Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack recently commented on the state of small farms in America:
the Drawn by As the average farm size has increased, the nation’s farms have fallen by 544,000 since 1981, according to the National Agricultural Statistics Service.
“That’s every farm in North Dakota and South Dakota, every farm in Wisconsin and Minnesota, every farm in Nebraska and Colorado, every farm in Oklahoma and Missouri,” Vilsack said. Meeting in Washington This spring, I wondered, “Is this really what our country should be like?”
The U.S. continues to produce more food on less land, but Vilsack worries that the decline of small farms is weakening rural economies, and he wants to stop the bleeding. Unlike when he last held the job under former President Barack Obama, this time the department can spend billions of dollars on subsidies and incentives passed under three major pieces of legislation since 2021, including investments in the largest environmental protection program in U.S. history.
The plan, in a nutshell, is to increase and improve revenue streams to strengthen the farm’s balance sheet. Farms of the future will be able to sell not only crops and livestock, but also carbon credits, waste and renewable energy.
“Instead of one check, a farm could get four checks,” Vilsack said in an interview. He also wants to help schools, hospitals and other institutions buy locally grown food and help investors build meatpacking plants and other processing facilities to free farmers from powerful middlemen.
But it’s far from clear that the new policies and funding will be enough to counter the forces that have been pushing farmers off the land for decades, especially since much of the money will be directed toward reducing carbon emissions and spending on the biggest polluters: large-scale agriculture.
Since the 1930s, the number of farms has been declining, primarily due to rural-urban migration and the increasing mechanization of agriculture, which allowed fewer people to work more land. Over time, the federal government abandoned policies that controlled production to support prices, farmers became more export-oriented, and local distribution networks declined.
The past five years have been more tumultuous than any other period in history. First, under former President Donald J. Trump, we had the trade war with China, which led to retaliatory tariffs that eroded U.S. agricultural exports like soybeans and pork. Then we had the pandemic, which disrupted supply chains, cost farm workers and left crops rotting in the fields.
Things started to look up after Congress cushioned the blow with relief for farmers hurt by the pandemic’s disruptions. Food prices rose, while the cost of supplies like fertilizer and seeds rose, and farm incomes rose. In 2023, farm loan default rates neared record lows.
“Farm balance sheets, overall, are the healthiest they’ve ever been,” said Brad Nordholm, CEO of Farmer Mac, a large secondary marketplace for agricultural credit. “There are more tools than ever before available to American farmers to earn more predictable income, even as commodity and input prices fluctuate.”
However, the wholesale price of agricultural products Expected to decrease Over the next year, rising interest rates will make it harder for farmers to finance planting and harvesting, borrow to expand their businesses, or even enter the agricultural industry, especially as land prices rise. 29 percent increase From 2020 to 2023.
This is especially true for small farmers, who are much less likely to have access to USDA assistance programs and are more vulnerable to bad weather, labor shortages and the whims of consumers.
“I think in some ways they’re in a worse position than they were before the pandemic,” said Benes Phelps, executive director of the Carrot Project, a nonprofit that advises small farmers in New England. “Now we’re seeing a lot of farmers lose momentum and have to make the difficult decisions of whether to stay in business or get out of business.”
This is where the American Rescue Plan, the Control Inflation Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act come into play.
In total, these laws provided the USDA with about $60 billion, which it allocated to a range of priorities, from farm debt relief to payments for reducing carbon emissions.
The largest lump is Approximately $19.5 billion — breathed new life into subsidies to encourage conservation practices that improve the land, such as reducing tillage or planting cover crops to sequester carbon in the soil. Some of these programs have been scaled back in successive farm bills, the five-year legislative package that covers most farm subsidies. About two-thirds The percentage of farmers who applied each year who got nothing.
This new funding Add 16,000 recipients Over the past two years, preliminary data has shown that this expansion is enabling smaller farmers to participate.
Part of that money, along with other USDA renewable energy funding, will be used to buy a $2.9 million methane fermentation unit for Savage View Farm, a 700-cow dairy farm in Grand Isle, Vermont.
The machine loads the fertilizer and generates electricity to sell to the local utility, as well as dry solids that can be used as cattle bedding. Inflation Control Tax Credits reduce the farm’s tax burden, and as a non-financial benefit, the facility reduces the odors caused by spreading raw fertilizer on fields.
“We have some surplus fertilizer,” said farm manager Sarah Griswold, who is engaged to one of the farm’s owners, “so we thought it would make spreading it a little easier for other people.”
Another $3.1 billion will be paid to farmers. I think I’ll try a little harder. Through monitoring, verification and reporting, we will scientifically validate what actually works to reduce carbon emissions.
The hope is that producers will be able to charge a premium for products that are marketed as climate-friendly. I say I’m willing to pay moreIn the United States and Europe, many food companies are under regulatory pressure to source ingredients with lower carbon emissions. To raise additional revenue, the USDA envisions developing a market where polluting companies could buy carbon offsets from farms that reduce their own emissions.
But not everyone is on board with these efforts. For one thing, they can be hard for small farms to take advantage of. For example, Savage View Farm’s methane digester isn’t cost-effective for a dairy herd of fewer than 200 cows.
The scientists also Climate benefits are overstatedAnd further subsidies, especially to farms that raise methane-emitting livestock, could actually increase greenhouse gas emissions from the farm sector as a whole.
“Agriculture in general, and meat and dairy production in particular, puts out more greenhouse gases than it absorbs,” says Matthew Hayek, an assistant professor of the School of Environmental Studies at New York University. “The more money you put into agriculture, the more it thrives.”
To help small farmers more directly, the USDA is providing additional funding to help those who want to start farming get started and to help local producers find buyers for crops beyond staples like corn and soybeans.
This initiative includes: $300 million The program helps historically marginalized farmers and aspiring farmers gain access to land, including Black, Hispanic, recent immigrant, and Native American farmers. The program far exceeded expectations in terms of application volumes, and funds are now being distributed to nonprofit organizations across the country that are building community land trusts, helping heirs gain clear title to family land, and providing technical assistance to beginning farmers.
Another bottleneck hurting small farmers is a shortage of meat and poultry processors, an industry that has consolidated under giants like Cargill and Tyson Foods Inc. To solve this, the USDA is revitalizing and investing in long-neglected antitrust enforcement. $1 billion In the construction and expansion of factories.
After securing the land, it is the customer that decides whether the farm will decline or thrive. Small farms often cannot survive on commodity prices alone, so they need private buyers willing to pay a little more for a wider range of crops.
To address this issue, the USDA $900 million Encourage institutions to buy from local producers and establish a network of regional food business centers.
Many farmers say the money has helped, but the benefits haven’t trickled down to the mountains and plains of America. Graham Christensen’s family has farmed about 1,000 acres of land since moving to eastern Nebraska in the late 1800s. Today, the family grows mostly white corn and soybeans, but has branched out to hazelnuts, cherries and pecans, which are typically high-value crops, but only if someone like a grocery chain or packaged food company buys them.
“When we have our product, we can’t take it anywhere,” Christensen said. “These are the markets we want, but we don’t have the means to get there.”
That’s why Christensen, the National Family Farm Coalition, the American Farm Land Trust and other groups are calling for the new funding to be continued in the next farm bill. They want billions more to transfer land from retiring farmers to small farmers instead of corporations, and they want the USDA to create a Small Farm Bureau to oversee it all.
They note that some of the funding could come from grants. Supporting large producers For many years it has produced wheat, corn and other agricultural products.
“This is about moving investments away from one type of farm and making them more inclusive,” said Carolina Mueller, coalition vice president for the Young Farmers Coalition. “This is a great source of financial support that could help young, new and, frankly, not-so-young farmers anymore.”
