Rural roots often grow deep—in the communities that serve them—and the people that call them home.
The Farm Foundation Forum, Reviving Rural: Agriculture as the Heartbeat of Healthy Communities, was held recently online, by the Farm Foundation and the American Farmland Trust to help have the needed conversation of protecting and enhancing agriculture, which can help the revival of rural health, prosperity and resilience.
Featured speakers included Julia Freedgood, senior fellow at American Farmland Trust; Xochitl Torres Small, the 15th U.S. Deputy Secretary of Agriculture; Alan Morgan, CEO of the National Rural Health Association; and Jeff Winton, founder and chairman of Rural Minds, a nonprofit dedicated to advancing mental health awareness and resources. Freedgood and Small will be featured in this article, another story is planned on mental health featuring Morgan and Winton.
At American Farmland Trust, the non-profit group’s holistic mission is to save the land “that sustains us by protecting farmland, advancing sound farming practices and keeping farmers on the land,” she said.
“We’re scale neutral, and while we pride ourselves as launching a national conservation agriculture movement, we’re best known for our efforts to raise public awareness through our No Farms No Food campaign,” Freedgood said.
Agriculture is influenced by federal policy, especially the farm bill, and that has reshaped the landscape of farming and rural life for nearly a 100 years, she said.
“State and local policy, where I spend a lot of my time, is often driven by or in response to federal policies,” Freedgood said. “Since the 1970s, farm policy has focused on increasing agricultural productivity and exporting commodities around the world.”
In the second half of the last century, ag policies “really did succeed” and production significantly increased, and distribution became more efficient, thus a much cheaper and more diverse food supply was created.
“Between 1948 and 2019 food prices fell, especially for food prepared at home,” she said. “It may surprise people, certainly surprises my children, but today, on average, most consumers only spend about 10% of their disposable income on food. That’s even with the recent inflationary uptick more eating out and eating a whole lot more than we used to.”
Freedgood said a Pew Research study found Americans eat about 23% more today than they did in 1970.
Loss of farms hurts communities
According to Freedgood, the loss of farms hurt rural communities, and they suffered because of it. This often led to shrinking populations and declining services like hospitals and banks. It also contributed to the highest rates of food insecurity many people have seen in their lives.
“At the peak of agriculture in terms of number of farms in this country, we had about 7 million in 1935, but the average farm size was only 155 acres,” she said. “Since then, that number has dropped by 72% and farm size nearly tripled.”
Since the nosedive in farm numbers, there’s been a tendency to lean toward large, technology dependent, and specialized farms. There’s been substantial consolidation, she said.
“By the 2022 census, farm numbers had dropped to 1.8 million, down about 8% from 2017, farming an average of 446 acres,” she said. “Land in farms also continue to slow decline from a peak of about 1.2 billion acres to 880 million acres today.”
Freedgood said 4% of large family farms operate on nearly a third of American farmland, contributing nearly half of the value of production. Another 42% of the value of production is completed by 1% of very large farms.
“These very large farms have gross cash farm income of at least $5 million, and they operate on an average of 4,673 acres, 100 times the average in the country,” she said. “This kind of consolidation is what’s changing the face of rural America.”
Those small and mid-sized family farms operate on less than 60% of the land and generate 35% of the value of production.
“They’re the bedrock of many local and rural communities, and their decline has reduced the diversity of food supply chains and led to declining employment and economic opportunity, rural depopulation and the loss of things like hospitals, schools and banks,” she said. “But we can turn this around.”
It takes a traumatic event for change to happen, and Freedgood said COVID was a “really important wake up call.”
“It was like the canary in the mine, and when the pandemic hit, consumers and at least some policy makers were shocked to find empty shelves at supermarkets,” she said. “The country as a whole was not prepared for disruptions along the food supply chain and a sudden surge in home cooking. This exposed vulnerabilities in our food systems, but it also revealed opportunities for innovation and change.”
Communities with established local and regional food systems were able to pivot quickly to fill gaps and leverage social networks or other local networks to bring production, processing and marketing needs, Freedgood said.
According to Freedgood, research has found local and regional food systems retain more revenue in a community compared to commodity supply chains.
“This generates a positive economic ripple effect, or a multiplier, which benefits other local businesses and improves rural prosperity,” she said. “It also makes communities more resilient to shocks and disruptions, reducing reliance on global supply chains and promoting community food security.”
Also, when there are more farmers in a community, there’s more room for social interaction and community building amongst them.
“Reducing the isolation that often comes with agriculture, and with it, stress and loneliness,” she said.
Community engagement and action are a solution to many problems, and Freedgood conducts planning programs for agriculture at AFT.
All farms play a role
Although the role of small and mid-sized farms is important, large commodity farms are just as important.
“Thanks to 50 or more years of federal policy, large and very large farms are the only sector that’s growing, but too much consolidation can lead to a concentration of poverty and food insecurity in rural communities, especially when other economic opportunities are scarce,” she said. “If we can enhance agriculture by sustaining and in some cases restoring diversity in state and farm country, we can support the health and wealth of rural communities.”
But it can’t happen on its own.
“There’s no bullet, there’s no magic sauce. Every community is unique,” she said. “Strategies have to be built from the ground up with local leadership and based on community aspirations and needs.”
Former secretary approach
Small attested to the importance of “rural communities, rural vitality and agriculture as a fundamental heartbeat of that.” Throughout her years as a congresswoman for New Mexico’s Second District and later the deputy secretary of agriculture, Small gathered stories from her experiences.
Small appreciates the support agriculture receives, and it’s crucial for food to be affordable, that it can be healthy, and people can access it close to home.
There has to be a strategy to support agriculture so it can continue to be “that foundational heartbeat for thriving, resilient, rural people and communities,” Small said. She appreciated Freedgood’s point to focus on assets, not deficits.
“The way I put it is that local people know what makes a place special, and the way you can build resiliency is intentionally building a marketplace around that,” she said.
The overall conversation is about being size neutral.
“It is looking at how each of those sectors and each type of ag can help achieve rural vitality and resiliency and what’s necessary to support that,” she said.
For Small, she can look at it in four different ways. One, does it support real, good jobs in a community. Second, can it serve as a multiplier for jobs in not just one sector, but others too. Third, is it supporting sustainability for the long haul and not just immediately. And four, does it maintain the essence of a community.
When visiting a ranch in Florida, Small was happy to hear about how they were doing all the things to provide real jobs in the community with lower margins allowing them to support employees.
“While I was with them, I was talking to the ranch manager, and I said, ‘OK, it’s clear that you are contributing to the community in lots of different ways, bringing in folks for training for this John Deere equipment, getting high speed internet, but let me talk to you about why small farms matter too,’” Small said. “He said, ‘you don’t have to sell me on that.’”
Another visit to a small Nebraska town showed the then-deputy undersecretary how a community can rally around vibrant downtown with diverse cultures.
“As I was walking down Main Street, I was struck by just how vibrant it was. There weren’t those shuttered storefronts that you so often see, and it makes your heart break,” she said. “Instead, it was filled with all sorts of businesses and the businesses were interesting.”
Small learned that many came for jobs at the local meat processing plants, and the families stayed and invested in the community.
“What was beautiful to see was that the community invested back,” she said. “They started inviting these entrepreneurs into the chamber of commerce, one of their signature annual events became Cinco de Mayo, which truly speaks to a combination of cultures, something that’s really only celebrated in the U.S., but it was inviting for everyone to enjoy and celebrate.”
In that town, the chamber of commerce invested in translation services for their meetings to include all the entrepreneurs.
Innovators necessary
Companies with innovation that can support both farms and support a rural economy are important and needed.
“But that doesn’t always happen, and one of the key issues is that Silicon Valley doesn’t always understand agriculture and rural operations,” Small said. “On the flip side of that, sometimes farmers can be really risk adverse in adopting tech.”
Farms of all sizes are needed, and multipliers can happen with small farms and communities can become resilient because of them too.
“Adoption for technology is more likely to happen with large farms first, who can use that economies of scale to cover those initial capital investments,” she said. “So, we certainly need everyone at the table.”
There needs to be a willingness to be in it for the long haul.
“We all need to eat. That’s why we’re all invested in long haul sustainability of our country’s farms,” she said. “But what are the challenges to that resiliency? Well, I don’t have to go through the long list, but I’ll say a few, high cost of labor, thin margins across the board, housing, healthcare, childcare and increasing natural disasters and climate uncertainty. There are so many challenges.”
What do the solutions look like? One example was a farmer cooperative Small visited. Initially they struggled with scale and getting the right equipment to the farm, so they created a buyer’s club.
Small was able to see what that looked like in the long term, because through that training and the relationships that were created from a reliable, consistent farm labor population.
Sustainability is also crucial, she said, and the same goes for “essence.”
“How can rural communities grow while maintaining that essence that makes them special in the first place?” she said. “How do we make sure that agriculture continues to be the heartbeat of a community. It takes knowledge on the ground.”
Small said the farmers and the community have to be able to be involved and share their stories. Investment in research will allow farmers to feel secure in the future.
“We have to recognize innovations and ideas, and we have to support farmers as they look to plan and diversify so they can take a risk that will turn into opportunities for themselves, for rural people and for places across our country,” she said.
Kylene Scott can be reached at 620-227-1804 or [email protected].
