Linda Garrett, the New York and New Jersey regional director with the American Farmland Trust, says small farmers financially operate on the margins.
“It's year after year they’re running on the edge. If it was cyclical and they had a chance to recover, that would be great. But we're not seeing any of these chances to recover recently. It's just more and more of the same thing,” said Garrett.
Last week, the U.S. House of Representatives passed legislation to reauthorize the Farm Bill. The bill now moves to the Senate just weeks after a report from the New York State Comptroller’s Office found the state is losing farms and farmland at twice the national rate, especially for small farms. Advocates and small farmers in the Hudson Valley said how this bill would address their needs.
It’s difficulty for farmers to breath with high fertilizer and fuel costs connected to war in Iran, along with extreme weather changes.
But Garrett says another challenge is that agricultural land of aging farmers often does not go to their younger farmer counterparts.
“We have an aging farming population and a lot of farmers that are looking to retire. The land that they have is their retirement fund. So instead of selling it to another farmer, they're selling it to the highest bidder, which is probably a developer and using that funding to be able to retire,” Garrett explained.
Vanessa Garcia Polanco, the government relations director with the National Young Farmers Coalition, says that getting access to land is the biggest struggle for young farmers, who also tend to be small farmers.
Polanco says the Hudson Valley has one of the highest concentrations of small farms in New York state, based on their membership.
She says this latest federal farm bill, which now moves to the U.S. Senate, does not do enough for young farmers.
“There were some modest improvements in some of the things, but a lot of those modest improvements don’t equal to the financial investment. They don’t actually catalyze change for a lot of young farmers’ programs or young farmers’ livelihoods,” Polanco said.
Polanco says the coalition wants to see more funding for programs that help young farmers access markets and credits, as well as provide infrastructure to support local regional food programs.
Garrett says the American Farmland Trust is happy with the federal conservation programs, like the inclusion of federal matching funds for state soil health programs.
She says the trust is also happy about unspent conservation funding from the Inflation Reduction Act going into the farm bill. But the trust would also like to see an Office of Small Farms added to the U.S. Department of Agriculture to help with outreach to small farmers.
Chris Nickell runs a small vegetable farm in Sullivan County called Finca Seremos with their spouse, Brenda Gonzalez. Nickell says their farm offers discounted groceries to low-income members who sign up to pay in advance and then a get a weekly supply of vegetables.
But the $187-billion-dollar cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, made in the One Big Beautiful Bill last year hit their farm hard – they get roughly 20% of their revenue from nutrition incentive programs.
“There's a higher likelihood we actually know the people we're feeding, and the food is better quality because it hasn't been on the shelf as long and hasn't traveled as many miles. And so everybody wins when we re regionalize our food shed, except those who are in favor of corporate control,” said Nickell.
Nickell wants to see funding in the farm bill that reinstates SNAP funding and puts more funding into programs that support buying from local farmers, like the Local Food Purchase Assistance and Local Food for Schools programs.
Nickell said they want their legislators to vote no on the bill until it includes that funding. Polanco, with the Young Farmers Coalition, agrees and said it’s already been three years that the Farm Bill has been extended since 2023.
“This is the longest we have gone without a farm bill in 90 years. This vehicle that is used to do this, but again, we will rather have an old farm bill status quo than a new farm bill that misses the opportunity to make the investments,” said Polanco.
The New York Farm Bureau was one of the groups that voiced support for passage of the bill, saying it improves risk management tools for dairy farms and access to crop insurance for specialty crops.
Democratic Congressman Josh Riley, who represents parts of the Mid-Hudson Valley and Southern Tier, voted yes on the bill, saying in a statement, “It’s not perfect, and there’s more work ahead, but this is a major step forward for Upstate New York and rural America.” He says he secured protections to prevent tractor rollovers, transparency on foreign purchases of U.S. farmland, and expanded crop insurance.
Republican Congressman Mike Lawler, who represents portions of the lower Hudson Valley, also voted yes, saying in a statement, “This legislation delivers real support for our state’s specialty crop industry, including the fruits and vegetables grown right here in the Hudson Valley.” He says his efforts got funding for promoting carbon storage and cybersecurity to secure SNAP benefit cards into the bill.
