Rural Coalition Joins Over 150 Organizations Calling on President Biden to Demand a Transformational 2023 Farm Bill

September 13, 2022

The Honorable Joseph R. Biden Jr.

President

1600 Pennsylvania Ave, N.W. Washington, DC 20001

Re: Demand a Farm Bill that Reflects Your Values

Dear Mr. President,

Every five years, Congress reauthorizes the Farm Bill, a wide-ranging piece of legislation that affects every part of our food system. The next Farm Bill should reflect your values and build on your administration’s actions to date to reduce economic inequality, bridge the nation’s racial divides, end hunger, confront the climate crisis, improve nutrition and food safety, and protect and support farmers, workers, and communities. Such a Farm Bill should:

Center Racial Justice – To reflect your values, the next Farm Bill must advance your administration’s pledge to “confront the hard reality of past discrimination” and address the continuing and devastating reality of systemic racism in the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Your Farm Bill must be a racial justice bill that will, in the words of your 2021 Executive Order, “allocate resources to address the historic failure to invest sufficiently, justly, and equally in underserved communities.” Farmers and communities of color, Tribal Nations, and food and farm workers add immeasurable knowledge and value to our food and farm system and make essential economic and environmental contributions. Ultimately, equity and justice must be at the center of every facet of the next Farm Bill if we hope to repair historical and ongoing discrimination against these communities, recognize more fully their contribution to the food and farming system, and eliminate inequities throughout the food and farm economy.

End Hunger - As you have recognized, “too many families do not know where they’re going to get their next meal.” To reflect your values, the next Farm Bill must protect and strengthen food assistance programs to ensure sufficient resources, merit staffing, and access to nutritious food for all people who struggle against hunger and food insecurity as a result of wealth and income inequities often driven by systemic racism.

Meet the Climate Crisis Head On – To reflect your values, the next Farm Bill must also be a climate bill. We will not avoid the worst effects of climate change unless this nation reduces heat-trapping emissions, including from agriculture. Your Farm Bill must invest in research, technical assistance, and financial incentives to enable farmers and ranchers to reduce emissions and to implement farming practices and labor policies that make their farms and workers better able to withstand extreme weather. The next Farm Bill should reward farmers and ranchers who are already implementing such practices, while also enabling others to make these shifts and discouraging farming practices that are harmful to the environment and public health.

Increase Access to Nutritious Food - As you have noted, there are “too many empty chairs around the kitchen table because a loved one was taken by heart disease, diabetes, or other dietoriented diseases,” and related health care costs continue to grow. Poor nutrition is now the leading cause of U.S. deaths—surpassing smoking—and racial inequities in our society frequently leave communities of color without access to nutritious foods. To reflect your values, the next Farm Bill must tackle this crisis by improving nutrition security, which your administration has defined as “consistent and equitable access to healthy, safe, affordable foods essential to optimal health and well-being” for all.

Ensure Safety and Dignity for Food and Farm Workers – The COVID-19 pandemic revealed the vulnerability of the 20 million food and farm workers declared essential to feeding our nation. To reflect your values, the next Farm Bill must invest substantially in the people who plant, harvest, process, transport, sell, and serve our food and administer our food programs, ensuring safety and a living wage, along with access to health care, clean housing, and the right to organize and join a union. The next Farm Bill must protect food and farm workers from pesticides and extreme heat and strengthen the consequences for employers that endanger their workers. Also needed are new avenues to support the aspirations of farmworkers who wish to become farmers, and access to citizenship for workers in the U.S. food chain that does not tie them to exploitative labor practices and systems.

Protect Farmers and Consumers – As you have said, “capitalism without competition isn’t capitalism; it’s exploitation.” You have made competition in the U.S. economy a priority of your administration, and your Farm Bill can and must build on your efforts to promote competition in the food and agriculture sectors. Anti-competitive practices are harming small-scale farmers, workers, and consumers; hollowing out rural communities; and damaging our environment. Your Farm Bill should acknowledge these forms of damage as central criteria in defining anticompetitive food and agriculture marketplaces, while increasing long term investments in local and regional food processing and distribution. In this way, the Farm Bill can level the playing field for farmers and offer more and better choices to consumers.

Ensure the Safety of Our Food Supply – Thousands of people in our country die every year from foodborne illness and millions more are sickened by pathogens in meat, poultry, produce, and drinking water. Recent food safety failures have highlighted gaps in our food safety net that place consumers at unacceptable risks from pathogens. Your Farm Bill must do more to address pathogens that originate on factory farms and to make the U.S. food supply safe for everyone.

President Biden, the undersigned organizations call on you to demand a transformative Farm Bill that fully reflects these values, and that you can be proud to sign.

Sincerely,

A Better Balance

Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics

Access East

AFL-CIO

Agricultural Justice Project

Agriculture and Land-Based Training Association (ALBA)

A Growing Culture

Alabama State Association of Cooperatives

American Grassfed Association

American Federation of Government Employees, Local 3354

American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME)

American Indian Mothers Inc.

American Sustainable Business Network

Association for the Study of African American History (ASALH Rochester)

Association of State Public Health Nutritionists

Appetite For Change

Broadway Community, Inc.

California Climate & Agriculture Network (CalCAN)

California Environmental Voters

California FarmLink

Castanea Fellowship

Center for Food Safety

Center for Science in the Public Interest

Center for Wellness and Nutrition (Public Health Institute)

Certified Naturally Grown

City Harvest

Climate Crisis Policy

Coalition of Immokalee Workers

Coastal Enterprises, Inc.

Coming Clean

Community Alliance with Family Farmers (CAFF)

Community Food Advocates

Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture (CISA)

Compañeras Campesinas

Consumer Federation of America

Cultivate Charlottesville

Detroit Food Policy Council

Earthjustice

Economic Policy Institute

Environmental & Public Health Consulting

Environmental Working Group

Equity Advocates

Fair Food Network

Fair World Project

Family Farm Defenders

Farm Action

Farm Aid

Farm to Table - New Mexico

Farmers Market Coalition

Farmworker Association of Florida

Farmworker Justice

Fertile Ground

Food & Water Watch

Food Animal Concerns Trust (FACT)

Food Bank of Central and Eastern NC

Food Chain Workers Alliance

FoodCorps

Food for the Spirit

Food Insight Group

Friends of the Earth

Friends of the Mississippi River

GC Resolve

Georgia Foundation for Agriculture

Georgia Organics

Glynwood Center for Regional Food and Farming

Good Food For All Coalition

Government Accountability Project - Food Integrity Campaign

Grazing Reform Project

Green America

Groundwork Center for Resilient Communities

Hand, Heart, and Soul Project, Inc.

Health Care Without Harm HEAL (Health, Environment, Agriculture, Labor) Food Alliance

Hempstead Project Heart

Illinois Stewardship Alliance

Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy

International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT)

Iowa Environmental Council

Iowa Interfaith Power & Light

Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future

Kansas Black Farmers Association

Kansas Rural Center

Land Loss Prevention Project

Land Stewardship Project

La Semilla Food Center

League of Conservation Voters

Los Jardines Institute

LunchAssist

Maine AFL-CIO

Marbleseed

Michigan Food and Farming Systems

National Association of Pediatric Nurse Practitioners

National Black Food & Justice Alliance

National Council for Occupational Safety and Health

National Employment Law Project

National Farm to School Network

National Latino Farmers & Ranchers Trade Association

National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition

National Young Farmers Coalition

Natural Resources Defense Council

Nebraska Appleseed

NETWORK Lobby for Catholic Social Justice

New Orleans Food Policy Action Council

Northeast Organic Dairy Producers Alliance

Northeast Organic Farming Association-Interstate Council

Northeast Organic Farming Association of New Hampshire (NOFA-NH)

Northeast Organic Farming Association of New York (NOFA-NY)

Northwest Center for Alternatives to Pesticides

Nourish Colorado

Office of Kat Taylor

Ohio Ecological Food and Farm Association

Oklahoma Black Historical Research Project, Inc.

Oregon Climate and Agriculture Network

Oregon Tilth

Organic Farming Research Foundation

Organic Seed Alliance

Oxfam America

Ozark Akerz Regenerative Farm

Pasa Sustainable Agriculture

Phi Global Farms

Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste / Northwest Tree-Planters and Farmworkers United (PCUN)

Pinnacle Prevention

Pesticide Action Network

Plant Based Foods Institute

Post Carbon Institute

Progress Michigan

Public Justice

Rebirth Inc.

RegeNErate Nebraska

Resilience Project

Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union

Restaurant Opportunities Centers (ROC) United

Rowan Food and Farm Network

Roots of Change

Rufty-Holmes Senior Center

Rural Advancement Foundation International-USA (RAFI-USA)

Rural Coalition

Savanna Institute

Sierra Club

Slow Food USA

Small Planet Institute

Socially Responsible Agriculture Project

Society of Behavioral Medicine

Sooner Food Group

Soul Fire Farm Institute

Springfield Food Policy Council

Student Action with Farmworkers

Sustainable Farming Association

Sustainable Food Center

Sustainable Food & Farming Program, UMASS Stockbridge School of Agriculture

Sustainable Iowa Land Trust (SILT)

The Farmers B.A.G.

The Georgia Farm to School Alliance

The Land Institute

TomKat Ranch Educational Foundation

Toxic Free North Carolina

Trust for Public Land

unBox

Union of Concerned Scientists

United Food and Commercial Workers International Union

Venceremos

Virginia Association for Biological Farming

Wallace Center at Winrock International

Wholesome Wave

Wild Farm Alliance

Women, Food and Agriculture Network

Women's Voices for the Earth

Worker Justice Alliance

Working Landscapes

Workplace Fairness

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RuralCo and Partners Host Listening Session on the Complex Realities of Hunger, Nutrition, and Health and Opportunities for Systemic Change

As organizations with decades of experiences in the food and farm system, Rural Coalition and our grassrooted partners gathered with our members and communities to discuss the intersectional realities of hunger, nutrition, and health and recommendations to create systemic changes. Our partners include Alianza Nacional de Campesinas, Slow Food USA, Farm Action, National Family Farm Coalition, North American Marine Alliance, Slow Fish North America, One Fish Foundation, HEAL Food Alliance, World Farmers, Inc., Family Farm Defenders, and Wallace Center. These realities elucidate our nation’s opportunities to address the longstanding consequences of broken food and healthcare systems, inadequate infrastructure, an extractive economy, and the undervaluing of workers in many of our communities - among many other interconnected issues. The following realities and opportunities from our report, The Realities of Hunger in Our Rural, Agricultural, Urban and BIPOC Communities, highlight the complexity of hunger, nutrition, and health within rural and urban communities and recommendations for direct, systemic change with a particular focus on Black, Indigenous, and other people of color (BIPOC) communities.

The Complex Realities of Hunger, Nutrition, and Health

Food inaccessibility and unaffordability drive hunger in our communities. The demand for healthy, affordable food in many communities far exceeds its supply capacity across the United States. The Ma-Chis Lower Creek Indian Tribe reported that the nearest grocery store to tribal land is often 15 miles or more away and fails to offer fresh, quality fruits and vegetables. To make matters worse, twenty states impose an unconscionable sales tax on groceries, which deepens income and racial inequalities.[1] Participants in Alabama discussed how taxes on food can be as high as ten percent, depending on the county, and have a harmful impact on individuals and families. Perpetuated by an extractive economy in rural areas, many participants reported receiving low wages that are inadequate to cover the rising prices of food, gas, rent, and other essential bills. Increased household expenses and the cost of transportation to worksites inhibits farmworkers’ ability to afford quality and nutritious food for themselves and their families. As the pandemic has expanded virtual work opportunities, it has also increased population and migration to small towns, intensifying an affordable housing shortage. Participants also explained how service providers of housing, health care, and nutrition assistance refuse to address the needs of members of many state-recognized tribes.

Many of our rural communities reported inadequate infrastructure with deleterious effects that exacerbate health inequalities. The water systems in employer-provided farmworker housing in the Coachella Valley of California is contaminated with arsenic and unsafe for washing hands, drinking, cooking, or mixing baby formula. Impoverished rural families in the southeast struggle with aging, substandard housing that is poorly maintained, unsafe and largely left out of development initiatives, disaster assistance, or loan programs that would fund improvements or connect them to new infrastructure. Many of these homes lack adequate and safe cooking and food storage facilities and protection from pests.

Members from Alabama described how these issues are compounded by the growing preponderance of absentee farm and timberland ownership, which decreases land value and the resulting property taxes needed to fund public roads, water and sewer systems, hospitals, and schools. These factors contribute to increased poverty rates.[2] Rural families are also overburdened with higher energy costs and lack broadband to access higher-paying virtual jobs and quality telehealth systems. Participants from New Mexico explained how wildfires and evacuations have delayed planting, devastated natural and ancestral resources, and caused a current loss of farm and ranch land in excess of 600,000 acres.[3]

However, despite the realities of hardship that rural communities endure, community-based organizations continue advancing work to address the effects of our broken system. Alianza Nacional de Campesinas and Lideres Campesinas continue to host regular drive-through food and water distribution events in these communities, using U-Haul trucks to provide bottled water and fresh fruits and vegetables to at least 500 families per event. Kansas Black Farmers Association’s educational camps for ages 10-17 teach youth how to grow food for themselves. Cottage House, Inc. in Alabama engages local school children in their predominantly Black and Hispanic community in growing food both during the school year and in intensive summer activities reaching upwards of 100 children each year. These organizations continue to need the funding to support and expand their community-based solutions.

Opportunities for Positive Systemic Change

The complex realities of hunger in our communities require comprehensive solutions and investments. As the White House builds out its action plan for addressing the hunger crisis and its effects, the administration should immediately enact the following interconnected policy interventions:

• Income: Advocate for a federal living wage and restoration of the enhanced child tax credit.

• Food assistance: Remove barriers for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) participation based on immigration status, full-time higher education, prior criminal conviction, and work status; base SNAP benefits on the Low Cost Food Plan.

• Universal free school lunches: Direct the USDA’s national school lunch program to advocate for universal free school lunch in the child nutrition reauthorization; incentivize procurement of fresh, locally produced, minimally processed and culturally meaningful and healthful foods; increase good food education and school gardens support, support “scratch cooking” through cafeteria and kitchen equipment upgrades and staff training, and increase children’s time to eat school meals, thereby reducing food plate waste.

• End unfair food taxes: Initiate federal attention and efforts to end the disproportionate impact of local and state taxes on groceries and prepared food on low-income communities.

• Expand healthcare coverage: Advocate for affordable healthcare coverage for everyone, regardless of immigration status or employment, including through full Medicaid expansion.

• Affordable and safe housing: Work with the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Department of Agriculture’s Rural Development agency to address inequities in availability, affordability, and quality of rural housing, including farm labor housing, with the goal of assuring safe housing with safe water, cooking, refrigeration and storage facilities in each home. 

• Safe drinking water: Work with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to improve and enforce rights to clean drinking water for all with particular emphasis on rural America and farm worker communities.

• Water and housing infrastructure: Establish a process to immediately report, address and mitigate reported public health hazards, including arsenic, lead, or other toxins in drinking water with a special focus on manufactured/mobile homes and farm labor housing.

• Immigrant farm labor protections: Advocate for extension of fair labor standards to farmworkers, including living wage, the right to organize, overtime pay, sick leave, access to protective gear, protection from pesticide exposure, and protection from workplace violence; provide an optional path to citizenship for undocumented farm workers and their families.

• Farmer equity: Increase targeted assistance for small and mid-scale diversified farmers and ranchers, tribal communities, and fishers, including compensation for food provided directly to communities and families who need it; urge Congress to swiftly address debt relief from Section 1005 of the American Rescue Plan Act.

• Resilient and equitable rural economies: Prioritize and incentivize governmental and institutional value-based procurement of locally sourced foods; prioritize and incentivize farm to school purchases of locally or regionally sourced foods; remove administrative barriers to local and regional meat processing; and strengthen and enforce antitrust and anticompetition laws and prohibit further consolidation of agricultural processing, seed, equipment sectors; ensure infrastructure investments are equitably distributed to the most underserved communities.

• Farm and food network: Provide structural assistance, grants, loans, and price support sufficient to maintain the food supply and support transportation, processing, distribution, and storage of goods with a focus on local food systems, regenerative production practices, and underserved communities.

• Tribal Consultation: Assure Tribal consultation in policy and decision making throughout administrative agencies to support and protect access to ancestral agricultural land and sea resources and traditional foods and foodways and to honor obligations to sovereign tribal entities.

• Farmworkers (landless farmers) to farmers: Modify requirements in beginning farmer and rancher programs to specifically recognize the skills of farmworkers with respect to eligibility for these programs and provide additional USDA program to assist farm workers to transition to owners of farms and ranches.

• Global climate crisis: Continue to take and advocate for immediate actions to address the global climate crisis with a particular focus on BIPOC communities such as increased technical assistance and set-asides for socially disadvantaged producers in conservation programs.

• Environmental quality and soil health: Direct the USDA to invest in and incentivize transition to regenerative and organic farming including through technical assistance, cost-sharing, and supporting community based organizations doing this work. Incentivize and prioritize restoring and rebuilding soil health including capacity to sequester carbon, hold water, and reduce nutrient runoff.

• Pesticides: Prioritize EPA review of pesticide safety (including the ongoing review of glyphosate) to reduce harmful impacts on farm workers and their families, consumers of food, water quality, and soil health.

• Rural development: Provide financial assistance to develop retail access to nutritious, healthful foods in underserved communities; to increase infrastructure support and programs with higher cost share for underserved and persistently poor areas.

Conclusion

As the White House examines hunger, nutrition, and health, we hope the complex realities and recommendations presented here and in our comprehensive report are thoroughly considered and enacted. We are grateful for this historic opportunity to help move our nation forward by addressing the longstanding challenges and perpetuating intricacies of the hardships communities face, especially BIPOC communities, related to hunger, nutrition, and health.

[1] Johnson, Nicholas, Lav, Iris J., “Should States Tax Food? Examining the Policy Issues and Options,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, May 1998. https://www.cbpp.org/sites/default/files/atoms/files/stfdtax98.pdf

[2]See Bailey,Connor, Gopaul, Abhimanyu, Thomson, Ryan, Gunnoe, Andrew. “Taking Goldschmidt to the Woods: Timberland Ownership and Quality of Life in Alabama.” 31 August 2020. https://doi.org/10.1111/ruso.12344

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/06/01/climate/new-mexico-wildfires.html

Sojourner Truth Radio KPFA: June 30, 2021 - Black and Indigenous Farmers - Interview with Keisha Stokes-Hough, Lorette Picciano and John Zippert

https://soundcloud.com/sojournertruthradio/sets/june-30-2021

“Over the past century, Black landowners in the U.S. South have lost over 12 million acres of farmland, mostly from the 1950s onward, according to The Atlantic. Joe Brooks, the former president of the Emergency Land Fund, a group founded in 1972 to fight the problem of dispossession, estimated that about 6 million acres was lost by Black farmers between 1950 to 1969 alone. This represents an average of 820 acres a day, an area the size of New Yorks Central Park wiped out every day. Black-owned cotton farms in the U.S. South have almost completely disappeared, withering away from 87,000 to just over 3,000 in the 1960s alone. Furthermore, the racial disparity in farm acreage dramatically increased in Mississippi from 1950 to 1964, when Black farmers lost almost 800,000 acres of land, according to the Census of Agriculture. This land loss is also a financial loss, estimated to be around $3.7 billion to $6.6 billion in todays dollars.

Today, only 1.3 percent of U.S. farmers, or about 45,000, are Black, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Back in 2010, the National Black Farmers Association held a demonstration in Washington D.C., where they drove their tractors around Capitol Hill to demand justice. A similar tractor protest was mobilized by the National Black Farmers Association in 2002. In 2020, under Trumps regime and during the height of the COVID-19 virus, only 0.1 percent of pandemic relief funding to help U.S. farmers during the Trump administration went to Black farmers, according to The Washington Post. Black farmers received only $20.8 million of the nearly $26 billion of payments made in two rounds of the Coronavirus Food Assistance Program announced last year.

Fast forward to 2021, under the presidency of President Joe Biden. A coalition of over 25 grassroots organizations have filed an amicus brief asking a federal court in Wisconsin to allow the distribution of $4 billion in loan forgiveness set aside by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, known as the USDA. The amicus brief speaks out against decades of injustice, systemic racism and admitted discriminatory behavior by the federal government. The assistance package was part of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act (known as ARPA) signed into law by Biden back in March.

However, on June 10, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin issued a temporary restraining order, stopping relief to over 17,000 Black, Indigenous and other farmers of color. Furthermore, the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida issued a preliminary injunction to further delay the relief to Black and Indigenous farmers provided by Congress in the ARPA. This decision puts them in severe financial peril, taking them off their lands and inhibiting their centuries-long struggle for equity in agriculture. Over 200 groups have signed a statement in support of immediately distributing the relief, pointing out that this landmark piece of legislation is desperately needed.

Joining us to discuss this are Keisha Stokes-Hough, Lorette Picciano and John Zippert.”

Organizations Deplore Temporary Restraining Order Stopping Relief for Black, Indigenous and People of Color Farmers and Ranchers

For further information, contact: Intertribal Agriculture Council, Colby Duren,  colby@indianag.org (406) 259-3525, Rural Coalition, John Zippert, jzippert@aol.com or Lorette Picciano, lpicciano@ruralco.org (202-628-7161) or North Carolina Association of Black Farmers, savi@landloss.org (919) 682-5969.

For Immediate Release 6/12/2021

Organizations Deplore Temporary Restraining Order Stopping Relief for Black, Indigenous and People of Color Farmers and Ranchers

We, the undersigned, are organizations whose service constituency is composed of Black, Hispanic, Indigenous, and Asian, and Pacific Islander family farmers. With our allied farm and environmental organizational signatories, we jointly deplore the issuance of a Temporary Restraining Order to prevent the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) from implementing Section 1005 of the American Rescue Plan Act, to assist BIPOC farmers in paying off their Farm Service Agency direct or guaranteed loans.

The underlying case, and related cases, reflect a flagrant attempt to overturn an act of Congress and the over 30 years of history of a definition that acknowledges and enables USDA to meet the urgent and particular needs of socially disadvantaged producers. During this pandemic, our producers have been unable to access the level of support and service provided to other groups of farmers and ranchers and will be further harmed by this relief being delayed.

We see these lawsuits as undemocratic actions designed only to frustrate and defeat the justice long denied to BIPOC farmers and ranchers and their communities. Many of the undersigned have worked for decades to assist tens of thousands of producers who have endured decades of disparate and discriminatory treatment by the USDA with huge barriers to relief–situations that continue today. This includes establishing a definition and provisions providing targeted USDA program resources in credit, conservation, marketing, cooperative development and other services for these socially disadvantaged farmer applicants--all which have been included, without legal challenge, in Farm Bills over the past 30 plus years.

Congress took into account this sad and sordid history when it consciously added Sections 1005 and 1006 of the American Rescue Plan. These sections targeted assistance to help BIPOC farmers to recover from more than a year of calamitous and disruptive conditions in producing and marketing of agricultural products.

No serious observer of USDA’s role in American agriculture can doubt that the Department has engaged in decades of intentional, and systematic, discrimination based on race and ethnicity. The results have been catastrophic and have completely reshaped farming by eliminating a wide swath of farmers. If ever there was a constitutional basis for taking race into account when making policy this is it.  In its decision the Court appears oblivious to this history, and hostile to efforts to achieve true racial justice.

We urge and support USDA to continue its vigorous defense of this critical relief and to assure the TRO does not prevent USDA from continuing to implement the eligibility and application process for this loan payment assistance, pending a favorable decision against a permanent injunction on this critically needed assistance for BIPOC farmers.

Our organizations further pledge to work to assure the intent of Congress is fulfilled and the rights of our producers are not extinguished.

We urge all other farmers and people of good will to educate themselves about this basic, fundamental, and continuing struggle for justice and equity by BIPOC farmers and their communities.

Intertribal Agriculture Council

Federation of Southern Cooperatives Land Assistance Fund

National Latino Farmers and Ranchers Trade Association

North Carolina Association of Black Lawyers Land Loss Prevention Project

Rural Coalition

Rural Advancement Fund of the National Sharecroppers Fund

Alianza Naciónal de Campesinas

American Indian Mothers, Inc.

Arkansas Land and Farm Development Corporation

Border Agricultural Workers Project

Cottage House, Inc.

Family Farm Defenders

Farm Aid

Hempstead Project Heart

Latino Farmers of the Southeast

Oklahoma Black Historical Research Project

Operation Spring Plant

National Family Farm Coalition

National Young Farmers Coalition

National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition

Rural Development Leadership Network

Texas Coalition of Rural Landowners

World Farmers

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Sojourner Truth Radio: November 12, 2019 - Small Farmers Panel Discussion w/ RC Members

Today on Sojourner Truth, a roundtable discussion with small farmers from across the country who work to maintain food sovereignty, sustainable agriculture and environmental protections. Our panelists are Dennis Connolly of the Shawnee Forest Defense, John Zippert of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives Land Assistance Fund, Barbara Shookman of the Rural Coalition, and Steven Bartlett of the U.S. Food Sovereignty Alliance. This discussion was recorded at the 2019 North American Forest & Climate Convergence at the Shawnee National Forest in southern Illinois. The Convergence was held from Oct. 11-14.

In this episode of Sojourner Truth, Dennis Connolly of the Shawnee Forest Defense, John Zippert of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives Land Assistance Fund and the Rural Coalition, Barbara Shipman of the Rural Coalition, and Steven Bartlett of the U.S. Food Sovereignty Alliance participate in a roundtable discussion on maintaining food sovereignty, sustainable agriculture and environmental protections.

This discussion was recorded at the 2019 North American Forest & Climate Convergence at the Shawnee National Forest in southern Illinois. The Convergence was held from Oct. 11-14.

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Sojourner Truth with Margaret Prescod is a public affairs program that airs Tuesday through Friday on KPFK Radio from 7 to 8 AM (PST).

Tune in at 90.7 FM Los Angeles, 98.7 FM Santa Barbara, 93.7 FM North San Diego, 99.5 FM Ridgecrest-China Lake, or www.kpfk.org.

Sojourner Truth brings you news and views on local, national, and international policies and stories that affect us all. We draw out how those of us most impacted - women, communities of color and other communities are responding. We also discuss the inter-relationship between art and politics. At the start of our show we bring you the headlines of the day.