If you were planning to make your farm the “employer of choice,” would you start by reducing hourly wages and adding a charge for previously free housing? This is what House Ag Committee chair G.T. Thompson’s Securing Agriculture’s Workforce Act (SAWA) proposes as the solution to labor shortages made acute by ICE raids.
The Triple Threat of Coordinated Actions: Monsanto v. Durnell, the Senate Farm Bill, and the Executive Order on Regenerative Agriculture.
NOFA and other non-profit grassroots farming support organizations across the country are also deeply impacted by these funding freezes and program terminations. USDA’s refusal to release contractually obligated funds along with gutting personnel in key agricultural-support programs is causing legal harm. With contract cuts in the thousands of dollars, the NOFA Chapters have been forced to lay off valued staff, suspend projects and significantly downsize their operating budgets — putting their state organizations in jeopardy.
NOFA and other non-profit grassroots farming support organizations across the country are also deeply impacted by these funding freezes and program terminations. USDA’s refusal to release contractually obligated funds along with gutting personnel in key agricultural-support programs is causing legal harm. With contract cuts in the thousands of dollars, the NOFA Chapters have been forced to lay off valued staff, suspend projects and significantly downsize their operating budgets — putting their state organizations in jeopardy.
NOFA joins lawsuit against the Federal Government
We demand that the farmworkers who have been arrested in the last weeks of March, whether in Massachusetts, New York, or Washington State, be released immediately from detention centers to return to their homes without further harassment. A truly sustainable system of food and farming is not possible without justice for all the people of the earth.
In May 2023 a detailed Position Paper titled “Organic Agriculture is Soil-based: A Fundamental Principle Underlying Organic Crop Certification” was filed with USDA’s National Organic Program (NOP) by 5 dissenting USDA Accredited Organic Certifiers (out of 80 total) who have banded together refusing to certify soilless operations in the face of NOP’s continuing unilateral blanket allowance of hydroponic production to qualify for the organic label.
In May 2023 a detailed Position Paper titled “Organic Agriculture is Soil-based: A Fundamental Principle Underlying Organic Crop Certification” was filed with USDA’s National Organic Program (NOP) by 5 dissenting USDA Accredited Organic Certifiers (out of 80 total) who have banded together refusing to certify soilless operations in the face of NOP’s continuing unilateral blanket allowance of hydroponic production to qualify for the organic label.
During the month of February, the members of the Farmworker Association of Florida, low-income Latinx workers, many of them undocumented, held 5 asamblea (member assemblies) around the state to share about their lives and set priorities for action by their organization. Then delegates met in a statewide assembly. Top of their list of policy priorities is immigration reform.
On March 29, 2022 the final Origin of Livestock (OOL) Rule was at long last instituted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), finally resolving statutory language ambiguities from the 1990 Organic Food Production Act (OFPA) that have been keeping family dairies at a major disadvantage in the organic milk marketplace for years now. The rule goes into full effect one year from that date. While we celebrate a Big Win for organic integrity and the surviving grassroots organic dairy farmers who have long suffered under the loopholes – we need to become even more vigilant going into the future.