What is the state of the American Farmer? Is food insecurity in the US on the rise? What initiatives are upcoming to address feeding more people with fewer resources? What does the USDA science data tell us? Deputy Under Secretary of the USDA, Sanah Baig, joins host Elysabeth Alfano on The Plantbased Business Hour for the big knowledge drop just months before the Farm Bill drop.
Specifically, we discussed
- As we turn the corner into 2025, what is the USDA working on given the need to feed a growing global population with fewer resources?
- How is the USDA prioritizing food systems transformation and the plight of the American farmer?
- What level of money is being spend on the future of agriculture and what kind of time frame for change are we talking about? Will we see this mapped out in the Farm Bill?
- What does a change in the food system mean for the average American?
- Can you share what the landscape looks like for investors around agriculture?
- Are we close to a food systems shift taking hold and what will that entail?
Below is a highlight clip and transcription from our long-form conversation.
Elysabeth: I want to bring on the Deputy Under Secretary for the USDA, Sanah Baig. She joins us today from the Capital. Thank you, Sanah, for being with us.
My understanding is that as we move into fewer family farms and we get into more corporate farms, the small farmer is squeezed and they are in a world of debt and maybe even in a world of pain. As you talk about the stats, and I’ll let you get back to your stats, maybe you could incorporate how this is going to go for them on a personal lifestyle note? I’d love to know if they can increase their power in negotiating because of their position.
Sanah Baig: That’s such a good question. I think every event that we go to or that USDA hosts or that we’ve been involved with, we always try to advocate to make sure that there is a farmer voice. Even looking across the halls and within this administration, we have folks that are active producers that have kind of taken a pause from what they do to come in and form policy, which I think is critically important in terms of some of the things that you pointed out around where things are going for small family farms.
We still do have a system in the United States where the overwhelming majority of our farms are considered small and mid-sized family operations. The difference though, is that when you break down where profitability and income are going, it really is the top 8% to 10% of farms and producers in this country that are making 90% of farm income. So it is kind of a nuanced story, but when Secretary Vilsack himself looked at the data and we thought, “Wow, in the early years of this administration there was record farm income.”
It’s really an incredible story to tell in terms of overall how much profit we were making in U.S. agriculture that the private sector was really making. In talking with communities and going to the Delta, going to the Appalachian regions, going to the heartland and you see people are struggling and you know that operations, especially small family farms are shuttering and you know that they’re being squeezed as you said, for profit.
Why is there such a disparity in which overall it looks like number wise we’re doing really well? Yet, on the ground we’re not quite hearing the same, especially when we saw the impacts of Covid on the economy and on small businesses. You realize that the system that we’ve created has really over the past 70 or so years been set up to value hyper-efficiency and production and yield and all of these things that did lift millions out of hunger and poverty. Yet there have been some unintended consequences of that.
So it is important to note that people think that we have this huge accessor and we once did, and yet we actually peaked in the United States in terms of our number of farms back in 1935. In 1935, we had about seven million farming operations here domestically. Today, we have just under two million farms in America. According to our latest census, as you kind of alluded to, only the number of large farms increased in our latest census, while the number of small and mid-sized farms continued to tick downward.
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