While Beyonce’s Renaissance Tour may be capturing our collective attention at the moment, there’s an admittedly less compelling event on stage in 2023: the Farm Bill. By some accounts a dusty relic of the New Deal Era, the Farm Bill contains billions of dollars for anti-hunger and agricultural programs. And it may be one of our best tools for addressing the climate crises. Advocates are pushing for it to include climate action, building momentum on billions of dollars set to be funneled by the USDA to support farmers to adopt climate-friendly practices.
The interest in agriculture as a source for climate mitigation is a welcome, overdue and critical shift. But if funding only goes to prop up our dominant industrial farming model, we’ll perpetuate the very system that’s driving climate change. What we need is a radical food system transformation towards an agriculture that feeds people while cooling the planet. For this transition to be truly successful, we need to listen to the demands of young farmers.
Young farmers are stepping up to the plate to grow nutritious food using sustainable methods. They’re increasingly diverse and majority women, which more accurately represents our country than the outgoing crop of retiring farmers. Combined, these factors make them more likely to be alarmed by climate change and demand action than previous generations.
Young farmers should be our beacon of hope to avoid another Dust Bowl, capture carbon, and feed our population. But there’s a huge caveat: We have set them up to fail.
In a recent survey by the National Young Farmers Coalition, their list of urgent challenges reveals startling barriers to success: access to land, access to capital, health care costs, access to affordable housing, the high cost of production, student loan debt, climate change, immigration issues and access to federal programs. Many young farmers, a majority of whom are women and increasingly non-white, are also disproportionately impacted by climate change. This suite of vulnerabilities shows just how fragile the farming system is.
Young farmers, if given the support system they need to thrive, could lead us towards a just and climate-resilient food system.
As it stands, not having farmland is the number one barrier to entry and the top reason young farmers leave the field. And to be sure, the low numbers of current young farmers make it hard to take them seriously as a groundswell.
But we have an opportunity for change. It’s estimated that nearly half of U.S. farmland will transfer ownership in the next couple decades as a generation of farm owners age out of the profession. Rather than selling off our farmland to private investors, why not transition these lands to young, diverse farmers equipped with the ecological skills to do climate-resilient farming?
Answering that question is the One Million Acres for the Future Campaign, which calls on Congress to “make a historic investment in the 2023 Farm Bill to facilitate equitable access to one million acres of land for the next generation of farmers.”
Without long-term access to good farmland, we can’t reasonably expect a young farmer to be successful. Affordable housing is also critical. Young farmers, and farmworkers, need to live near or on their farms, decreasing their commutes and offering them security in a fixed place. Farmers are increasingly on the frontlines of climate change, including breathing toxic smoke from wildfires. These compounding factors make the reality of making a life, and thus, stewarding a piece of climate resilient land long-term, increasingly impossible.
Congress needs to act on the One Million Acre Campaign and the policy recommendations in the Young Farmer Agenda for the 2023 Farm Bill, as well as land back movements for farmers of color. Anyone can support local young farmers through farmers markets and CSA’s, but why not also advocate for urban planning within your communities to include access to land and housing for farmers?
We can increase our chances of producing food in a way that cools the planet by bolstering the lives of the people dedicating themselves to this essential work. Young farmers, if given the support system they need to thrive, could lead us towards a just and climate-resilient food system. The alternative is to sustain the unsustainable.
This column was produced for Progressive Perspectives, a project of The Progressive magazine, and distributed by Tribune News Service.