While the pandemic may be in the rearview mirror, organic farmers are still facing struggles and 2023 is a key time for them to contact members of congress and get their concerns heard with the upcoming Farm Bill. Lori Stern, Executive director of MarbleSeed says their farmers aren’t getting a share of the price increases and are producing milk at a loss.
“We think we’re going to have the pandemic and all of the associated challenges behind us and it’s just not proving to be the case,” says Stern. “I think moving forward there we’re going to see a trend of this desire to move to more domestically produced organic feed grains that potentially can lead to more transparency in the pricing of those.”
She adds that there is an entire agricultural system that is built up around non-organic systems and that they are working to fix those challenges. Organic agriculture being recognized as climate smart agriculture is just the first step.
“A lot of the programs that are within the Farm Bill have really benefited large monocrop operations that are not organic,” explains Stern. “When we think about some of the climate friendly practices, the diversity on these smaller to medium sized farms, integrating livestock and row crop,and the grazing that happens with organic dairy, these kind of diverse practices aren’t necessarily what’s being compensated or resourced by farm build programs.”
These topics will be a big part of the conversation happening at the MarbleSeed Annual Organic Farming Conference, February 23-25. The sessions throughout the conference will cover adding rotations and markets for them, grazing practices, and provide members the opportunity to talk with the Department of Agriculture.
“Then, of course, we’ve got a lot of content on production, as that’s why farmers gather, to learn how to continuously improve their farming system,” says Stern. “Another keynote is going to be talking about consolidation in our food system and what is the next place that we need to go, how do we kind of take our food system back and have it more human scale and more localized.”
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