Advocating for an Equitable Farm Bill

This week I had the incredible opportunity to join farmers from across the country for the Farmers for Climate Action: Rally for Resilience. We gathered in D.C. in order to advocate for a Farm Bill that supports:

• Farmer-led climate solutions
• Racial justice
• Communities, not corporations

The Farm Bill is a package of legislation that is passed roughly every 5 years and has a HUGE impact on the food we grow, eat, and have access to. There are multiple chapters (called “Titles”) in the Farm Bill that can change over time but may include commodities, conservation, nutrition, credit, rural development, research, extension, forestry, energy, horticulture, crop insurance, and more.

This is a Farm Bill year, which means members of Congress are proposing and debating each element of the Farm Bill which will determine how our food system looks over the next 5 years. We rallied with hundreds of other farmers, farmworkers, and advocates to march to the Capitol and meet with our Legislators to share our stories about small farms, regenerative agriculture, and BIPOC-owned farms.

My team at Rural Action organized with the Ohio Ecological Food & Farm Association to meet with the offices of Senator JD Vance and Representative Bill Johnson. I had the privilege of sharing our farm story alongside other Ohio farmers, including Sophia Buggs of Lady Buggs Pharm. Below are the stories I shared, with farm bill recommendations in bold.

On supporting beginning farmers…

I am a beginning farmer raising grass-fed beef in southeast Ohio. My fiance and I want to make farming a career and hope that it can someday support our household of two. But three years into our business, we both still work full-time. To be an Appalachian farm is to be a small farm. And small farms struggle, within a system that prioritizes industrial agriculture, to make farming a viable livelihood. This is why we’re asking Congress to cap farm subsidies that reward industrial production and concentrate wealth and resources. Furthermore, I farm on my family’s land with a $0/acre agreement. Most beginning farmers, the majority of whom are first-generation, do not have the privilege of farming on family land. So if we cannot make it farming, how can any beginning farmer in our region make it when access to land is the largest barrier?

1 in 3 farmers is over the age of 65. For most industries, that’s retirement age, meaning 1/3 of our farmers is leaving agriculture. Over the last 15 years the number of beginning farmers has decreased by 9%. But young people ARE interested in farming! The barriers to accessing land and the difficulty of supporting a household on farming keep them from living out their agrarian dreams. I am excited about a Farm Bill that supports community-led land access initiatives and training and capital assistance for beginning farmers.

On grazing as as climate solution…

Ohio’s #1 industry is agriculture. This means Ohio should have the nation’s best soils and most healthy waterways. But our state experiences high rates of soil erosion, algal blooms from fertilizer run-off, and a long history of environmental damage due to resource extraction that left acid mine drainage in our streams in Appalachian Ohio and communities hollowed of their resilience. The power of well-managed grazing to restore these soils and sequester carbon in the face of climate change must be supported in the Farm Bill. Pastured meat and agroforestry are farming practices that are best suited to the rolling hills of Southeast Ohio. We need the Farm Bill to incorporate the Grazing Lands Conservation Initiative to provide technical assistance to graziers and funding to incentivize producers to implement regenerative grazing practices.

Too often, NRCS funding is disproportionately directed towards large operations or confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs). For example, our small farm has attempted year after year to secure EQIP funding to implement conservation practices that we could not pay for on our own. And year after year, we are passed over for larger farms. The Farm Bill must incentivize organic agriculture by increasing set aside funding for the EQIP and CSP Organic Initiatives.

On investing in local processors…

We drive an hour and a half to get to our processor and must schedule a butcher date a full year in advance, sometimes before we even buy the animals. This is a common experience. We have seen investments in local infrastructure work after the Inflation Reduction Act supported a new processor to go in near our farm. Now our drive is only 15 minutes and we have much more flexibility in scheduling butcher dates when we need them. Investing in local infrastructure ensures resilience in the face of disrupted supply chains and a beef industry that is controlled by four major corporations. The Strengthening Local Processing Act is a vital component of the Farm Bill in order to ensure that small farms like ours can thrive.

MoSo Jewelry

The MoSo Jewelry shop is running a Spring Cleaning Sale from now until April 9th! Help me clear out the shop with 25% off everything to get ready for some new creations this summer.

What I’m reading…

Uncultivated: Wild Apples, Real Cider, and the Complicated Art of Making a Living | Book by Andy Brennan | "Author Andy Brennan describes uncultivation as a process: It involves exploring the wild; recognizing that much of nature is omitted from our conventional ways of seeing and doing things (our cultivations); and realizing the advantages to embracing what we’ve somehow forgotten or ignored.”

You Don’t Have to Be Complicit in Our Culture of Destruction | NYT Article interviewing Robin Wall Kimmerer about traditional ecological knowledge, paying attention to the natural world, and not being complicit with destruction.

The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden | Book by Stanley Kunitz, Genine Lentine, and Marnie Crawford Samuelson | “Throughout his life (1905-2006) Stanley Kunitz created poetry and tended gardens. This book is the distillation of conversations, none previously published, that took place between 2002 and 2004.”