Agricultural business journalist dies at 75

EVERETT — Albert Valentine “Al” Krebs Jr., a journalist who investigated corporate farming and was a determined voice for small farmers and rural communities, died Oct. 9 of liver failure at Emerald Hills Healthcare Center in Lynn­wood. He was 75 and lived in Everett.

Krebs began to cover agricultural issues in the 1960s as a journalist in California covering a farm workers’ strike organized by labor leader Cesar Chavez. He devoted the rest of his career to investigating agribusinesses and to projects benefiting small farmers.

After working for the National Sharecroppers Fund in New York, Krebs went to Washington, D.C., in 1971 as corporate research director of the Agribusiness Accountability Project, investigating the role of agribusiness in the farm economy. He contributed to several books on agriculture and corporate farming.

Since 1995, he had lived in Everett, where he was director of the Corporate Agribusiness Research Project until his death, monitoring the effects of corporate farming on rural life. He was the editor and publisher of the project’s newsletter and a regular contributor to Progressive Populist, and he had more than 1,000 subscribers to his weekly e-mailed discussion of issues affecting rural America.

He also revived the AgBiz Tiller as an online periodical, in which he stated his vociferous opposition to corporate agriculture:

“Whereas family farming-peasant agriculture has traditionally sought to nurture and care for the land, corporate agribusiness, exclusive by nature, seeks to ‘mine’ the land, solely interested in monetizing its natural wealth and thus measure efficiency by its profits, by pride in its ‘bottom line.’ Family farmers, meanwhile, see efficiency in terms of respecting, caring and contributing to the overall health and well-being of the land, the environment, the communities and the nations in which they live.”

“The passion of his life was family farm agriculture,” said John Hansen, president of the Nebraska Farmers Union and a former colleague of Krebs’ at the Agribusiness Accountability Project. “He was a walking family farm agriculture historian who chose to defend our traditional system” of family-owned ranches and farms.

Krebs graduated from Seattle University and was a sportswriter with the Los Angeles Examiner before he began reporting on agriculture.

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