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Posts Tagged ‘small farm’

Federal Cuts Hurt Small Farms

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on August 25, 2025| 2 Comments »

Photo: Mark Stockwell/Boston Globe.
Mohammed Hannan of Hannan Healthy Foods farm in Lincoln, Massachusetts, holds garlic, one of many organic greens grown on his farm.

After the US takes a step forward, it always seems to take two steps back. In today’s story, We learn about federal funds that have been supporting sustainable agriculture. Until now.

Jocelyn Ruggiero reports for the Boston Globe, “It’s dreary, gray, and unseasonably chilly on the first day of Community Supported Agriculture pickups at the Hannan Healthy Foods farm. As CSA members trickle in to collect their bags of produce, they chat with Mohammed Hannan and passersby who’ve stopped to buy green garlic, beets, collards, and various herbs and greens at the farm stand. Hannan’s 11-year-old daughter, Afsheen, sits bundled up at the checkout table, reading a book alongside volunteer and longtime CSA member Tricia Moore. Aside from the weather, the scene looks similar to opening day last summer. But circumstances are vastly different from what they were 12 months ago.

“One person is notably absent. Hannan’s wife, Kaniz Fouzia, died of pancreatic cancer in March. And even as the family grieves, Hannan confronts the practical challenges of running the farm without his primary support.

“He also faces another crisis. Last year, as with every year since it launched, the farm’s biggest buyer was the New Entry Sustainable Farming Project’s Food Hub, which purchased $7,000 in produce, primarily funded by two federal grants: the Local Food Purchase Assistance and Local Food for Schools Cooperative Agreement programs.

“Since 2021, the Food Hub has bought more than $32,000 of produce from Hannan, supported by these food grants, both part of the 2021 American Rescue Plan. These initiatives enable local schools, food banks, and senior centers to purchase produce from the Hub and, by extension, local farmers and producers. They’ve brought close to $20 million to the Massachusetts economy. Both the LFPA and LFS were originally scheduled to run through December 2025, [but the federal] administration abruptly and prematurely terminated funding for both programs. …

“Established in 2005, the Food Hub aggregates and distributes vegetables grown by more than 35 beginning, immigrant, and refugee farmers in the Boston region. It is an initiative of the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University, which was founded in 1998 to integrate recent immigrants and refugees with farming backgrounds into Massachusetts agriculture. …

“[The] sudden termination of multiple streams of support disrupted many long-planned efforts and, in some cases, left farmers holding the bill for purchases they had already made based on awards that were withdrawn.

“It’s no coincidence that Hannan is the steward of a successful farm. He’s always had close ties to agriculture. He grew up on his family’s organic farm in Bangladesh, which was both a source of food and income. Hannan went on to earn a master’s degree in wildlife biology, studying the country’s ecologically critical coastal areas. In 2014, he gave up an opportunity to accept a Duke fellowship when his wife received a US Diversity Visa; the family left Bangladesh to settle in Cambridge.

“He eked out a living at multiple minimum-wage jobs — Walgreens, Indian restaurants, and MIT facilities — before landing work in biotech, then as a lab manager at MIT. During the lean years, he yearned for the affordable organic food that was so accessible in Bangladesh. He wondered, ‘How can I change my situation? How can I grow food here?’ …

“Unsure about whether working a full-time job while running a farm would be feasible, Hannan spent the summer of 2017 volunteering mornings, nights, and weekends at White Rabbit Farm in Dracut. … He began the New Entry Sustainable Farming Project farmer training program that winter, leasing a small piece of land through New Entry and growing produce to feed his family. By 2019, he had launched his first 30-member CSA and was selling to the Food Hub. In 2020, he graduated and set his sights on a plot in Lincoln.

“The weeds were chest-high on the 2.5-acre barren plot, and there was no potable water for washing produce. … ‘I came up with a plan: I’ll grow veggies that do not need washing: bottle and bitter gourds, tomatoes, eggplants, peppers.’ As he expanded, Hannan connected with the Lincoln community through an online forum. There, he met Tom Flint, an 11th-generation Lincoln farmer. Flint introduced him to Lincoln Land Conservation Trust trustee Jim Henderson, who let Hannan use his backyard sink and cure garlic in his barn. These were the first of many new friends who welcomed him to Lincoln. …

“During COVID, unsolicited, strangers started contacting Hannan: ‘I had accountants, engineers, doctors. They were helping on the weekends. … We were laughing, harvesting … and eating from the farm. It was really good.’ Town residents later responded to his query on the town’s forum and helped Hannan build a deer fence when he couldn’t afford a contractor. His robust volunteer network has strengthened and extended beyond Lincoln, and today includes such groups as the Boston-based climate justice nonprofit Mothers Out Front. …

“[Today] Hannan’s MIT job subsidizes his farm, and his volunteer community provides supplemental support. However, for many other small farmers affected by funding cuts, the consequences will be existential. As Hannan puts it: ‘Small farmers like me … will definitely choose other options.’ ”

More at the Globe, here.

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Small Farms Fight to Survive

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on June 17, 2024| 4 Comments »

Photo: Whitney Eulich.
Fernando Matus Hernández ties a small bucket filled with heirloom corn kernels around his waist before planting them on his family’s farm in Oaxaca, Mexico. Small farms like his are an endangered species.

Agricultural capitalism is making it hard for small farms to survive, but so are some environmental regulations, normally a public good. How can we protect both the environment and the small farms that feed us?

At the Christian Science Monitor, Erika Page, Whitney Eulich, and Srishti Jaswal have an in-depth report on the challenges facing farmers today.

“Julie De Smedt tries not to picture her future too often. When she does, she has trouble imagining herself anywhere but here, planted on this stretch of fertile land that runs from her childhood home to the River Scheldt.

“Her family’s cattle ranch is the last farm left on this sleepy Belgian country road. If she were a statistic, she would have left for the city. But at 21 years old, she’s made up her mind.

“ ‘I want to take over the farm,’ says Ms. De Smedt, who lives doors down from her grandparents and cousins on both sides. ‘I don’t want to be anywhere else.’

“But she knows how unlikely her dream is. Sometime soon, all her family farm’s land will be converted into a nature reserve. The European Union is pushing to restore ecosystems in the face of widespread environmental degradation, which contributes to climate change, so the state has expropriated their land.

“The family is not against green policies. ‘There has to be nature, and there have to be people who defend nature,’ says Wendy Vasseur, Ms. De Smedt’s mother, looking through the back door of a cow barn at the line of trees that marks the boundary of the future reserve. But nobody seems to care what will become of their family and the life they have built on this land, they say. …

“Small-farm owners around the globe, in fact, are feeling that same sense of helplessness. From Germany and Spain to India and Canada, farmers are rising up to protest not only burdensome new environmental regulations but also the impact of corporate mega-farms and cheap food imports, which have caused their costs to rise and their profits to fall dramatically. So, many around the world have driven their tractors into capital cities, sometimes spraying manure on city streets and sidewalks. They’ve blocked major freeways, set fires in urban metro stations, and demanded changes to policies that, to them, feel like death sentences. 

“ ‘What they want is a decent living,’ says Morgan Ody, general coordinator of La Via Campesina, an international small-farmers organization. ‘What they want is respect for their work.’

It would be a mistake, she says, to see the latest wave of protests as simply right-wing backlash against the green agenda.

“True, some farmers oppose green policies on political grounds, but many support them. As rural areas lose population, farmers on every continent say they are being sacrificed to meet the demands of a society that no longer values the people who feed it. …

“A cow and a pig were all Ms. De Smedt’s grandfather needed to open this farm in the 1950s. As agriculture intensified and industrialized, the farm, too, grew. Today, the wooden barns the family built itself hold 250 cattle, whose meat is sold mainly to French grocery chain Carrefour. 

“They fatten their cows on corn and beets they grow on the land destined for the nature reserve. And they will continue for as long as they can, Ms. Vasseur says. But it is a perpetual battle to keep the farm going, and Ms. Vasseur has to work a full-time job at a nearby factory to make ends meet.

“The price they can charge for their beef has not kept up with the rising costs of inputs such as fertilizer and pesticides needed to keep poisonous weeds at bay. Now, the family business has to deal with rules governing crop rotation and fallow land. …

“Their story has repeated itself around the world for decades, says Timothy Wise, a researcher and senior adviser at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, an international nonprofit that promotes sustainable food production. ‘Bigger farms get bigger, and smaller farms disappear. Rural communities just get hollowed out.’ 

“Between 2005 and 2020, the EU lost nearly 40% of its farms and over 5 million farmers, most of them smallholders. At the same time, the amount of land being farmed has stayed the same. …

“That isn’t how Lieven Nachtergale wants things to end. As coordinator of the Sigma Plan, the project responsible for Belgium’s new nature reserve, Mr. Nachtergale does not enjoy removing farmers from their land. He does, however, think it’s necessary: Natural habitats in the densely populated region of Flanders have been badly degraded, and floods pose a growing risk. In such cases, the needs of the land, if not the planet, must take precedence.

“But the real problem he sees is a model of intensified agriculture that has become so disconnected from the natural world. Fields treated with herbicides, pesticides, and heavy doses of fertilizer leave native species next to no room to thrive, he says. 

“The EU’s Nature Restoration Law requires countries to restore 30% of their natural ecosystems by 2030 and 90% by 2050. Mr. Nachtergale’s team is helping Flanders establish 36,000 hectares (almost 90,000 acres) of nature reserve, the equivalent of 5% of the land area being farmed.

“Over the years, he has grown increasingly interested in figuring out how nature and agriculture might better work together. He is working on a pilot project that would give farmers who want to produce in a ‘nature-inclusive’ way 2 hectares of land (5 acres) for every hectare of their own that they contribute. The goal is to restore ecosystems while keeping family farmers on the land. 

“ ‘We will need farmers in the future to do this kind of management,’ he says. But he recognizes the challenge of competing with bigger industrialized farms. ‘If we want to change the system and give the farmers a better future, I think we should pay more for what they are producing.’ “

More from farmers around the world at the Monitor, here. No paywall. Subscriptions welcome.

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