Farm Issues

“Whether the challenge is low-yield crops in Africa or low graduation rates in Los Angeles, we listen and learn,” states the website of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (the Gates Foundation). Even though it is the richest and most powerful organization in all of international aid, the Gates Foundation prides itself on listening to small farmers.

America’s farmers have been shut out of foreign markets, hit with retaliatory tariffs and lost lucrative contracts in the face of President Trump’s trade war. But a $12 billion bailout program Mr. Trump created to “make it up” to farmers has done little to cushion the blow, with red tape and long waiting periods resulting in few payouts so far.

“If a mammal doesn’t produce it, it isn’t ‘milk’,” says Lisa Engelbert, one of the farmers at the sixth-generation Engelbert Farms in Nichols, New York. Engelbert is referring, somewhat wearily, to the plant-based beverages and other products made from soy, rice, nuts, and oats—she calls them “plant juices”—that currently account for 13 percent of the U.S. milk market and $1.6 billion in sales.

Across the U.S.—from New England to California—a small but growing movement of farmers is foregoing traditional farm ownership in favor of a cooperative model. In Maine, four Somali Bantu refugees raise crops on shared land at New Roots Cooperative Farm, growing both regional and Somali produce. To the south in Vermont, Intervale Community Farm shares farm ownership with its community supported agriculture (CSA) members.