We need your help!

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

ccooper@gracelinks.org

Letter:

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,