By the time the next Farm Bill expires in five years, 125,000
American farmers will have retired. This fact may well be the biggest
threat to national food security, but you wouldn’t know it if you’ve
been following this year’s Farm Bill hearings.
Instead, the conversation is about “managing risk” for the Big Five
commodity crops (i.e. crop insurance, subsidies, and margins for large
agricultural interests) and not about the challenges to our food system
as a whole. The recent House Committee on Agriculture’s Farm Bill “Field
Hearings” were dominated by established farmers, with little if any
time for new farmers to talk about their needs. Here in New York’s
Hudson Valley, a group of beginning farmers considered a trip to the
Saranac Lake to participate in one of these hearings, but decided
against it when we learned that there would be no time to add our
experiences to the chosen panelists. Beginning farmers like us didn’t
fare much better in similar Senate hearings.
That’s why it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that the needs of
the next generation have yet to be met in the current draft of the Farm
Bill, recently approved by the Senate Committee on Agriculture.
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