2023…2024…2025 Farm Bill: there’s still time to act!
In 2023, Kentucky Chapter’s Healthy Food, Healthy Earth Campaign focused on Building a Better Farm Bill. Our Kentucky team of nine (including Sierra Club volunteers and staff, and representatives from our partner organizations, Kentucky Resources Council and Community Farm Alliance) lobbied leadership in Washington, D.C. in September 2023; in total, Sierra Club volunteers from across the country lobbied 65 offices, including 17 meetings at the Member-level and discussions with the chairs and ranking members of the House and Senate Agriculture Committees. However, Congress failed to get the job done, and our Farm Bill work carried over into 2024.
In 2024, we continued to sponsor and attend local food and agriculture conferences, including the Black Farmers Conference in Bowling Green and the University of Kentucky Food Summit. In April, we attended the Cumberland Seed Commons Spring Convening in Berea, where Hank and his daughter, agricultural policy and agrarian geography scholar Garrett Graddy-Lovelace presented Bill Best with a Sierra Club Kentucky commendation for his incomparable work in seed saving. We continued to build relationships with farmers investing in regenerative agriculture, from LeTicia Marshall’s Bearfruit and Grow Farm in Louisville to Willie Huston’s Pick ‘n Grin Farm in Rockfield. We also continued to focus on the unfinished business of passing a Farm Bill that provides funding for farms like Willie’s and LeTicia’s that want to implement regenerative agriculture practices, and Hank Graddy, chair of the HFHE campaign, and Susan Patton attended a second, smaller DC fly-in in March 2024.
The Sierra Club remains a strong supporter of the Climate Change provisions of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) which was the single largest investment by the US government to address climate change issues in history. That legislation included $19.8 billion to help the US food and agriculture systems change from the current, dominant industrial agriculture model – which makes agriculture a leading contributor of greenhouse gas emissions and the largest source of water pollution – toward the regenerative organic model – which is based upon building soil health, capturing carbon and improving water quality and quantity. Many of us believe this transition also helps produce healthier food than we are currently getting from the industrial food system. However, that $19.8 billion remains under threat by industrial agriculture to be diverted away from that transition and used instead to support further expansion of its harmful model.
It is urgent that the Sierra Club – in Kentucky and across the country – understand and resist this threat. And we must continue our opposition to CAFOs – concentrated animal feeding operations. There will be a number of ways you can help the Sierra Club in Kentucky be a part of Building a Better Farm Bill in 2025, including joining us in Washington, DC if we need to have additional Farm Bill lobby events. There will also be ways you can help in Kentucky: you can also call or write and you can visit your representatives when they are in-district–our Legislative Committee can help you learn to lobby your legislators to invest in healthy soil and water!
So – mark your calendars for upcoming Sierra Club events that focus on local food systems, and let us know that you want to help!