Farm Bill News | Civil Eats

Will Congress Pass a New Farm Bill in 2025?

Wed, 08 Jan 2025 09:00:21 +0000

With his new book, Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry, Austin Frerick set out to unravel the tangled history of today’s agriculture industry, while simultaneously pursuing the answer to a very personal question: What happened to the vibrant, diverse Iowa he once called home?

“The state is blessed with some of the world’s best soil: ‘black gold,’ which, coupled with consistently good rainfall, makes for ideal farming conditions,” writes Frerick, a fellow at Yale University’s Thurman Arnold Project, a research effort focused on competition policy and antitrust enforcement. “I wanted to understand how this blessing has, over the past 40 years, turned into a curse.” How, he wonders, has the countryside become “so industrial that it no longer feels like countryside at all?”

But Barons, which took Frerick five years to write, is not a memoir. It’s a detailed look at seven families that have risen to power within the food industry and, more importantly, the story of the system that has allowed them to concentrate power, reap enormous profits, and shape our political landscape. He digs into the policies that allowed white farmers to displace farmers of color in the 20th century and contrasts the “New Deal Farm Bill”—his term for the bill as it was originally intended—with today’s “Wall Street Farm Bill.”

“I wanted to call attention to how intentional the rise of industrial farms was by the business community in Iowa, as well as the failure of public servants like Vilsack to do what voters had wanted.”

“I refer to these people as ‘barons’ to hearken back to Gilded Age robber barons such as John D. Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan because I believe that we are living in a parallel moment when a few titans have the power to shape industries,” writes Frerick, in the book’s introduction.

Some of the barons, like the Waltons and the Cargill-MacMillan family, may be familiar to his readers. But most—including Driscoll’s “berry barons” J. Miles and Garland Reiter; Joesley and Wesley Batista, the brothers behind the Brazilian beef company JBS; and the Reimanns, the German family behind JAB Holding Company, the fast-growing company that has come to dominate the U.S. coffee industry in a single decade—will likely be new.

Civil Eats spoke to Frerick recently about several of the barons, the systemic levers that have allowed food monopolies to thrive, and why he thinks lawmakers should completely rethink the farm bill.

There have been a lot of books about the food system. What did you think was missing from the existing canon and why did you want to write this book?

I didn’t start off with wanting to write a book. I wanted to write about what I’ve seen happen to Iowa. In 2021, I wrote an article [about “hog baron” Jeff Hansen and his company Iowa Select Farms] with Charlie Mitchell. And that started over beers in a bar in Des Moines where a political operative told me the largest donor to the governor in the big race that year was this hog farmer who had given her $300,000.

He had a private jet, and the rumor was that it had “when pigs fly” painted on the side of it. To me, that just said everything about what had happened in my home state in my lifetime, how [a few big agribusiness families] run the state government to the detriment of the environment—and our communities. That article did well online; a whole lot of people reached out to me afterwards.

And I realized that missing in the larger story of the rise of Iowa hog confinement in the media is the fact that people there did fight them for years; there was a rural rebellion—and they lost. In these little towns of 2,000 people, hundreds packed gyms, trying to organize against hog confinements. When [current Agriculture Secretary] Tom Vilsack ran for governor in 2002, he even campaigned against them.

Then, after he won, he oversaw the largest expansion of confinements in Iowa history. So, I wanted to call attention to how intentional the rise of industrial farms was by the business community in Iowa, as well as the failure of public servants like Vilsack to do what voters had wanted. And after working on that story, I realized the baron framework was a powerful way to tell larger structural stories.

You write, “I was born near a Cargill soybean mill and went to church near a Cargill corn mill. I even played soccer next to a Cargill grain elevator.” Yet, like most people, you didn’t know how powerful the company was—it is now the largest private company in America—until much later.

It is truly mind-blowing how massive they are and how little attention they’ve gotten. And it’s because they’re the middleman. The Cargill-MacMillans are like your classic smart monopolists. The best monopolies are the ones that fly under the radar.

Cargill also doesn’t give donations—it funnels money through other people. Ninety percent of the company is owned by one family. That is an insane amount of money and power. I would argue they’re probably some of the scariest barons.

Can you speak to how the farm bill has changed since its inception? You describe what began as a “New Deal Farm Bill” and detail the events that transformed it into what you call the “Stock Market Farm Bill.” How are those different?

The “New Deal Farm Bill” was about managing production. What we saw during the Dust Bowl and after the crash of agriculture markets after World War I was the result of markets overproducing. Farmers were pushing their land [to produce as much food as possible] just to keep their land even though it was cratering the market.

The “New Deal Farm Bill” was an attempt by the federal government to try to figure out a balance between producing enough but understanding that the soil, air, water, etc., are common goods, and we shouldn’t push our lands too hard. And the two programs were tied together; in order to get farm subsidies, you had to engage in conservation programs. The carrot and stick were interlocked. And there were caps—each farm could only get so much in subsidies.

Fast forward to what I call the “Wall Street Farm Bill.” It is designed specifically to incentivize overproduction of grain. If you grow carrots, you don’t really get anything. The dark joke I keep telling after writing this book is that the only farmer really on the free market is the CSA vegetable farmer.

That push to produce corn in places like Iowa led to the ethanol industry. Farmers overplanted corn, and that pushed a lot of animals off the land. But it didn’t happen all at once. It’s like what we’ve seen in the last few decades of deregulation in America—there has been this slow removal of checks and balances. Now you have [farm bill-funded] conservation programs that come out of the Dust Bowl and are now being used to finance hog confinements, a fact that Civil Eats has reported on extensively.

The “New Deal Farm Bill” did some important things, but it was ultimately a bill to support white farmers. Ricardo Salvador [a Civil Eats’ advisory board member] helped me understand that the system has long been broken for farmers of color. Black sharecroppers did all the farming in the South. The white people were just the landowners who pocketed money and kicked Black people off the land.

So, rather than romanticize the “New Deal Farm Bill,” I think we should be looking forward. Because at the end of the day, agriculture in America is rooted in genocide and slavery. The question is: How do we incorporate the awareness we have now and move to a better system?

The GOP is often associated with leading the shift toward free-market capitalism in the ’80s and ’90s, but you highlighted the way the Clinton administration played a rather large role in creating the policy environment that has allowed the barons you write about to thrive. How should we be thinking about the role of neoliberalism in all this?

It was both Republicans and Democrats that led to the system we have now. That said, it wasn’t equal. You still had people like Tom Harkin trying to do the right thing. And in Iowa, the only people standing up against the proliferation of hog confinements were the Democrats. But, yes, you had [Democratic leaders] like President Clinton and Vilsack, who is a former lobbyist, willing to do the bidding of corporate America.

“Today, we have children working in our slaughterhouses, and there are no consequences. I haven’t seen something in modern American history so ripe for bipartisan reform than the meat industry.”

When JBS [bought dozens of meat processing companies in the U.S. and drove down prices for cattle ranchers], Vilsack didn’t stop them. The company will just keep pushing the limit, because they only get slapped on the wrist. They get fined and it’s considered part of the cost of doing business.

There are plenty of politicians out there—take Terry Branstad, governor of Iowa, or [former Agriculture Secretary] Sonny Purdue. They don’t pretend to be reformers. They’re there to do the bidding of corporate America. Vilsack is a different story.

Today, we have children working in our slaughterhouses, and there are no consequences. I haven’t seen something in modern American history so ripe for bipartisan reform than the meat industry. Vilsak had everyone [on his side]. He had Republican-leaning ranchers, the mostly Latino workers, and the consumers being gouged in the store.

All these non-American companies have moved in [in the last decade], and the largest one, JBS, admitted to bribing its way to monopoly status. And Vilsack couldn’t do anything? On top of it, the markets have gotten more concentrated during his second stint. JBS was an intentional creation of the Brazilian government. They realized they were over being shortchanged by international companies, so they decided to create their own monopoly. That was very much an intentional development strategy. But you let concentrated power happen and guess what? It corrupted the political system. And that’s why you also saw the rise of [former Brazilian President Jair] Bolsonaro.

You describe the Biden administration’s investment in small- and mid-scale meat processing to promote competition as “dumping money on Ask Jeeves and wishing it luck in competing with Google.” Can you say more about that? There are people who have attached a fair amount of hope to those investments.

To my knowledge, there has never been an example where markets have been de-concentrated by throwing government money at them. You have these meat monopolies, which have shown how ruthless they are—someone might even argue they’re quasi-mafia capitalists. Do you think they’re going to let an ounce of market share go to a local mom-and-pop butcher market space? No. There are a lot of people excited to get free money from the government to go build [or expand meat processing facilities].

But common sense just tells you the two most likely outcomes. One: they will just create more niche products for the Whole Foods Consumer. And, honestly, that has been the story of the food system for the last 30 or 40 years. Two: Most people assume these facilities will go broke in a few years. Then the big meat companies can buy them for pennies on the dollar. Vilsack will be a lobbyist again at that point. And he got the media he wanted about pretending to care about the little guys.

Here in California, the investments seem to have mostly gone to strengthen and expand existing operations, and there are some early signs that it might help build up the market for regenerative beef alongside institutional procurement.

You have some decent regulators there. But much of the “change the food system with your fork” framework is just concerned about the Whole Foods class. My goal is to change the food in Dollar General and Walmart. None of this does that.

Walmart has made an aggressive move into [producing its own] meat and dairy, and that says everything. My understanding is they did that because they were being gouged by the big meat monopolies, these [other] barons. Walmart is known as one of the most ruthless players, and they weren’t happy. Walmart didn’t fully make a vertical play like Costco did with chicken; it created its own companies to gain cost insights. So, now it knows the cost of beef production, and that way when it negotiates with the [other] barons, they can’t screw Walmart over. That’s where we are now: We’re depending on the world’s richest family to police the markets for themselves.

You write about the way that Walmart has driven prices down to such a degree that the companies who make the food it sells must find other ways to eke out a profit.

Yes, that’s true. My favorite disturbing fact about Walmart is the company’s 30 percent rule, because that’s so much about power. [From Barons: “The company is very cognizant of the power asymmetry between it and its suppliers. It requires that no more than 30 percent of their sales come from Walmart. This rule may seem counterintuitive at first, but an industry expert told me that Walmart implemented it to manage its own supply chain risk. It knows that if suppliers cross that threshold, they are at risk of going out of business because Walmart is such an unprofitable and difficult client.”]

The 30 percent rule shows us how the company just keeps tilting the field toward its own advantage.

In the book’s concluding chapter, you point to the existing tools for dismantling the system in which these barons are able to maintain so much control. Where do you see possibilities for change?

I think the heartland in America hasn’t grappled with what the shift to electric vehicles will mean for us all. It is like watching Wile E. Coyote run full-speed toward a cliff. Cars are moving to batteries; that’s going to happen. And it stands to destroy the ethanol industry—one of the largest markets for corn.

Right now, so much wealth in the Midwest is predicated on land wealth. Farmland is worth over $23,000 an acre right now in Iowa. That will plummet if half the corn’s no longer in use. We’re gonna face the death of ethanol soon. The question is what we do with that?

My silver lining is that we could use that moment to put animals back on the land. Because we’re playing with fire by having so many genetically similar animals packed into these metal sheds. We’re just asking for [more] disease.

“The problem with USDA now is it acts like a chamber of commerce, or a promotional agency for the barons. And with every metric—except corporate profits—they’ve failed …”

You also make a radical set of proposals in the last chapter to scrap the farm bill, completely rethink federal support for farms, and re-organize U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). Can you say a little about why?

I think the current farm bill is just too broken. The 2024 Farm Bill will uphold the status quo. They’re going to try to ram it through in the lame duck session after the election. That’s pretty clear at this point. The current “Wall Street Farm Bill” really doesn’t change between [reauthorizations] in my opinion. They add little pilot programs, they do little tweaks, and there’s usually a little bit more deregulation. But I really think a bigger conversation needs to be had over putting the farm bill out to pasture and stripping USDA for parts.

I think a lot of reformers in the food space get played. What Vilsack types do is they bring them into the room, they let them say their peace. And then they can go back and tell their funders, “We had a meeting with the ag secretary.” And the status quo is maintained. That is what you see over and over. Secretary Vilsack oversaw the death of the family hog farm as governor of Iowa, and then he oversaw the death of the family dairy farm as Secretary of Agriculture, and that happened mostly because he didn’t do anything. If you’re not playing on a level playing field [as a farmer] at some point, you can’t play anymore.

I understand food reformers are trying to [make change] day to day, but once in a while, you have to step back and look at the bigger picture. This [bill] was built in a different world. It is so corrupted and corroded. We need to rethink it. And the USDA goes back to the Civil War. It’s not a bad thing to look at reorganizing the system. Let’s put food research under Health and Human Services. Why does USDA have antitrust authority? We should give that to the FTC.

The problem with USDA now is it acts like a chamber of commerce, or a promotional agency for the barons. And with every metric—except corporate profits—they’ve failed: The farmer’s share of the dollar is at an all-time low. One in 10 Americans works in the food system, and the way workers are treated is appalling. And by health standards, Americans are not doing well. It’s hard to make a case that they should continue as-is based on this checklist of failures.

I want readers to understand that the system we have now is radical. It is radical that one man in Iowa raised 5 million hogs a year. The reforms in that last chapter, a lot of it is going back to the way systems used to be—like putting animals back on land. That is not radical; that’s how animals have lived for most of their existence. I understand that the barons and their lackeys will frame me as a radical, but no, it is their corporate capitalist system that is incredibly radical. And you can’t talk about fixing or reforming something unless you have an honest conversation about where it’s at.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The post In ‘Barons,’ Austin Frerick Takes on the Most Powerful Families in the Food System appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2024/03/26/in-barons-austin-frerick-takes-on-the-most-powerful-families-in-the-food-system/feed/ 1 Should a Plan to Curb Meat Industry Water Pollution Consider the Business Costs? https://civileats.com/2024/02/05/should-a-plan-to-curb-meat-industry-water-pollution-consider-the-business-costs/ Mon, 05 Feb 2024 09:00:03 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=55187 However, tackling the problem won’t be straightforward. A new EPA proposal to significantly reduce water pollution from slaughterhouses and meatpacking plants is facing backlash from the meat industry as well as environmental groups, with one side expressing concerns about increased costs and the other worried that the agency may choose significantly weaker rules to minimize […]

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Tractor Rollovers Kill Dozens on Farms Each Year—and a Prevention Program Is at Risk

Mon, 11 Dec 2023 09:00:19 +0000

On a sunny afternoon in September 2021, Michael Langford was moving compost with his compact John Deere. The front bucket was half full as he drove the tractor forward on a gentle slope of his 10-acre produce and poultry farm in Greensboro, Georgia.

Suddenly, the 53-year-old felt a tire slip under him. “I felt the tractor tilting over,” Langford recalls. “I wanted to get away from it as fast as possible. Thankfully, I didn’t have my seatbelt on. It just threw me across the yard, about 40 feet.”

In the end, the tractor landed on its left side; a roll bar above the seat prevented it from turning upside down.

Initially, Langford had only scrapes and bruises on his shoulders and neck, but a few weeks later, he couldn’t raise his arms above his chest. He underwent two surgeries to address torn rotator cuffs in his shoulders.

The tractor, the most ubiquitous tool on America’s farms, is also the most dangerous. Tractor accidents can result in severe injuries and are also the leading cause of death for farmers, according to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH).

Rollovers alone account for most fatalities. Exact numbers are difficult to tally, but based on the most recent information from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 417 people died in tractor rollovers between 2011 and 2018—an average of 52 every year. And given the fact that many farms have 10 or fewer employees and are therefore not required to report fatalities, the number is very likely higher.

A safety device called the rollover protective structure (ROPS) has been known for decades to prevent these deaths. The structure includes a roll bar above the seat, supported by two or four posts, or a crush-proof cab. When used with seatbelts, ROPS are 99 percent effective in preventing injury and death.

“Rollovers can happen anywhere. Slopes and hilly terrain are definitely high risk. Mowing ditches is pretty risky. But it can totally happen on flat ground.”

In 1985, tractor manufacturers adopted a voluntary standard to include ROPS and seatbelts on all new tractors over 20 horsepower. Older tractors can be upgraded by installing ROPS—and farmers can defray the cost, which varies from less than $200 to nearly $6,000, depending on the make and model of tractor—through a national rebate program that began in 2007.

The National ROPS Rebate Program helps farmers with approximately 70 percent of the cost of purchasing and installing the safety equipment. The Northeast Center for Occupational Health and Safety (NEC) administers the program, and states cover the cost of the actual rebates, though the amount of support states provide varies widely and waiting lists are common.

Despite the proven success of the safety measure, however, the NEC is facing a funding shortfall and may have to shut down the program in 2024—because even if states continue to supply money for rebates, if the NEC doesn’t have money to administer the program, it cannot continue to run. To keep it going, administrators need $125,000 a year.

Given the threats to the rebate program’s existence, researchers and trade groups are hoping to shift its funding—both its administrative costs and the rebates themselves—to the federal farm bill, which would offer the program more long-term stability and move thousands of farmers off years-long waiting lists to upgrade their tractors. So far, however, Congress has not introduced any legislation that would create the rebate program.

Older Tractors, Experienced Farmers

Tractor overturns have been reported since the 1920s. The vehicles have a high center of gravity that can shift when they are hauling heavy loads or lifting large items such as bales of hay, according to Dr. Brandi Janssen, director of Iowa’s Center for Agricultural Safety and Health at the University of Iowa.

“Rollovers can happen anywhere,” Janssen said. “Slopes and hilly terrain are definitely high risk. Mowing ditches is pretty risky. But it can totally happen on flat ground.” Older tractors, with their narrow “tricycle-front” wheels, are more prone to tipping over, she continued.

Farmers hang on to older tractors because they know how to repair them and they work well with their other equipment, according to Dr. Julie Sorensen, director of the NEC. “Having worked with farmers for over 20 years, “they do have an attachment to their equipment,” she said.

Missouri has the highest number of fatal tractor incidents nationwide. It was on Janssen’s family farm in the state’s Ozark Mountains where her uncle rolled his tractor—which had no ROPS—into a ravine in the 1980s. “The tractor got hung up above him and he dropped down into the ditch so he walked away from it,” said Janssen. “Those are the stories that we don’t capture in [the existing data].”

The vast majority of reported deaths happen to experienced farmers, according to the NEC.

That is evident in Washington state, where between 1998 and 2022, 24 tractor rollovers resulted in fatalities, and all the victims were men, with a median age of 54. In one instance, a 56-year-old man had worked on his father’s farm all his life.

In late July 2020, he was driving a 1971 International Harvester 1066 tractor—which did not have an ROPS or a seatbelt—with a trailer near the edge of a bumpy road before sunrise. As he turned the tractor, one of its front wheels caught in a rut and the massive machine rolled down a grassy embankment. The heavy metal arms of a 3-point hitch at the back of the tractor pinned the farmer on his back and killed him. He was found hours later by his wife and son.

Paul Karolczyk, a research investigator with Washington’s Fatality Assessment and Control Evaluation (FACE) program, published a detailed report on the incident. He found that the victim had only used the older tractor because the newer, safety-equipped tractor he owned had recently developed engine problems.

“It hit me when I was reading his obituary,” Karolczyk said. “There were a lot of comments . . . that really communicated the repercussions of this traumatic incident. We’re talking about rural communities that have smaller populations, and those impacts are felt much more widely through communities, because it’s not just one employee out of thousands. It’s also somebody who might be a pillar in that community.”

Most of the rollovers in Washington occurred on crop farms, including the state’s signature apple orchards. On those operations workers often take the roll bars down to work under the trees.

“Then they have to travel to another part of the farm, and in their mind, it takes too long to stop and put that ROPS back up,” said Todd Schoonover, director of the state’s FACE program. “But they’re going to go 30 miles an hour over some rough terrain. They’re going to navigate some tight, hairpin corners, and that’s when these rollovers often happen.”

Children at Risk

It’s not just farmers and farmworkers who are at risk. Rollover accidents can also impact children. Farms are a unique live-work space where young children often grow up riding in tractors with parents and grandparents, and older youth often help out their families and get hired by neighbors to operate tractors.

In 2011-2020, agriculture was the industry with the most deaths for working children ages 17 and younger, according to the National Children’s Center for Rural and Agricultural Health and Safety. The problem is even more pronounced because agricultural injuries and fatalities for non-working children are not recorded.

For child workers, the category that includes tractors, along with all-terrain vehicles (ATVs) and utility task vehicles (UTVs), was tied to the most deaths, according to Dr. Marsha Salzwedel, a project scientist at the center. Rollovers are more prevalent in older children driving tractors, she added. Parents will often teach children on older tractors without ROPS so they don’t damage expensive, new vehicles. But even practiced children face risks.

“We’ll hear stories about children who aren’t tall enough to reach the pedals or the steering wheel, so they have to slide forward on the seat and they don’t have the seatbelt on,” she said. “The other thing to consider is whether they have the cognitive abilities, the cognitive function, to operate that tractor. They don’t have the experience to know that you need to go crossways on a slope.”

That was the case with Ward Gerhardt in upstate New York. He learned to drive a tractor at age six on an old John Deere H that ran on kerosene. At 16, on a sunny fall afternoon, he started up a tractor for a trip down a hill. Hitched to the back was a 12-foot-high chopper wagon filled with oats from his brother’s field. Gerhardt turned up the radio over the noise of the tractor. He left his seatbelt unfastened as his foster brother sat wedged on a fender beside his seat.

“I don’t know what I was thinking, but instead of going down around the path that I should have, I broke over the crest of the hill,” Gerhardt recalled.

The six tons of grain he was towing suddenly piled forward in the wagon. The tractor’s tires lost traction, and it raced down the hill in a 25 mile-an-hour free fall. Gerhardt managed to steer straight until the tractor hit two rutted cowpaths a thousand feet down and then tore through a fence and crashed sideways.

“We got jostled around pretty good, but we got out of it without any injury,” Gerhardt said. “When it rolled, [my foster brother] was just lying there on his back and didn’t get hurt.”

That accident took place 50 years ago. An enclosed cab on the tractor kept the teenagers safe. Gerhardt, now 66, farms organic hay on his own 10-acre field in Mohawk, NY. He said the accident still affects how he drives a tractor.

“Fortunately, most of the land I’m working with is pretty flat,” he said. “Any hilly land, I’m pretty apprehensive about. I’m overly careful with how I’m driving on it and where I’m going.”

ROPS Rebates

With help from the National ROPS Rebate Program, Gerhardt is now planning to upgrade his own John Deere 3020 with a roll bar and a seatbelt. Since 2007, the program has retrofitted nearly 3,500 tractors, with rebates totaling more than $3 million. More than 2,000 farmers across the country are now waiting, because states must set aside funds for the rebates, and only New York and Minnesota have budgeted enough. A farmer in Maine has been on the waitlist for nearly 17 years, and in Iowa, the state with the highest rate of rollovers, 135 people are waiting for a rebate.

Jolean Johnson, 66, was waitlisted for five years before she upgraded the oldest of her four tractors. She uses the John Deere 2840 to rake hay and move wagons on her hilly 28-acre horse boarding farm outside State College, Pennsylvania.

Pennsylvania farmer Jolean Johnson’s retrofitted tractor. (Photo courtesy of Jolean Johnson)

Soon after she purchased the farm in 1984, Johnson witnessed her father nearly flip his tractor backwards. She bought the John Deere in 1986 and has been looking to upgrade ever since.

“It has always been an issue for me, because of how close I came to losing my father,” said Johnson.

But with her tight budget, the cost was prohibitive. When she got approved for a rebate, she paid $1,300 for the ROPS and installation. The rebate reduced her outlay to about $430.

“We’ve come so far in identifying a solution, but all of that will fold in [less than] a year if we can’t find some way to support the program.”

But other farmers may never make it through the waitlist. The NEC has relied on research grants to administer the program, including a website to apply for the rebate, a toll-free hotline manned by a former dairy farmer, recommendations for local installers, and rebate processing. But because the program is past the research phase, it no longer qualifies for the grants it has relied on in the past. Sorensen, the director of the center, estimated they need at least $125,000 per year to keep the program running at its current level nationwide.

“We’ve come so far in identifying a solution,” she said, “but all of that will fold in [less than] a year if we can’t find some way to support the program.”

She said they could charge states for administrative costs but that seems unlikely as they already struggle to provide funding for the rebates themselves. A more permanent solution would be to fold the rebates into another program: the next $1.5 trillion farm bill. (The last bill expired in September but Congress recently granted a one-year extension in funding, until September 2024.)

“The funding mechanism that’s most ideally aligned with providing rebates and funding the program would be USDA,” Sorensen said. “To provide national funding for rebates would be something like $1 million a year. If you look at the farm bill, that’s peanuts.”

Trade groups that lobby legislators, including the American Farm Bureau Federation, also support federal funding for the rebate program. And the Association of Equipment Manufacturers lists the rebate program as one of its policy priorities for the farm bill.

So far, no one has introduced legislation that would support the program. With the one-year extension, however, Congressional agriculture committees have extra time to draft the next bill, and to include the rebate program.

“[Tractor rollovers are] the most frequent cause of death in the farm community, and we have a solution that we know works,” Sorensen said. “We could prevent further death or injury in the community. And the only thing that is stopping us is a marginal investment nationally in making this happen.”

The post Tractor Rollovers Kill Dozens on Farms Each Year—and a Prevention Program Is at Risk appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> Animal Welfare Advocates Want a Say in the Next Farm Bill https://civileats.com/2023/11/06/animal-welfare-advocates-want-a-say-in-the-next-farm-bill/ Mon, 06 Nov 2023 09:00:30 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=53736 This is the latest installment of our series Faces of the Farm Bill, wherein we set out to humanize the real-world impacts of ag policy. This time around, animal welfare groups have even stepped up their efforts to shape the bill. The nonprofit Farm Sanctuary, the first shelter for farm animals, is among the groups that has spent the […]

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Op-ed: Farmers Want Climate Resilience, but GOP Lawmakers Want to Redirect Billions in Conservation Funds

Thu, 12 Oct 2023 08:00:57 +0000

As Congress let the last farm bill expire at the end of September, I was navigating an ongoing drought on my Iowa farm for the third year in a row.

Iowa is known for its lush, green summers and abundant rivers and streams. Today, most of those streams are dried up and the rivers are at all-time lows. The soft rains we used to see from April to October are gone and now we’re facing longer bouts of drought, high heat events, torrential downpours, and polar vortexes. Because of climate change, the state is now colder than Alaska in the winter and hotter than Arizona during some parts of the year.

“Despite the ongoing droughts, floods, heat waves, and fires—and their ensuing costs to taxpayers—there’s still no consensus among lawmakers about the value of helping farmers achieve resilience in the face of climate change.”

In this corner of the state, we’ve only had 10 inches of rain since May 1; typically we would have had closer to 30 inches by now. In the first week of October, we had several unusually dry and windy 90-degree days that resulted in a field fire sparked by a combine.

These conditions are just one piece of a much larger puzzle. By September 2023, the U.S. had already seen 23 billion-dollar disasters fueled by climate change that year alone. Each year the number exceeds the year prior, yet there is little talk or action on mitigation and prevention.

Meanwhile, it may be months before lawmakers can agree on a new farm bill. And as their negotiations set the stage for the next five years of American agriculture, it can feel to farmers like our future is in their hands. Despite the ongoing droughts, floods, heat waves, and fires—and their ensuing costs to taxpayers—there’s still no consensus among lawmakers about the value of helping farmers achieve resilience in the face of climate change.

Many of us, however, are taking matters into our own hands. On the parts of my farm where I’ve been able to plant trees and perennial plants and grasses, that deep-rooted living cover is still providing a lifeline to moisture and minerals. I’ve been slowly expanding the land on which I’m using these conservation practices, and I’ve witnessed how resilient the area has become to unpleasant climate extremes.

And yet, here in Iowa, and in a number of other states, policies that invest in climate-smart farming practices are often written off as “climate alarmism.” And that resistance to talking about the crisis is also playing out in the farm bill negotiations themselves.

Last year, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) included $20 billion that was to be used to shore up four federal conservation programs: the Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP), the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP), the Agricultural Conservation Easement Program (ACEP), and the Regional Conservation Partnership Program (RCPP). While these programs haven’t always been used to make farms climate resilient, they all have the potential to do so—and more funding and specific guardrails specified within the IRA would make that even more likely.

GOP Lawmakers Move to Block New Animal Welfare Standards in Organic

Tue, 26 Sep 2023 08:00:51 +0000

October 25, 2023 update: The USDA published the Organic Livestock and Poultry Standards final rule, and organic industry and advocacy groups cheered the publication as a victory. The amendments to block the standards, if passed, could still impact the implementation and enforcement of the rule, but progress on spending bills in Congress remains stalled. In […]

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How Crop Insurance Prevents Some Farmers From Adapting to Climate Change

Wed, 20 Sep 2023 08:00:54 +0000

Chris Grotegut has earned a reputation in the High Plains of Texas for farming practices that have helped replenish the region’s depleted aquifer. Just over a decade ago, he began converting his 11,000-acre farm to perennial native grassland to rebuild the health of his soil. He planted wheat and other grains directly into the meadows and relied solely on rainfall for much of his acreage. It soon proved worth it.

Water runs right off dry soil, but healthy soil is absorbent. The water table beneath Grotegut’s land didn’t just stabilize—it began to rise in some places. The regenerative farming practices allowed him to stop pumping groundwater on most of his land.

It’s easy to see why most farmers keep growing vast tracts of irrigated soy and corn over depleted aquifers . . . and experts say federally subsidized crop insurance is part of the problem.

Grotegut now sees this model of farming as the solution to the increasing desertification in the stretch of Texan desert that overlies the Ogallala Aquifer, the massive, quickly depleting underground reservoir that lies beneath the Great Plains, stretching from North Texas up to the Dakotas.

There is, however, one major drawback: Grotegut’s efforts to save water have left his crops largely uninsurable by the U.S. Federal Crop Insurance Program (FCIP), the multi-billion dollar program designed to protect and stabilize both farmers’ livelihoods and the U.S. food supply.

Even though his primary crop is wheat, one of FCIP’s most widely insured crops, his land management system disqualifies him from coverage. He was specifically denied coverage for harvested crops grown in the grasslands. Instead, his insurance is limited to a small plot where he grows many of the same crops in rows under pivots, a more legible system to FCIP.

And while he’s staying the course on regenerative practices, it’s easy to see why most farmers keep growing vast tracts of irrigated soy and corn over depleted aquifers instead.

A recent New York Times investigation found that the U.S. is rapidly running out of groundwater, including historic lows in parts of the Ogallala Aquifer. And experts say federally subsidized crop insurance is part of the problem. Irrigated crops receive higher payouts than dryland crops, while farmers often risk their coverage to engage in some of the most ecologically sound practices. Even if a crop is dying, farmers can still be required to irrigate it to maintain insurance.

Under the sweeping FCIP, administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Risk Management Agency (RMA), most participating farmers receive what’s known as multi-peril insurance, receiving payments for crops that die from a range of causes, from flooding to fungal disease to extreme heat.

But there’s a catch: Farmers must also prove that they weren’t at fault for the failed harvest by following a specific, FDIC-approved set of standards called the Good Farming Practices. If farmers stray from these practices, they are penalized with either denied claims or reduced payments. And while the practices vary regionally, determined by approved local experts, they tend to favor commodity row agriculture.

Farmers can be penalized for under-fertilizing, under-watering, keeping a cover crop in the ground for too long, and not growing in distinct rows, according to interviews with farmers and insurance experts. Any practice that “could affect the amount and quality of the crop” can potentially violate the Good Farming Practices, according to RMA’s guidance.

Yet this often ends up excluding farming methods known to benefit the environment, such as intercropping, where multiple crops are planted together. This method is exemplified by the three sisters, the Indigenous practice of growing corn, beans, and squash together. If crops aren’t managed separately, in distinct rows, this practice is widely prohibited across regions.

“The crop insurance program is designed for a very linear thinker—for being able to check a box ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ The more creative ways of farming or adapting are really not feasible,” said Grotegut. “Even though what we’re doing is absolutely [moving in] the right direction, ecologically and long-term economically, it’s not doable if you’re following the rules.”

In Grotegut’s case, wheat grown in grasslands is certified as “mixed-species forage” by the USDA’s Farm Service Agency. It is certified organic and ends up in bakeries, but it’s also denied coverage as wheat.

The crop insurance program—funded by the premiums paid by farmers and an $11 billion subsidy so far in 2023—has been steadily expanding in size in recent years as persistent drought, wildfires, and flooding take a sharp toll on U.S. farms. Yet this funding is unevenly distributed to mainly benefit the largest 10 percent of farms. This narrow segment receives over half of all crop insurance subsidies, funding their capacity to further expand in a cycle of farmland consolidation associated with greater climate vulnerability.

A USDA spokesperson told Civil Eats in a recent email that the agency is working to bridge the gap between its recommendations for climate-friendly practices and its coverage. “From providing greater flexibility for cover crops to covering innovative practices such as split application of nitrogen, RMA has made great strides in harmonizing conservation and crop insurance,” the spokesperson said.

However, farmers, advocates, and experts across the country say that FCIP has presented steep barriers to adopting ecological and climate-friendly practices, including onerous reporting requirements and strict rules for maintaining coverage. As lawmakers negotiate the 2023 Farm Bill, advocates see a window to reform its policies that are hindering the type of farming supported by the USDA’s own climate initiatives.

As it stands, the program often leaves farmers who conserve resources and mitigate climate change uninsured or underinsured, while subsidizing farmers who depend heavily on pumping groundwater and the use of synthetic fertilizers on marginalized land.

Caught Intercropping

The Biden administration has made historic investments in “climate-smart” farming practices generally aimed at increasing soil fertility, yet the FCIP can act as a barrier to these goals by disincentivizing some of the same practices.

“We’re incentivized to eliminate fallow, practice diverse rotations, and intercrop—all of these sorts of things by federal conservation agencies and paid to do so under contracts,” said Montana farmer Doug Crabtree. “At the same time, if you do those things, you’re ineligible for crop insurance, which is administered by a federal agency under the [U.S.] Department of Agriculture. It’s a ridiculous juxtaposition.”

For instance, the USDA’s Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS) promotes intercropping as a way to improve soil health and water retention. Yet under the most utilized insurance plan covering a range of risks, farmers can be denied an insurance claim if caught intercropping by an insurance adjuster. In fact, earlier this summer, Crabtree was accused of intercropping barley and peas, risking his coverage.

“[The adjusters] came out and inspected it and said, “Well, there’s barley in those peas, so you must have intercropped,” said Crabtree. “I said, ‘No, I did not intercrop. I had barley in that field last year.” While he claims most of the barley grew naturally from the seeds of last year’s crop, the adjusters questioned his intentions.

This seemingly minor dispute carries large consequences. Crabtree had a lower pea yield, which he attributes to the drought. “It became hot and dry again right when the peas, in particular, were trying to flower,” he said. However, in growing two crops at once, the insurance adjuster may consider him at fault. He’s still waiting on the final word from the insurance company.

“It’s based on this fallacy that intercropping automatically reduces the yield of the crop,” said Crabtree. “It’s simply not true.” In fact, a 2021 paper published in Nature Sustainability found that the practice increases yields by an average of 22 percent compared to monocrop systems, while improving soil health.

Another organic farmer who spoke to Civil Eats anonymously, for fear of risking his crop insurance coverage, admitted to covertly intercropping flax and chickpeas. He uses only a small amount of flax hoping it will be overlooked. It’s a combination that has been shown to reduce Ascochyta blight in chickpeas, which can lead to crop loss.

“I just seed the minimal level of 10 pounds [of flax] an acre with my peas. So, it’s just a little bit in between that keeps more of the weeds out and then I get some extra flax for selling,” said the farmer. “I don’t talk about it too much.” The farmer said that the flax was once spotted by an insurance adjuster, who ultimately turned a blind eye. But another adjuster might not let him off the hook.

“I think the future of no-till organic on the Great Plains is intercropping two or three crops together. It just throws [insurance agents] into a whirlwind. They don’t know how to handle it,” said the farmer.

“The crop insurance program is designed for a very linear thinker—for being able to check a box ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ The more creative ways of farming or adapting are really not feasible.”

In the current farm bill, passed in 2018, the RMA incorporated insurable cover cropping, a widely recognized climate-friendly practice that pairs well with others such as reduced tillage and managed grazing. But the catch is that farmers must comply with strict rules for terminating cover crops under the premise that they will influence the yield of the incoming crop. In some regions, keeping a cover crop in the ground for too long disqualifies farmers from higher insurance coverage. And fallowing fields, or keeping them barren for a season, yields higher payments.

“To qualify for summer fallow [payments for wheat], you have to terminate cover crops no later than the first of June,” Crabtree said. “Well, that basically means you can’t grow cover crops because [in Montana] we don’t seed things until late May. It’s pointless to seed something and it’s barely emerged and then you have to terminate it.”

If the cover crop is allowed to grow into June, then the next crop that gets planted in that field would fall under “continuous coverage”—a designation that results in a lower insurable yield if the crop fails, regardless of the farmer’s actual yield history. This disincentivizes continuous planting and cover cropping, a management strategy that the USDA’s Climate Hubs promote as a way to build climate resilience, reduce erosion, and provide other benefits.

The Good Farming Practices also include herbicide and fertilizer rates, typically determined regionally by university extension agents, explained Anne Schechinger, a crop insurance researcher and the Midwest director of the Environmental Working Group. But this can also be detrimental to the climate and water quality.

“In many states, the recommended rates [for fertilizer] are just too high and lead to nitrate runoff,” Schechinger said. This is a major source of groundwater pollution, spawns oxygen-deprived dead zones, and accelerates climate change. “If you’re using more nitrogen fertilizer, you’re going to have more nitrous oxide emissions,” she added.

However, there is an option for farmers to work with an insurance agent to develop a written agreement to cover less recognized practices. It’s a tedious process. It typically requires the farmer and agent to compile extensive research on the practice, which is submitted to the insurance company and then RMA for approval.

“When I do a request, at a minimum I’m submitting at least 50 pages,” said Ginny Olson, an insurance agent at Lockton Companies. “It does take quite a bit of time”— to a point where some agents might not be willing to do this. But if she can prove that it’s an effective, accepted organic practice, her request is usually approved.

‘On Paper, It Looks Like We’re Covered. We’re Not.’

For many farmers, one of the largest barriers to adopting more climate-friendly farming practices is the upfront resources needed. New practices often require new tools, research, planning, and manual labor. The FCIP adds an additional hurdle by penalizing farmers transitioning aspects of their farm by reducing their coverage.

Under the most common federal crop insurance policy, each crop is insured based on the farmer’s yield history with that crop. However, if a farmer wants to transition to a new crop, field, or farming practices, they are given a transitional yield (“T-yield”) based on a reduced percentage of the county’s average for that crop. Farmers receive a 35 percent reduction when transitioning to certified organic, which is often too low to trigger claims.

“On paper, it looks like we’re covered. We’re not because we’re self-insuring even though we have these programs,” said Amy Bruch, an organic farmer in Nebraska. “They just give you an actuarial number. And then you’re stuck with that.”

“From providing greater flexibility for cover crops to covering innovative practices such as split application of nitrogen, RMA has made great strides in harmonizing conservation and crop insurance,” a USDA spokesperson said.

Recognized as an innovative farmer, the Organic Trade Association named Bruch its 2021 Organic Farmer of the Year. Her crop yields tend to be much higher than her actuarial numbers, resulting in highly limited coverage. She refers to the coverage as “catastrophic” insurance because it only kicks in if a crop is nearly wiped out.

“If I have 30 percent damage, I would never trigger a claim. I would still out-yield the coverage,” Bruch said. This reduced coverage is intended to last for four growing seasons. However, it can amount to 20 years for some organic farmers, like Bruch, who do frequent rotations and don’t grow the same crop every year.

“This doesn’t get discussed because it is complicated on the outside to understand, but it’s one of the biggest barriers to organic production,” Bruch added.

She sees the solution as simple: provide growers in transition with customizable insurance plans to reflect their actual yields.

The Endless Paperwork of Diversified Farming

In other sectors, insurance premiums generally rise as the risks of catastrophe or other damages increase. But FCIP’s most utilized insurance plan looks narrowly at production history, basing future risk on historic conditions. This fails to account for longer-term future risks in the food system, such as aquifers running dry, and farming methods that can help a farm adapt to the growing threat of climate change.

It’s well-established that one of the most effective ways for farmers to reduce risk during disasters is by growing a variety of crops. This offers a built-in level of resilience, by spreading out risk across crops and seasons. For instance, a farm that only grows sunflowers is vulnerable to a strong wind, but that risk is lowered if the farm grows wind-tolerant crops too. Crop diversity also helps build up soil health, another buffer to disaster.

However, a highly diversified farm is almost impossible to insure. Even if the farm qualifies for insurance, the paperwork required often makes it infeasible.

Under the FCIP’s largest program, farmers are required to take out individual insurance policies for every crop. This is simple if you’re just growing corn and soybeans every year, but it can quickly turn into a paperwork nightmare for farmers growing a rotating, colorful medley of crops.

As a result, crop insurance is inaccessible for farmers and farming traditions that prioritize crop diversity, including many farmers of color and Indigenous farmers whose traditions gave rise to what it now called regenerative agriculture.

Larisa Jacobson, Climate Justice Co-Director and a founding member of the Northeast Farmers of Color Land Trust, said that almost all the farmers in the network—around 600 BIPOC farmers in 12 states throughout the Northeast and in Washington D.C.—lack crop insurance.

“We have these folks growing at a really small scale, highly diversified, with many different crops,” said Jacobson. “Since crop insurance is often crop-specific, the bureaucratic paperwork load for people is really prohibitive.”

Crop insurance is inaccessible for farmers and farming traditions that prioritize crop diversity, including many farmers of color and Indigenous farmers whose traditions gave rise to what it now called regenerative agriculture.

Currently, commodity crops, like wheat, corn, and soy, and 80 “specialty crops” that include fruit, vegetables, and nuts have FCIP policies. Jacobson points to how the RMA’s process for expanding crop coverage is based on “significant grower interest,” yet most farmers in their network aren’t in communication with the RMA.

This creates what Jacobson describes as a “circular” problem: Farmers don’t engage with the RMA because their policies don’t cover their crops, and the RMA doesn’t expand to include more crops because farmers don’t reach out.

The alternative is Whole Farm Revenue Protection, FCIP’s lesser-utilized program that insures farms based on their historic revenue rather than yields. In theory, this program is ideal for diversified farms because it doesn’t require unique policies for every crop, and farms with more crop diversity receive lower premiums. Beyond just accommodating crop diversity, this policy is designed to incentivize it.

However, the paperwork needed to show revenue can be just as prohibitive. Jeff Schahczenski, an agricultural economist, notes that the USDA contracts with a set of private insurance companies to sell these policies. And many of the companies require that farmers not only prove their revenue through tax returns, but also their sales history for the past five years and sometimes even include a detailed plan for projected earnings.

“It essentially failed because it’s just too cumbersome,” Schahczenski said. “Your average farmer says, ‘To hell with this.”’

As a result, very few farmers actually use Whole Farm Revenue Protection. In 2021, just 1,934 policies were sold, insuring less than 1 percent of the 2 million farms in the U.S. Instead, many of the most climate-adapted farmers rely on crowdfunding through sites like GoFundMe in the aftermath of a disaster.

The Upcoming Farm Bill

While prohibitive to many farmers, FCIP’s policies guarantee a revenue to major commodity growers. A recent analysis by the Environmental Working Group found that three-fourths of crop insurance payments went to four crops—corn, soybeans, wheat, and cotton—between 2001 and 2022. During this time, corn growers received over $55.36 billion in indemnities, partially supported by taxpayers.

“We have made growing these few crops so riskless that there’s no motivation for them to change what they’re doing,” Schahczenski said. “It is basically saying, ‘We will support you to overproduce these few commodities at a public expense.’’’

According to the USDA spokesperson, RMA plans to issue guidance in October stating “that NRCS Conservation Practice Standards will be recognized by agricultural experts for the area as considered Good Farming Practices. Therefore, the appropriate use of [those] standards will have no [negative] impact on federal crop insurance coverage.” This could be a significant change, but it’s not clear how it will play out on the ground.

Advocates also see the upcoming 2023 Farm Bill as an opportunity to reform the policies that sustain risky farming.

For instance, the Land Stewardship Project in Minnesota is pushing for a cap on insurance subsidies to the largest farms, while asking lawmakers to simplify the Whole Farm Revenue program, and reducing premiums to farmers implementing conservation policies. The National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition is advocating for a relatively simple fix to the Good Farming Practices: The RMA could recognize any policy supported by NRCS, the USDA’s conservation agency, as a Good Farming Practice, to resolve the discrepancies within the agency.

These changes, advocates say, could help shift the crop insurance system so that it adequately covers existing farmers who practice climate-friendly methods—and doesn’t prevent new ones from following in their footsteps.

To really reform the crop insurance system, farmer Doug Crabtree thinks there also needs to be a mindset shift away from policies designed to “maximizing short-term yield” above all else—a narrow view of risk that overlooks the climate and natural resources.

“To be a truly good farming practice, it has to be [done for] more than one year,” he said. “Because things that are good for the long-term health of the soil and the ecology of the land are counter to what RMA and crop insurance companies recognize as good for any one particular crop.” And that long-term health will be key to farming in an increasingly uncertain future.

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]]> Op-ed: Big Ag Touts Its Climate Strengths, While Awash in Fossil Fuels https://civileats.com/2023/09/14/op-ed-big-ag-touts-its-climate-strengths-while-awash-in-fossil-fuels/ Thu, 14 Sep 2023 08:11:23 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=53409 Most American farms consume massive amounts of oil and gas. As the climate crisis intensifies, lawmakers need to start regulating the industry and holding it accountable for its impact on the air and water.

The post Op-ed: Big Ag Touts Its Climate Strengths, While Awash in Fossil Fuels appeared first on Civil Eats.

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Climate Change Threatens the Agritourism That Helps Small Farms Survive

Wed, 06 Sep 2023 08:00:15 +0000

If you tried to call Owl’s Head Blueberry Farm in Richmond, Vermont, this summer, you might have reached an automated voicemail announcing that the evening’s live music had been rescheduled for later in the week and the U-pick was closed due to thunderstorms. At Berry Patch Farm in Central Iowa, three consecutive years of drought plus water restrictions led to crop failure that left the U-pick operation struggling. And in Celeste, Texas, Paul Magedson, owner of Good Earth Organic Farm, hasn’t seen many visitors this summer either.

“It’s just too hot,” Magedson said in a recent phone call. In June, a heat dome covering the state pushed temperatures to 119 degrees in some places. “We had calls for strawberries, but we didn’t have any. I cancelled [on] a lot of people.”

“Unpredictable weather patterns are a problem, making it harder to plan, and operators are worried.”

Even when the crops survive, recent bad weather—unhealthy air quality from wildfires, storms, heatwaves, hurricanes, and more—has often kept customers from spending their days outside picking fruit or touring farms. This is difficult for many small farms which rely on events and other forms of agritourism for income and as a way to develop relationships with consumers.

“For many farms that offer outside entertainment, visitor numbers are down,” said Claudia Schmidt, assistant professor of marketing and local food systems at Penn State. “Unpredictable weather patterns are a problem, making it harder to plan, and operators are worried,” she added.

The last agricultural census, taken in 2017, showed that only 1.5 percent of farms received income from agritourism activities. The majority of those farms are small, however—63.3 percent of farms offering both agritourism and direct-to-consumer sales (such as through U-pick, farm stands, and farmers’ markets) were under 100 acres.

The term “agritourism” was first identified in the U.S. Census of Agriculture in 2007; while the trend long predates the term, it has been growing ever since. Schmidt said that many farms opened their operations up to visitors during the pandemic and she expects that the next Agricultural Census—which was taken in 2022 and will likely be released in 2024—will show an increase in farms participating.

Income on farms offering recreational activities like hayrides and farm tours grew by 67 percent between 2007 and 2017. Direct sales gave farmers an average of $21,570 in income in 2017 and an untold additional value in marketing and goodwill.

“U-pick serves several different roles,” said Jessica Sanford, co-owner of Adam’s Berry Farm in Vermont. “One, it helps with the harvest. Two, it really helps with marketing, outreach, and introducing people to who we are and what we do.” Adam’s Berry Farm doesn’t do much traditional marketing or use social media, and the owners rely on on-farm events to build goodwill with the public. “But we hope that people’s experience at the farm translates to them buying berries from us at the farmers’ market or vice versa,” added Sanford.

Wet, rainy weather and wildfire-related smoke forced Wickham’s Fruit Farm in Cutchogue, New York, to close its U-pick offering more often than not this year. (Photo courtesy of Laurie McBride)

Weather Extremes Make Farm Visits Less Likely

The changing climate, and the weather extremes it brings, has made that difficult. “I think everyone would agree that the sporadic weather events have gotten worse or more severe,” Sanford said. In 2012, she and her husband, with whom she co-owns the farm, had to move locations because of continual flooding. The new location has more space for indoor activities that help keep visitors coming to their farm even when the weather makes visiting the actual farm fields less appealing.

“It’s not a matter of ‘Will we get a heat wave?’ but ‘When is it going to happen and how will it affect the fruit?’”

“We do events like kids’ yoga and music, story hour, some classes,” Sanford said. “Maybe people can’t pick berries, but they can enjoy the farm and purchase from the store.” They invested in a mechanical harvester a few years ago. “In years like this when it’s so rainy, we don’t have the manpower to get to all our berries,” Sanford said. The harvester makes it possible to get berries visitors don’t pick and freeze them or put them into value-added products.

This isn’t an entirely new story. “Weather has affected us forever,” said Megan Hallstone, operations manager at Columbia Farms U-Pick in Oregon. “You could always have a bad year,” she explained. But now heat waves have gone from a rarity in the Pacific Northwest to something she expects. Once unprecedented weather—the kind that fries crops overnight and makes it unsafe for visitors to be outside in the fields—is becoming the norm. “It’s not a matter of, ‘Will we get a heat wave?’ but ‘When is it going to happen and how will it affect the fruit?’” she said.

Hallstone has started closing U-pick operations at noon on days when the forecast highs creep close to or over 100 degrees. “I’ve had somebody pass out in a strawberry field before,” she said. Since the farm is in a rural area, she was on hold with 911 for 10 minutes before anyone even answered her call. “I don’t want my staff to be out here when it’s super hot; I don’t want customers to come out when it’s super hot,” Hallstone said. “It’s just not worth it.”

Columbia Farms U-Pick in Oregon closes to visitors when the temperatures reach 100 degrees. (Photo courtesy of Megan Hallstone)

For some farms, agritourism activities only bring in a small percentage of income; but in a business with such low margins, it can be an important lifeline. “Some of these farms wouldn’t be economically viable without it,” said Audrey Comerford, agritourism coordinator for the Oregon State University extension service. But, she added, the reason that agritourism exists in the first place is because farmers are inventive, and many have turned to diversification to stay afloat when one crop fails or bad weather during one harvest keeps visitors away.

Agritourism has become important enough that in 2022, a bill was introduced that would, if passed, establish an Office of Agritourism inside the USDA. Representative Jennifer Wexton (D-Virginia), the bill’s sponsor, said in a statement, “I’ve heard from too many small business owners in our region about how hard it is to get connected with the resources that they need to grow their agritourism businesses.”

The current farm bill will expire this month, and there’s hope that more support for agritourism could be included in the new version. Currently, some USDA programs like the Farmers’ Market Promotion Program can be used to fund new agritourism projects. There are even two USDA insurance programs for small farms that can provide coverage when a heatwave prevents customers from getting out to pick at a farm or a harvest is rained out.

But it’s not clear whether it will be enough to bolster farms like Southern Belle Farm in McDonough, Georgia, which lost its peach crop after warm winter weather led to as much as a 90 percent crop loss in the state.

“We knew going into the season that we were going to be down some,” said Jake Carter, Southern Belle’s president. The farm added flowers and a few other last-minute crops for people to enjoy. “I’m not going to sit here and tell you it’s like peaches,” he said. “It’s not what people wanted and it’s not what we wanted.” But at least it gave people a reason to visit the farm, which offers a farm market, bakery, and other attractions. Visitor numbers were down, Carter said, “but this year was a good example of why you diversify and why we’ll continue to do that.”

Poor air quality from Canadian wildfire smoke impacted U-pick operations at Wickham’s Fruit Farm in Cutchogue, New York. (Photo courtesy of Laurie McBride)

Wickham’s Fruit Farm in Cutchogue, New York, takes a similar approach. As a result, the farm grows about 25 different crops. Laurie McBride, farm stand manager and wholesale coordinator for the farm, said that roughly three-quarters of the business comes from direct-to-consumer sales. “If we have a down [year] in one of those crops, we’re generally able to cushion our losses with some other product.”

The wet, rainy weather forced the farm to “close U-pick more often than not” because the plants are more likely to get diseases when they’re wet, McBride said. And in early June, when smoke from the wildfires in Canada made it unhealthy for people to go outside, McBride estimates U-pick sales were down 10 percent to 15 percent. “Air quality had a huge impact on our strawberry season.”

Adapting to a Rapidly Warming Climate

As the global temperatures continue to creep toward . When that happens, McBride said the farm may shift more of its business from direct-to-consumer sales to wholesale and retail markets. Right now, Wickham’s is looking into growing different crops that can better accommodate cooler springs and they recently installed a high tunnel to help with tomato production. “We’re trying to be innovative for keeping ahead of climate change,” she added.

Many farmers hope they won’t have to move away from U-pick or on-farm sales, which can also include selling value-added products such as baked goods and jam. The chance to cut out the middleman in the sales equation means that many farmers will prioritize agritourism over other parts of their business, said Columbia Farm’s Hallstone.

“We are at the whims of the world market. Farmers are price-takers, not price-makers. The U-pick is the one place on the farm where we can set the price,” said Hallstone.

To keep that personal connection going, farmers and policy makers will be looking for ways to mitigate the effects of climate change—both on their crops and on visitors. Taking advantage of covered and indoor spaces is one solution. Diversifying and planting new crop varieties that can better withstand heat, drought, and rain is another.

In the Pacific Northwest, Hallstone said, “We’re always thinking about how we add more shade in a thoughtful way because berries can’t grow in shade. My husband has repeatedly been telling me I need to get misters.” Both options are on the table for the years ahead.

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