The corporate behemoths collectively known as "Big Food"-companies like General Mills, Monsanto, Cargill, Tyson Foods, and Archer Daniels Midland-are feeling squeamish. They've watched with dismay as President Obama and his agriculture secretary, Tom Vilsack, have adopted "sustainability" as a top priority for the USDA and inched the department toward greater support of organic agriculture. With Kathleen Merrigan-noted sustainable agriculture advocate and former director of the USDA organic program-as the department's new second in command; more money now available for organic farmers; and a grand USDA-funded study of organic agriculture and its role in American farming in the works, Big Food feels the ground shifting beneath it. So much so that it's acting as if it could lose its grip on the American food system. But Big Food persists in battling the wrong target. While it is indeed locked in an existential struggle with an implacable foe, the government is not the enemy. The enemy is Mother Nature.

The simple fact is that the interests of Big Ag remain well-served by a broad range of government policies from agriculture, to trade, to the environment, to nutrition, and even to commodities market regulation. To suggest, as Nebraska's Sen. Mike Johanns (a former Bush-era agriculture secretary) recently did, that the administration has "let [its] fervor for organic production cloud [its] judgment" vastly overplays the administration's ambition. And when Obama did make a substantive attempt at reform, with his proposal to cut agricultural subsidies paid to the largest farmers, Big Food's congressional allies moved quickly to kill it. Rep. Collin Peterson, the powerful chairman of the House agriculture committee and close friend of Big Ag, wasn't kidding when he declared the proposal "more than dead on arrival." No trace of the cuts made it into Congress' final budget.

And that new funding for organic farmers? At $50 million, it's no chump change. But it pales in comparison with the $11 billion conventional agriculture is estimated to receive in government payments this year-most of which, according to the Environmental Working Group, will go to the largest 10 percent of industrial farms. It's clearly not the scale of the administration's commitment to organic that's at issue, however. Small gestures may also offend-which could explain why the pesticide industry has begun a letter-writing campaign protesting Michelle Obama's much-ballyhooed organic "kitchen garden" at the White House. 

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