The National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, of which NOFA/Mass is a coalition member, is holding its “Farm Bill For All Farmers Week of Action: Conservation Not Consolidation.”

We are urging all of our members to join this week of action.

Ask you legislators to support increased conservation and climate-smart agriculture efforts — not increase funding for an already lopsided farm safety net.

Bipartisan negotiations are hung up on a potential proposal that could cut billions of dollars from both nutrition assistance and popular climate-smart conservation programs – the kind of incentives that all farmers can use to build strong and diverse farms – to instead raise subsidies for less than 0.3 percent of the largest and wealthiest commodity farms.

Farm safety net subsidies have become a significant driver of climate change, soil erosion, and farmland consolidation in agriculture. Increasing reference prices to benefit a few farmers at the expense of popular conservation programs would be investing in the wrong direction.

Additionally, the majority of farm safety net programs benefit large commodity farms and subsidize risky forms of commodity production – systems that are based on monoculture crops, overly reliant on chemical inputs, and which chronically overuse tillage. This style of commodity production contributes to soil erosion and worsening climate change.

The Inflation Reduction Act has allotted nearly $20 billion for conservation programs which will hasten the urgent shift to climate-smart agriculture. This pool of funds is under threat for reappropriation towards greater commodity subsidies that benefit a small percentage of farmers and incentivize extractive agriculture.
Make your voice heard this week.

Tell Congress we want our tax dollars to protect pivotal nutrition programs and proven conservation programs that build resilient food systems, not giveaways that exclude most farmers and fuel farmland consolidation.

We’ve made calling and emailing your lawmakers as easy as possible. Tailored call scripts and automated email templates are provided, and you will be connected only when you are ready.

Thank you for your ongoing advocacy and support! These calls make a huge difference, and we appreciate each and every one of them.

If you’d like to learn more about the current state of the farm safety net and how it prioritizes large commodity producers and often leaves out small-scale, organic, diversified farmers, check out NSAC’s latest report, ‘Unsustainable: State of the Farm Safety Net.’