An entire workforce enabled by agriculture and devoted to our nutrition is as vulnerable as it is essential. Workers in food preparation and farming occupations take home a less than living annual wage of $26,670 and $31,340, respectively. And 75 percent of the agricultural workforce is denied the basic protections that citizenship provides and their contributions deserve.
The public experience of agriculture does not correspond with the economic reports of the farming industry. It is not simply that we have a system of agriculture that fails the public interest by depleting land and people. The public’s experience is so divergent from the economic success indicators of the farm industry that last year saw net farm income at its highest in seven years. Just as we have a stock market that is not our economy, we have a farm economy that is increasingly detached from the realities of farming and the experience of farming communities.
This detachment has everything to do with public policy. It’s a long story with a new chapter every year. In 2020, a series of new and long-standing government relief programs were responsible for nearly 40 percent of the farm income spike. This windfall did not come from Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans, or accessing Economic Injury Disaster Loans (EIDL), or even the stimulus checks that were made available to U.S. residents and restricted to our undocumented community members. This windfall was a combination of direct farm payment programs dating back to the Great Depression, topped up with a novel relief program, the Coronavirus Food Assistance Program (CFAP).
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CFAP unlocked billions of dollars in new government funding to help farmers “absorb” their pandemic-related losses. The National Young Farmers Coalition, of which I am co-executive director, campaigned to make this funding available to local food producers who also faced downturns due to restaurant closures and lost markets. Instead, the funding approved by Congress was largely made accessible to the usual recipients of direct farm payments: large, land-owning farms and commodity producers.
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