Tell Congress: Support the Future of Farming!

Despite recent aid packages, small-scale farmers, and especially young farmers, first-generation farmers, and farmers of color continue to be unable to access much needed COVID-19 relief. Farmworkers, deemed essential, continue to work without mandatory protections to safeguard their health.

As noted in a recent Washington Post article, these young and first-generation farmers are the ones likely to sell directly to restaurants or schools. They are also the ones selling into the local farmers’ markets and into community-supported agriculture (CSA) models. As the pandemic hit this spring, schools and restaurants shuttered. Farmer's markets delayed or limited their openings, drastically reducing these farmers’ income. According to the National Young Farmers Coalition, three-quarters of its members have experienced lost sales due to reduced market access.

These farmers have also been extraordinarily resourceful, pivoting, and adapting to find new markets and feed their communities. Yet these changes have been expensive.

So far, federal aid has been a one-size-fits-all model that has left out small-scale farmers and those growing fruits and vegetables—the foods we eat every day.

Meanwhile, the COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare the failures of the industrial food system. In the last few months, the ways that Big Food corporations put their profits ahead of workers’ safety in the fields and in processing plants has made headlines. Yet those stories are just the most visible.

Farming in the U.S. is consolidating into fewer and fewer hands—and those hands are growing older and older. As supermarkets have faced supply challenges, more and more people have turned to local farmers to find fresh, locally grown food.

Congress needs to act to ensure that the young farmers and farmers of color who make up the future of farming get much-needed relief.

Farming organizations are calling for relief that prioritizes:

• Targeted direct assistance to young farmers and ranchers, especially farmers and ranchers of color.
• Aid that accounts for sales lost and covers the costs of innovations to pivot their operations as the pandemic hit.
• Support for farmworkers, including mandatory workplace protections and hazard pay.