It’s possible to make the 2023 Farm Bill a win-win for everyone: both farmers and they people they feed as well as Democrats and Republicans.
That’s the thought New York State Farm Bureau President Dave Fisher shared Thursday at SUNY Cobleskill at Congresswoman Elise Stefanik’s first stop on her
’23 Listening Tour.
About a half-dozen farmers shared their concerns over Farm to School, food deserts, apple tariffs and farm safety.
Most of them, a bristling John Radliff said, issues they’ve been struggling with for a quarter-century.
“We’ve been fighting the same fight for 25 years,” Mr. Radliff, a Cobleskill dairy farmer and past Schoharie County Farm Bureau president said.
“You”—Congress, not Ms. Stefanik specifically—“talk a good game, but you don’t do jack. Don’t promise with your mouths what your hands can’t deliver.”
Like Mr. Fisher, Mr. Radliff argued that if the Farm Bill gave “Democrats all their social programs,”—75 percent of the Farm Bill—“we’d get results. We need to get something done.”
Speaking from the Bouck Auditorium stage alongside Congresswoman Stefanik, Assemblyman Chris Tague, State Senator Peter Oberacker, and County Supervisors’ chair Bill Federice, Mr. Fisher spoke to specifics needed in the next Farm Bill, including the need to lock in dairy pricing protections and addressing specialty crops.
Most people look at the Farm Bill and don’t understand it, he said.
“But it’s really an opportunity to bring people together over what we do every day: eat…by keeping agriculture viable and helping those in need.”
For Mary Beth Shults of Canajoharie, whose family switched from milking 200 cows in 2004 to growing produce and pasture-raised meat to 2013, to opening a Main Street market in 2022, and bringing back the cows—that means doing a better job of putting local food in local schools.
Duane Spaulding of Cobleskill argued that needs to go a step further: with whole milk back in schools as well as at senior meal sites and the Gathering Place.
Relief milker and Gilboa Supervisor Alicia Terry said there’s a disconnect between food grown so well upstate and the difficulties of getting it to food deserts in New York City.
Ms. Terry also said there needs to be more of a focus on finding the next generation of farmers—especially with profit margins so tight that too often, the people growing the food wonder if they can afford to put it on their own tables.
“My parents put three kids through college milking 40 cows,” she said; she volunteers her time at a cousins’ farm because she loves it, she said, but also, they can’t afford to hire the extra help.
Phoebe Schreiner from CADE—the non-profit Center for Agricultural Development & Entrepreneurship—based in Oneonta, said there needs to be more of a focus on small to mid-size farms and what they are to the economy, the environment, and their communities.
Among the agriculture issues on her radar, Congresswoman Stefanik said: the Dairy Margin Program, specialty crops, the Northern Border Regulatory Commission, farm worker VISAs, and overtime thresholds.