these San Diego farmers’ market, looking at the refugee program, talking to a lot of the innovative people that were doing work, meeting some bunch of farmers who were refugees, talking to people supporting them, talking to public officials, having some meetings, then flying up to Sacramento and reporting on what I found in San Diego to the Deputy Secretary of Agriculture, and then working with the WIC director and see if we couldn’t get more food into the WIC program and getting her flavor what was happening.

Q:  But none of this was official? 

Schumacher:  Not in a government sense, but there was part of my work with Wholesome Wave and other groups, Kresge and some of the work I’m doing with the foundations.

Q:  Why don’t you explain what Wholesome Wave is.

Schumacher:  Well, before we start that, the fun part is basically focusing on what’s going in the United States.  I have a lot of interest in Europe and working in emerging markets and Africa and Afghanistan and Iraq and all the problems in that area, but I did that for thirty years.  Getting on a plane and going to Nairobi was okay, but that was a long time ago.
	I think we haven’t paid enough attention to what’s going on in this country.  We’re putting enormous resources overseas, whether it’s military or aid or other programs, and we haven’t reinvested in our own infrastructure, in our own agriculture, in our own technologies to help the small and medium-sized farmers here.  So I thought, well, if the government’s not going to do it, then I’ll work in foundations and then bring a little pressure on the government to do a little bit more of this work.  That’s, I guess, the theme of what I did 2001 to current.  Can you do some innovative work in my own country, traveling around to all different parts of the country, meeting farmers, meeting advocates, meeting people who are interested, meeting financiers and other foundations, and put some programs together to assist not only refugee farmers, but small farmers and looking at those kinds of options.  That’s been very rewarding.

Q:  You did this consciously, I don’t mean rejecting big job offers, but consciously choosing a life that was not going to make you a lot of money.

Schumacher:  Well, my wife still works, let’s put it that way.  We survive.  We’re not buying used cars, but we’re not buying fancy cars.

Q:  How did Wholesome Wave come about?  Why don’t you explain what it is set up to do.

Schumacher:  Paul Newman approached Michel Nischan and said, “Michel, why don’t you go out and be a little more aggressive about where you locate this food.” 
Michel said, “One of the best things is to put a farmers’ market of the Westport Playhouse.”  That was three, four or five years ago.

Q:  Why was Paul Newman interested in that?

Schumacher:  I don’t know.  He was very interested in local.  Remember Newman’s Organic, Newman’s Own.

Q:  But that was his daughter, primarily, wasn’t it?

Schumacher:  Daughter, but he went along with it.  He liked fresh local healthy food, and that’s why he encouraged Michel to run this restaurant, where basically 80 percent of the food was bought—his food costs must have been 35, 38 percent, ten points above what the normal was, and then he’d work it out with the—I don’t know if it was in terms of the lease or how they all worked it out where they would make some money, not a lot, but make some money by featuring healthy local food, [unclear] on a farmers’ market in Westport, which became one of the most successful markets in Connecticut.  They had to move it down the street because it was so successful.  The parking.
	Then he got interested in just how do you scale up this a little bit.  So he and I were chatting about it, and so we formed this little group with a little bit of money from Paul Newman, and we decided we’d focus on how do the underserved access food in difficult areas, whether it’s rural or urban.  We looked at a number of different ways of doing that and settled on improving marketing and access, bringing food procured regionally and locally into an underserved neighborhood and selling it at a fair price.

Q:  So Wholesome Wave, that is what it is trying to do actively, is improving market access in these underserved areas?

Schumacher:  Yes.  We call it nourishing neighborhoods in areas that do not have adequate access to fresh food, fresh healthy food.  So we were doing a lot of academic work, and we said that’s not our gig.  We’re actually going to go out and do it, and if we make some mistakes, so be it.  So we started setting up farmers’ markets in Connecticut in difficult areas and discovered that we needed to basically provide incentives, because even procuring locally, the food was expensive.  So we provided vouchers or coupons to cut the product cost in half to low income consumers.  Then we got a lot of interest by low-income people who could afford to come.  So we started in South Norwalk.

Q:  Such as the WIC vouchers?

Schumacher:  Right.  But only doubling it, so if you used your food stamp card or your WIC vouchers and you went to a farmers’ market in Norwalk or Bridgeport or Holyoke or San Diego, you presented your WIC voucher for ten dollars, we’d give you twenty dollars in tokens.  Or you swipe your EBT card at a wireless machine for ten dollars, and we give you twenty dollars in tokens to shop at any of the farmers’ markets for fresh fruits and vegetables.

Q:  But that required coordination with the officials at the WIC program, yes?

Schumacher:  Oh yes, and especially the food stamp program.  You had to go and get special permission.  You had to write a letter getting a waiver for a whole variety of legal reasons.  The WIC was okay, but the food stamp program was a lot more regulatory.

Q:  By its very nature?

Schumacher:  By the rules that the USDA set.  They did not want you to give incentives to buy a particular food, because if you did that regularly, Coke could give incentives to buy Coke, or Twinkies would give you half off to buy Twinkies, and so I think it was a fair regulation, and they’ve been very flexible about signing those letters.
	So it’s worked out very well.  We were in four states in 2008, and it went very, very well.  Now we’re in twelve states in 2009 at fifty-six farmers’ markets, and we’re hoping to do twenty states next year at a hundred farmers’ markets.

Q:  At these fifty-six farmers’ markets providing what, just to be clear?

Schumacher:  That we will provide, let’s say, to the Abingdon Virginia Farmers’ Market, which is way down in southwest tobacco area of Virginia, we provided, I think, $20,000 and they then bought a wireless EBT machine.  We would give them technical assistance, we hired a consultant to give them advice, and then we gave them $15,000 where they could then match food stamps, WIC and seniors at the farmers’ market.

Q:  These are not enormous sums.  They’re very important, but is the budget of the foundation such that you want to do targeted projects to get the most for your contribution?  How would you describe it?

Schumacher:  We’re not actually a foundation.  We have some underpinning money, but we don’t have an endowment.  We’re called a charitable foundation, where we have to raise money.  The Newmans give us money every year and others do, and then we just raise a relatively small, five, six, eight hundred thousand dollars a year, and then give a chunk of that away to these markets.

Q:  So that your overall budget is?

Schumacher:  Modest, but it’s highly leveraged.  Like in Boston we gave $10,000—

Q:  What do you mean?

Schumacher:  Ten thousand dollars to The Food Project in Boston, and they raised 50,000, 100,000 dollars in Boston. Same thing in San Diego.  So we would give 10,000 or 15,000 dollars to San Diego, and they’d go to the county offices and local foundations and double that, triple that.

Q:  Like a matching grant, sort of?

Schumacher:  More than matching.  They would triple up, because these people enjoyed the project.

Q:  And that’s the condition of giving—

Schumacher:  Not necessarily.  It just happened to work out.  In Rhode Island they would generate a lot of money from healthcare foundations.  So it seems to be growing very rapidly.  Michelle Obama mentioned it, to my amazement, in her speech the other day.

Q:  What did she refer to?

Schumacher:  She called it the “double-dollar” program, which I thought was fascinating that she would even mention it.  Then the Department of Agriculture is well aware of it.  The question is, can we find money in the federal government to do double vouchers.  That’s going to be interesting.

Q:  You are, I can’t remember, president, chair?

Schumacher:  I’m chairman, yes.

Q:  Why isn’t it a foundation?  That confuses me.

Schumacher:  Because a foundation has to have an endowment.  Like the Kellogg Foundation has its own money in the stock market, and we are more of an operating foundation.  To get a million dollars in revenue, you’d need, what, 20 million dollars in the bank, 75 percent.  Some just send us checks.  Anonymous donors will send us a check for $150,000.  Others we write a proposal for.  We’re an operating foundation, they call it, a charitable foundation.

Q:  Is that how you describe yourself, as an operating foundation or a charitable foundation?

Schumacher:  Right, it’s called the Wholesome Wave.  I think the legal title is the Wholesome Wave Charitable Ventures Foundation. .

Q:  A mouthful.

Schumacher:  It’s the legal term to differentiate it from Ford, Rockefeller or others.

Q:  Do you spend half-time there doing that work, whole time?

Schumacher:  I’m spending more time than I should.  It’s non-paid.  I get a little expense money when I travel, but I’m probably spending three-quarters of my time right now with it.  But it’s all right.

Q:  And you’re traveling to educate yourself, to see what’s going on?

Schumacher:  Yes.  When I flew up to San Diego, it’s one thing for them to write you a little note and saying what’s going on.  It’s a whole other thing to go out and actually talk to them, see what they’re doing, encourage them to write a little report.  I’ll send that to you.  “This is terrific stuff.  Write me a little report and I’ll circulate it, put some pictures in, describe what you’re doing.”  And these young people wrote a brilliant four-page report, pdf with all the pictures, and described precisely what we’re doing.  I sent that everywhere.  People were very excited about it.

Q:  They were willing to give it to you because they knew you were connected?

Schumacher:  Well, we fund it.  It was part of the requirement.  We said, “Help us describe what you’re doing so we can get you some more money.”

Q:  What do you think your grandfather or father would think about what you’re doing now?

Schumacher:  I don’t know.  Well, my father enjoyed coming to the farmers’ market, that’s for sure, because he grew up going to the markets, and then he sold to the supermarkets for many years, and he did not direct market.  My brother, when he bought a farm, he and I did direct marketing.  He did most of the work.  I did the coming up to the markets.  I think he’d be interested.  Sort of cycling back into how he started.  My great-grandfather, grandfather, and father sold from the 1870s till 1930, 1945 through farmers’ markets.  Then when the supermarkets came along, they then shifted and sold to Bohack and A&P, at First National.

Q:  Is it, I guess, part of a chain that started with the kind of small farm that your grandfather and father worked on?  I don’t mean a chain like a supermarket chain.  I mean a chain of activity that seems to logically evolve out of.

Schumacher:  I guess so, yes.  I think what I found is that when my father was selling, he never sold when we moved to Boston, a little bit to a roadside stands, but the kids would be given a wagon and go in the front of the house and sell carrots or corn off the front to the passer-bys.  But we never sold at a farmers’—there weren’t any farmers’ markets to sell to.  It was considered peddling.  In the early part of the last century, pushcarts in New York, Italian pushcarts going around Boston or New York, “Get your vegetables!  Get your fruit!” pushing the carts around, that was peddling, and you couldn’t make much money at that.  You could sell at a farmers’ market.  Probably sold to the peddlers to take it around.
	My father, we would sell to the First National A&P truckloads of stuff.  I’ll show you some pictures downstairs, ten, twelve big trucks going off daily in the thirties to big supermarkets.

Q:  But weren’t there farmers’ markets like a century ago or more, or were they technically not the same animal?

Schumacher:  They weren’t quite the same animal.  I mean, they were basically markets where you would sell, bring your commission.  You’d come in, you’d park, and you’d sell.

Q:  There was a structure, often.

Schumacher:  There was a structure, always a structure, and you’d sell to people buying for small stores, very much what’s going on at Hunts Point now in New York.  You’d come in, there’d be a couple hundred commission men, so you’d sell your stuff there.  Then the Korean green grocers would come and buy.  Now that’s the main market.  They have a big Korean festival at the Hunts Point Market to the biggest customers, whereas the big California guys will ship trainloads or busloads or semis straight into Wal-Mart.  They never go to these places, or your big cities buy direct.

Q:  What motivates you to do this work?

Schumacher:  I just enjoy it.  Getting up at six-thirty, seven o’clock and going to a consulting firm and doing work for a big corporation on how to improve the market for Hostess Cupcakes, not quite what I—that’s okay.  Some people love it, but not me.

Q:  So what’s next for you?  Continuing this work for Wholesome Wave, or you know not what’s next?

Schumacher:  I don’t know.  I mean, let’s see what—I think this Wholesome Wave thing is pretty interesting.  We’ll see how this would continue for the next few years, and see what comes over the transom.  But I just enjoy visiting and learning about the changing structure of American agriculture.  Who is growing our food?  Is the crisis in transportation a year and a half ago encouraging people to grow more in the East?  What are the technologies?  Will the demand for better nutrition encourage more production throughout the country?  There’s very little vegetables or fruits grown in Mississippi.  They have the highest rate of diabetes in the country in Mississippi.

Q:  Oh, my.  I didn’t know that.

Schumacher:  There’s no small vegetable farmers in Mississippi.  Down in the Southeast, you look at Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, you’re getting big farms with big orange groves, but you don’t have the thousands of small farmers that you have in New England growing mixed crops for direct consumption.  It’s just simply not part of their tradition in those places.  Well, can we work on that?  Can foundations give money to put up high tunnels to grow food throughout the winter?  Can we put up more farmers’ markets?  Can we use vouchers?

Q:  And Wholesome Wave would be involved in that?

Schumacher:  We are involved in that, yes, and Kellogg is involved in that.  Then try and get the government involved in that as well.  So we shall see.  This is a different administration.  They’re very interested in nutrition, local food, regional food systems.  Can we work with them a little bit?
	In New York City, a former director named Tom Frieden, now head of the CDC—that would be a wonderful interview, if you can do an interview with him in public and political.com or something.  Where is his direction?  He started Health Bucks in New York, where poor people get Health Bucks, like we’re doing in Wholesome Wave, and go to the farmers’ markets.
Will CDC expand that kind of a program?  With their millions and millions of dollars, will they promote healthy food by going to a local food system, or will they just encourage people to eat healthier by shopping on the edge of the supermarket rather than the middle?  It’s all up in the air.  But you can’t shop at the edges unless you have some other increase in food stamps or incentivize food stamps to eat healthier.  That’s the great battle I think is going to be occurring, is between the hunger advocates, which are very powerful, and the nutrition advocates, which are less powerful.  People feel that if people are hungry, they’re pouring money into food stamps and into school lunch and after-school meals, but not looking at the nutritional content of all that food, whereas a bunch of us over here are looking at, okay, let’s incentivize, keep the money there, but incentivize free programs that will create healthier food system.
So we shall see.  But they say the tree falls in the forest and no one reads about it, then the tree didn’t fall.  Right?  So, I mean, one of the things we’re doing is we’re making sure that our partners, like in Chicago there may be a front-page story on our—

Q:  What kinds of partners do you mean?

Schumacher:  The grantees.  We don’t put the press releases out; they do.  We have them put together and we’ll talk to them.  There’s a woman named Monica Eng, who I don’t know, is a food writer, apparently, in the Chicago Tribune and is going to be coming out this week with a major front-page story on this program.  She’s managed to go from the food section occasionally to the front page and then linked to the food section, on why the city of Chicago is not doing more to promote healthy local food for food stamps.
	So she’s been calling up—well, here’s an example.  They called and wanted to know who else was doing this, so I was able to refer her to three or four of our projects.  My name will not be in any of this stuff.  The people in San Diego and others called back and said, “We did a wonderful interview with someone named Monica Eng on what we’re doing.”  She might not put much in it, but the fact that they would call, it’s exciting for these young people.  The Chicago Tribune calls Andrea McGee in City Heights, San Diego. “How are you doing?  What are you doing?”  She’s excited about that.  People have egos.

Q:  You, obviously, are excited, too, so that’s wonderful.

Schumacher:  Well, I’m excited for a different reason, that from a policy perspective it strengthens the story to have verification from people who are already doing it successfully.  So this just started Saturday in Chicago.  Well, here’s City Heights San Diego, Fresh Farm Rhode Island, that has been doing it for a year or two very successfully, doubling the use of food stamps at farmers’ markets and people coming in very enthusiastically to do this stuff, and they can just give verification to that.  That’s important for a reporter to—is this stuff for real?  Reporters need to check this stuff out, and so you’re going to check your sources.  Is this stuff going to work?

Q:  Before we end, do you know what percentage of farmers’ markets in the country food stamps can now be used?

Schumacher:  In about 800 farmers’ markets out of 5200, so about 18 percent.

Q:  But two years ago?

Schumacher:  A hundred.  In Massachusetts, the governor just gave $50,000 to put EBT machines in every farmers’ market in Massachusetts next year, which is kind of cool.

Q:  That’s very exciting.

Schumacher:  Yes.

Q:  Thank you very much.

Schumacher:  Is that all right?

Q:  Absolutely.

[End of interview]








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