Angela Huffman - Fighting for the Future of the Family Farms

[00:00:10] Christy: Welcome to Green Champions.

[00:00:11] Dominique: Thanks for joining us in a conversation with real people sharing sustainability success stories.

[00:00:16] Christy: This Podcast is a platform for green champions to share their stories and plant new ideas. I'm Christy.

[00:00:21] Dominique: And I'm Dominique.

[00:00:22] Christy: Today we're back with Angela Huffman to learn more about her impact on agriculture policy and family farms. Angela is the President of Farm Action, a nonpartisan farmer led watchdog that holds government and corporate power accountable in food and agriculture.

You can listen to last week's episode to learn more about what lead to this work, and today we are talking about sustainability as it relates to agricultural policy and farms. Angela, welcome back.

[00:00:48] Angela: Thanks for having me back on.

[00:00:49] Dominique: Angela, we spoke last time about your background and a little bit of kind of like why this is so close to your heart, and why you've been exposed to some of these problems before. But can you remind us really briefly about kind of your personal relationship with farming?

[00:01:03] Angela: Sure. Yes, I am the sixth generation on my family's farm up in northwest Ohio. I've really seen firsthand how hard farmers work, how little control they often have over their success. So, all of those challenges really inspired me to get involved in advocating for a better food system.

[00:01:23] Christy: Yeah. And through that advocacy, you co-founded Farm Action. Could you tell us a little bit about that 

please?

[00:01:29] Angela: Yeah. Like you mentioned, we're a watchdog organization. We work to hold corporations and government accountable and that's to push for a fair and sustainable and healthy food system. So what we do is we do a lot of research to expose what's going wrong in the food system. We translate that into clear public education.

We bring together unlikely allies and lift up farmer voices and work together to push for policy reforms that create fairer markets in a more sustainable and healthy food system.

[00:02:03] Dominique: And I feel like a really big part of that is the research component and getting, like finding out what the truth is, finding out what's really going on. Can you just kind of unpack that a little bit more? Like what does that research look like? How do you do that?

[00:02:16] Angela: So we've got, one, it's a day-to-day thing, so kind of at the most day-to-day level, every single day we're looking at what's being reported in the agriculture news. We're looking at shareholder reports that are coming out from the largest corporations and what they're saying, we're looking at data from the USDA on the census and farmer profitability and the prices that farmers are getting. Kind of on a bigger scale, we maintain on our website, we've got an agriculture consolidation data hub.

So this is an entire kind of database where we have looked at every single sector in agriculture, processing the entire supply chain. And we're looking at who are the dominant players in those sectors, how much of the market do they control, what kind of practices are they up to? We're looking at things like price gouging and price fixing. We're really, like I said, a watchdog, keeping an eye on what's going on, maintaining this data hub where we house all of this information and working to communicate that out.

Just yesterday we sent a letter to President Trump about concerns about price gouging in the fertilizer sector due to the war in Iran right now. So we're always watching what's going on and raising awareness about that with policy makers, with the press, with the general public, to hold folks accountable.

[00:03:36] Dominique: Yeah. And you got into it last time a little bit when we were chatting about how policy has power in this space and how you have conversations around these things. But can you share a little bit about your day to day and who you're speaking with? You just mentioned like sending a letter, but I imagine there's a lot of conversations that happen before that. Or it doesn't end at a letter, you're not just sending a letter and then sitting on your couch and being like, well, the letter's gonna do its job. So who are you talking to and how do you decide?

[00:04:03] Angela: Yep. So one, we've got a really great research and policy team on our staff at Farm Action. So we are all working closely together doing that research. We have a really great network of farmers called local leaders across the country, who are kind of our eyes and ears on the ground. So they're letting us know what they're seeing. We're talking with other allied organizations, partner organizations, other farm groups, environmental groups. We work very closely with a number of environmental organizations around the country. So, a lot of different stakeholders that have a different lens and are bringing in different information, and we're working to connect that and coordinate our work together to lift it up and have the power we need to make a difference.

So that's kind of who we're talking to and where we're getting information. From there we're working to translate that into communications that get the word out. So yeah. Whether that's a letter to Congress, to the administration, to our federal antitrust enforcers or the US Department of Agriculture. We're raising awareness, pointing out the problems, offering solutions. And like you said, it doesn't stop there. That's usually not enough for them to say, okay, we're gonna do exactly what you just asked us to do. It really takes a lot of pressure, so from there we get the word out to the press.

We do a lot of outreach to the press and interviews and getting our message out that way, building awareness on social media, starting petitions and sign on letters. And we've held rallies and large events to get attention. So really, taking these issues and building the pressure that it takes to get it across the finish line, ultimately into policy change in Washington, DC.

[00:05:46] Dominique: Yeah. Which, I mean, right now that is uniquely challenging. Like there's not an interest in reading the letters and finding out people are thinking clearly. But you've been around doing this work prior to this administration. How old is Farm Action?

[00:06:00] Angela: Farm action is six and a half years old, but I've been working kind of in this area myself for about 16 years.

[00:06:07] Dominique: I am very grateful for the work that you're doing, and I'm very grateful that you run this organization now. Just so many things you're touching on are like, so dire and needed now more than ever, and you're fighting a uniquely uphill battle. But I wanted to also call out that you've been doing this work prior to the problems we're facing right now, and some of these problems have been, our food system has been centralized for quite a while. But I think that's also notable how much you're fighting an uphill battle right now.

[00:06:31] Angela: Yeah. Thank you. These problems have existed, there have been challenges in agriculture for centuries. But even in the last century, we've really seen kind of a wave of, back in the early 1900s, we had very consolidated markets. You hear about the Gilded Age and the railroad monopolies and the banking monopolies. Eventually those got broken up at the turn of the century and things really improved for farmers. But then again, we've seen over the last about 40 years, kind of a resurgence of this monopoly power in the food system. So, we know that it's been broken up before and that we can do it again. So that's really encouraging. But yeah, the problems we face today, some of those are unique and some of those are more entrenched and more ongoing.

[00:07:19] Christy: I think that in many cases, not everybody is as connected to their food as we perhaps used to be. What is it like to be a farmer today? What is that landscape? Can you help the listener who might not have that connection to agriculture and a family farm? What is it like to be a farmer in the United States today?

[00:07:38] Angela: I'll back up a little bit. What it's like to be a farmer has largely been shaped around our government farm program. For example, right now the government, in our farm policy, certain crops are really prioritized. So those are commodity crops like corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton, and rice. Those crops are mostly used for livestock feed and ethanol, highly processed foods. And those crops have long standing federal government programs supporting them and taxpayer dollars. And so, a lot of farmers have been pushed into growing these commodity crops because that's where the government support is and it's very challenging to grow other crops or livestock anymore in the United States, for example, specialty crops. What's known as specialty crops, those are fruits and vegetables and nuts and legumes. 

So it's notable that the government designates those specialty crops and there's a big difference in our government policies and our taxpayer funding that supports farmers growing those kind of crops. And that's not to say the farmers growing corn and soybeans have it easy, even though they do have those funding supports because they have very few options on kind of both sides of them, on the production side or the input side, the things that they need to buy in order to farm are very expensive and they're under monopoly control. So just a few corporations sell the equipment and fertilizer and seeds that farmers buy. And then on the other side, when farmers go to sell their products, there are very few buyers and those buyers are often very frequently in court for price fixing. So they're driving down the prices that they're paying to farmers, they're coordinating instead of competing. So it's really a take it or leave it for farmers.

So it's really challenging. But there are these other forces that make it really hard to stay viable today.

[00:09:30] Dominique: And when we think about Farm Action as a group, you've described it as being farmer-led. And so, we think about you now as leading Farm Action. But who else is part of this organization? How big is it? How do you collaborate with, like, do you have like folks that are kind of on like an advisory side of things? Who's bringing all this together?

[00:09:50] Angela: So, my colleague Joe Maxwell and I are the co-founders and Joe's a farmer as well. We've got a board of directors, our staff. We've got about today, I think eight or nine people on our staff. About half of our staff are farmers themselves. And then we've got this really great network of farmers around the country that are volunteering with us to be part of informing our work and speaking out as leaders in their community on our behalf. That's really important for who we are and how we're able to authentically represent the interests of farmers which is so important to us because there are really powerful forces in Washington DC lobbying on agriculture policy that really don't have the best interest in mind.

They're going in, I'm talking about folks like Bayer, Monsanto, or Cargill or the meat packing giant JBS, these are multinational corporations. They're a lot more concerned about their profits than farmer's profits. But they carry a lot of weight in Washington, DC and a lot of influence by implying, that they're working on farmer's behalf.

[00:10:57] Dominique: And what is the average age of a farmer?

[00:10:59] Angela: It's around 60 years old.

[00:11:01] Dominique: Wow.

[00:11:02] Angela: Yes. That's, that's a real concern for the future of our food system, for our food security. It's harder and harder to get into farming as a young person, unless you're lucky like I was to be part of a multi-generational farm. That certainly makes it easier to get in. And, so yeah, it's a real concern that the aging out of the American farmer and who's going to replace them.

[00:11:24] Dominique: Is there an element of fear in speaking out from the farmer point of view? So like you're obviously putting Farm Action on the line of being very vocal, and standing up to the large corporations. Cannot be easy in just the effort of it all, but it also must be risky.

Is there risk on the farmer trying to advocate for themselves in these environments?

[00:11:43] Angela: Absolutely. Yes. Many of the farmers that we work with have been retaliated against for speaking out. One in particular, a colleague that I work really closely with was blackballed. He's a cattle producer and was selling cattle to different processors, and they got together and said, no more.

They basically locked him out and he ended up creating his own meat business and retail store and just kind of went independent. And, that's kind of, the system's really set up where there is so much control by a handful of corporations that farmers need to sell into those markets.

And if they speak out, they're retaliated against, they can be blackballed, and then they're kind of on their own and that's very risky to try to make it work.

[00:12:29] Dominique: What's an example? Sorry, just quickly, I wanna understand like how that made an impact with that individual. And you can maybe make a fake example if you'd like, but what's the kind of thing a farmer might stand up and say, I don't wanna comply with this, and then what is the outcome that could come from 

that?

[00:12:44] Angela: Yes. So a really great example is in the poultry industry. So the vast majority of chicken raised in the United States is raised by farmers under contract with companies like Tyson Foods, for example. So the way Tyson and a few other chicken companies have really shaped the industry is under this contract growing system. So farmers, they own their farm and they enter into a contract with Tyson Foods. The farmers then responsible for building these large buildings taking out massive loans, upwards of a million dollars for buildings to house the chickens. Now Tyson owns the chickens, they own the feed, they own the veterinary supplies. So they bring the chickens in, they tell the farmers exactly how to raise them under what conditions. And then, several weeks later when the chickens are grown up to market size, Tyson comes back and takes the chickens away for processing. Every part of the farmers' day to day operation is dictated by Tyson's standards. 

 So that puts the farmer under a lot of pressure because they've invested in these buildings. And if there is an issue with the company, they're contracted with and that company cuts them off. There's not another company they can go to raise chickens for.

So at that point, they've got major loans they're trying to pay back. And we've seen this time and time again where farmers find that they're not paid fairly. We've seen one farmer that we worked with caught the company that they contracted with was cheating when they were, came to load up the chickens and weigh them.

They caught them tampering with the scales to make the weight lighter in order to pay the farmer less. He caught them on video and spoke out. He was blackballed from working with that company and those companies tell the other ones, don't work with this guy.

And we just see this time and time again where farmers, when they speak out, they are retaliated against and they just don't have a lot of recourse in that situation. So it's very risky for farmers to speak out.

[00:14:51] Dominique: Yeah. Thank you for sharing that, that understanding of how corporations have, like geographic hold too, I honestly did not understand. And so I didn't understand how maybe you couldn't just go be working with somebody else. And you shared that so well, how the leverage is so not in their hands.

[00:15:10] Angela: Thank you.

[00:15:11] Christy: Thank you for the work you're continuing to do, you and your team from Farm Action. Of all the work you've done and the influence that you've had, what are you most proud of? What success are you most proud of? 

[00:15:20] Angela: So, we've had a couple of major wins and the biggest one has been around transparency and fairness in labeling. So the problem was for many, many years, meat could be imported into the United States from other countries, brought to the US and then labeled as a product of USA.

And consumers thought they were buying American beef based on the label, but it could actually come from another country. And this really was undercutting American ranchers who were trying to compete with this imported beef. So what we did, we filed a petition to the USDA to change this rule. So we filed a petition, we organized ranchers and public support.

We raised awareness in the press to bring attention to this. So what happened was USDA initially rejected our petition. Our coalition kept pushing. We held a huge rally in Nebraska. We had ranchers riding in on horseback. The issue, continued gaining momentum. And after about six or seven years of fighting USDA, and it was over administrations even.

So we're continuing the fight. President Biden's USDA ultimately said yes. They finalized, they made the rule change. They said, if meat is labeled a product of USA, that animal must have been born, raised, slaughtered and processed in the United States, and that rule went into effect on January 1st of this year. It restores truth in labeling, it helps American ranchers compete fairly, and it gives consumers transparency at the grocery store.

So, this is an example of why policy really matters because when the rules allow for deceptive labeling like this, farmers lose market opportunities. But when the rules are fair, farmers have a better chance to compete.

Angela, I think That is a phenomenal example that matters so much. I am curious on one thing, I was having a conversation with a sustainability leader of a large organization here in the US that purchases a lot of food. And we were talking about pros and cons of different policies that are emerging lately, one of those being tariffs. And we were trying to think about, what are some positive outcomes of different things that are happening? And there was a theory, and it kind of goes to the labeling, so this is why I'm asking this here, was that, at least, if there are tariffs and there are different percentages that you pay for tariffs, you have to understand country of origin. And if you understand country of origin, again, that leads to greater transparency in your food supply. Do you think that that is a fair hypothesis to form? Yeah, I do agree with that. Country of origin labeling is so important. We have it on our t-shirts, we have it on dog treats. Just about anything you buy when you go to the store must have the country of origin listed, and that's very important for trade. It's important for people who wanna buy local and buy American or support American farmers.

It's really important. And even, even our fight isn't over. I talked about the product of USA label. So that was, like I said, when companies were bringing meat in and falsely labeling it as a product of USA, well, the reason they're able to do that, they're not able to do that anymore, but there is an absence of this mandatory country of origin labeling that you do see on all these other products. So back in, I believe it was 2015, under pressure from multinational meat packing corporations, Congress repealed mandatory country of origin labeling for beef and pork. So those are the only two products in our economy that are exempt from mandatory country of origin labeling.

And so, basically that means those products can come in with no label at all, and that's what allowed these companies to start kind of voluntarily stamping it with a product of USA because it didn't have to already say where it came from. So that's a fight that's still ongoing for us is to restore that mandatory country of origin labeling, not just, they can't use these fake product of USA labels anymore, but they still don't have to tell us where it came from. They can just leave the label off entirely.

[00:19:39] Dominique: And Angela, you've walked us through today so many problems with our food system. And I appreciate so much of what you are doing, but also how much you deeply understand the problems and like why they're happening. And I think something that I wanna make sure we create space for in this episode is like, what can we be doing about it?

And so I don't wanna put that full pressure on you to like to have like a beautiful, succinct answer to a various complex problems. But if somebody is listening and wants to be part of the solution or wants to be a more engaged member of the food system, and do whatever the right thing is, what would you tell them they can do?

[00:20:20] Angela: I think that the first thing is raising awareness. And I think it's going to take a lot more public awareness to apply the kind of pressure we need to change our food system. So I think that something anyone can do if they care about this issue is to become more and more informed about what's going on.

And, you could do that by visiting our website, farmaction.us, signing up for our newsletter. Or join up with another organization that you trust that's talking about the food system and be informed. And when these organizations ask you to take action at a critical moment, for example, to call your members of Congress or sign a petition or those kind of actions, those kind of collective actions is what does put pressure on lawmakers. So that's a really important one. And then I think, if you can vote with your food dollars, seek out local farms that are environmentally sustainable, that are raising food in a way that you feel good about, and that's whether going directly to the farm or checking out a farmer's market or a community supported agriculture program, shopping online. Thankfully it's becoming easier over time to be able to connect with family farms, trying to do the right thing and trying to survive. So, those are kind of the two, there's kind of the consumer dollar pathway, and then the education and awareness and advocacy pathway.

[00:21:47] Christy: Angela, thank you so much. You provided so much information. And I think that most Americans, we don't fully understand everything that's happening in the Farm Bill, how it has influenced our food system historically. The distinction that specialty crops really, you know, that's just what we eat versus commodity crops, which is really not what we eat. And the incentives and disincentives in those areas, as well as just the complexity of the large organizations and corporations in our food system and how that plays out for each person in their everyday life. Thank you so much for that.

[00:22:24] Dominique: Angela, how could people connect with you or support the work that you're doing?

[00:22:27] Angela: Yes. If you'd like to connect with Farm Action and support our work, I really encourage you to start, visit our website, that's farmaction.us. There's a button on the menu called Join. That's where you can sign up for our newsletter to stay informed. If you'd like to be even more involved, you can become a local leader.

And that's our network of volunteers across the country who kind of informing us about what's going on on the ground and being leaders on these issues in their communities. So, I'm also on Substack, @angelahuffman. And I'm publishing kind of a just analysis of what's going on in the food system about every other week.

[00:23:04] Christy: Amazing. Thank you so much. Each guest brings a different approach to sustainability. We're here to highlight the people doing the work that inspires others because climate action takes many forms.

[00:23:14] Dominique: As always, you can find our episodes and support the show at thegreenchampions.com. If you enjoyed the episode, please follow and subscribe and leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform. Stay connected with us on LinkedIn and Instagram, @greenchampionspod. Our music is by Zayn Dweik. Thanks for listening to Green Champions.

We'll be back with another sustainability success story in our next episode.