Angela Huffman - Why Are Food Prices Rising While Farmers Struggle?

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

[00:00:12] Christy: Thanks for joining us in a conversation with real people sharing sustainability success stories.

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

[00:00:22] Christy: And I'm Christy.

[00:00:23] Dominique: Today, Christy and I are speaking with Angela Huffman. She's the co-founder and president of Farm Action, an organization focused on federal agricultural policy focusing on supporting family farmers.

Today we're talking about sustainability as it relates to agriculture policy and farms. So we are so excited to have Angela here today. Thanks for joining us, Angela.

[00:00:42] Angela: Thanks so much for having me.

[00:00:43] Christy: Angela, are you still in DC?

[00:00:45] Angela: I am in DC at the moment, so I split my time between my home in northwest Ohio and Washington, DC.

[00:00:53] Christy: Yeah. And what are you doing in DC? Tell us about that.

[00:00:55] Angela: Well, right now we're working on the Farm Bill, which is a massive piece of legislation that really shapes our entire food system. So I'm here, we're meeting with policymakers raising awareness about what farmers need to be able to grow healthy food in a sustainable way and earn a fair price for that.

[00:01:16] Christy: I love it. Thank you for the work you're doing on this, it's important. And thank you for taking time out of that important work that impacts so many people to talk to us and our listeners about this. So thank you.

[00:01:27] Dominique: Yeah. And when today we're talking about agriculture, was farming a part of your life growing up?

[00:01:32] Angela: It was. So, my family actually settled on our farm there in northwest Ohio about 200 years ago. So, I'm the sixth generation in my family on our farm. My mom grew up farming there, the house that I'm living in now. My dad also grew up on a farm just a few miles away. So, you know, it's really rooted in my background and I really love the connection that I have to that history and to the land itself and carrying on that family tradition.

[00:02:00] Christy: What does your farm look like right now? Tell us like what's on it? Tell us a little bit about that. 

[00:02:05] Angela: Sure. I raise sheep. So I raise a breed of sheep called, Katahdin, which is a hair sheep, meaning that they look a little more like goats than woolly sheep. They don't grow wool, so I'm not in the wool business. But basically I'm a breeder, so I raise sheep for a breeding stock to sell to other farmers.

And, I really enjoy it. I love caring for the animals and they're such a gentle and sweet breed of animal. And so that's what it looks like for me now on our farm. 

I am working full time doing this policy advocacy work. So I've tried to find the right balance to keep the farm going in a way that's, you know, manageable for me right now.

[00:02:43] Dominique: What was it like growing up on a farm, but also in a family that's farmed for so many years? Like are there unique experiences that you had growing up that you think other people would find to be insane? 

[00:02:53] Angela: Well, so I didn't grow up on the farm myself. So, my mom did but we moved into a nearby little town, or my mom did, my parents. So for me it was really just going out there, going out to the farm to visit my grandparents and, you know, just seeing the animals, riding along on in the tractor and, you know, pretty typical I think what you would imagine a kid visiting their grandparents' farm is really what it was like.

[00:03:19] Christy: How do you think growing up on a farm to what you're doing today, how was that connection? Because obviously there's a clear connection between agriculture, but I don't think that's where you thought maybe you were headed initially. So tell us a little bit about how you came back to agricultural policy?

[00:03:36] Angela: Yeah. So growing up around farming, I did really watch how much work it takes to produce food. And what really stuck with me was seeing how hard farmers work and actually how little control they often had over their success. And my work today really came outta that realization over time, you know, that farmers needed a stronger voice in the policy conversations that are shaping agriculture because right now here in Washington, DC we've got a lot of very powerful corporate lobbying interests walking the halls of the capitol bringing in, representing themselves as the face of family farms and not always advocating in their best interests. So that's really kind of a realization I had over time is that farmers needed better representation in policy and that's how I ended up moving in this direction with my career.

[00:04:27] Dominique: It's cool to hear how you have like really found your sweet spot with like your skills. But how did you first even uncover that policy was going to be such a powerful tool in this space? Like was there a light bulb moment for you when you started to find an interest in like, wanting to be part of that and wanting that stuff to be advocating for this space?

[00:04:47] Angela: It was not a light bulb moment, but more of a gradual understanding. It evolved over time. After undergrad, I went over and spent a year in Japan teaching English and something that I learned there, it really struck me how different the food was. I had just never been exposed to any other food production system than what we had here. So that was kind of the first moment that kind of broadened my view of how food is produced, and also the quality of food that makes it to the consumer. So that was a moment of realization. Also learning more about, you know, like I said, I grew up on a kind of a smaller family farm, but I learned about these larger, more industrial operations that can find hundreds of thousands of animals in small spaces and you know, very harmful for animal welfare for the environment. That was another moment over time that I started just seeing how this bigger system was working and how it wasn't working out so well for the consumer, but even for the farmers caught up in that system.

So there were several kind of moments that expanded my awareness about our food system and where our food was coming from. As I slowly got into this work too, I did a lot of outreach. I traveled all around the country, meeting with family farms and learning about their struggles and really started developing an understanding, a similar theme that I saw across the board with all of these issues here in the United States was just how deeply consolidated our food system has become from the seed industry, equipment, fertilizer, meat packing, food distribution, and retail. Really, the entire food supply chain has become dominated and controlled by just a handful of corporations.

And that's why Farm Action exists to fight back on that corporate consolidation because it's really the connecting root cause of so many of our challenges when it comes to harms to the environment, harms to food workers, to animal welfare, and to farmers and farmers not getting a fair shot in the marketplace.

[00:06:49] Christy: You know, you've been in Japan, maybe other places, you've toured across the US, you've met with family farmers. If you're thinking about that, you're obviously educating our listeners and people that may or may not have connections to farms. What do you think is the biggest misconception about family farms that people have here in the US?

[00:07:07] Angela: I think, maybe what people don't know is just how hard farmers work. But they're stuck in a lot of ways and they need help. There's just not enough of them to have the leverage that they need to have a fair playing field.

[00:07:20] Dominique: why is farming so hard? I liked what you mentioned earlier about like a lot of their success is not in their control, and I can imagine what you're getting at there. Can you just paint that picture for us and maybe for somebody who might be oversimplifying the role of a farmer?

[00:07:34] Angela: So, the way I see it is farmers are really getting squeezed right now on both sides of them. So one side is the inputs that they need to buy in order to farm, right? So like I mentioned things like seeds and equipment, fertilizer, the prices for those keep going up and farmers don't have a choice, right?

They have to pay what it costs for those products in order to run their farms, when just a few corporations control those products. And what you see with a monopoly is you have fewer choices and higher prices because there's not fair competition. 

 Once they've grown their crops or their livestock, they also have few options when it comes to the selling of those products. And because similarly, there are just a handful of corporations controlling that side of it. And like I said, whether it's meat packing, whether it's distribution, whether it's trying to get your products into a grocery store, when you've got so few, like right now in grocery, you know, there's just a handful of really large grocers for the most part. And they wanna buy from the biggest, largest farms or distribution companies. And so farmers are really locked out on that end or have very few options and are not able to often set fair prices. So farmers are often actually producing food and selling it below the cost of production, so they're losing money.

And that's where, you know, we can talk about government subsidies and government programs, that's where those come in and farmers have had to be really reliant on. Especially in recent years, bailouts, there have been three major farm bailouts just in the last year because of this situation I'm describing where farmers are just so squeezed that it now takes, government bailouts in order to just keep them afloat.

[00:09:18] Dominique: And that's huge. I also just wanted to mention, I think you called out so many moving variables and constraints, and just like things they have to navigate all the time. And you didn't even really touch on the fact that somebody might have first thought that you would be talking about like climate change and the way that our like the actual natural environment is just like more and more unreliable. And so just to add another layer to all of that, I thank you for giving us that like kind of big picture holistic view because I think people they might not be as familiar, and might not have thought about the considerations that are at play. And I think one big part of that too that we think about, I think as consumers, is how disconnected we are from our food supply and where our food comes from. But we forget about what it means for the farmer, for us to be so disconnected from them as well, and what kind of powers that takes away from them.

So I just really appreciate the way that you laid that out.

[00:10:10] Angela: Yeah, and that's a great point. My work is often really focused on these really larger market dynamics, but you're right. There's a huge layer under that of just the day to day, you know, the example you gave with the climate, and farmers are facing such extreme weather volatility now, increasingly. You know, even in recent years, it's just really become a dominant part of the conversation about what farmers are facing day to day just to even produce their crops or their livestock, you know, even those hurdles. And then once they do, they're faced with these challenges on marketing.

[00:10:43] Christy: You know, I want to go back to something about you, Angela 'cause I wanna explore a topic a little bit. You grew up in a farm, yes. You're working in this agriculture public policy space. Tell us a little bit about your educational background and then how all of those various things are merging together to shape how you approach this work.

[00:11:05] Angela: Yeah. So I went to school at Ohio State and I ended up studying English and then later public policy. I realized that like we've discussed a lot of what happens on agriculture isn't just what's going on the farm, but the policy and the economic systems around it. I think that English and public policy really work very well together because I believe that in order to change public policy, first we have to change public opinion because our lawmakers, one, they need to have pressure applied to them, especially when there are powerful, you know, well-funded interests, lobbying them every single day.

So we really need a lot of public awareness and a lot of public pressure on our policy makers. So, communications is a really big part of raising that awareness. So taking complex issues and communicating them in a way that people can understand, and then getting the word out, raising awareness and inspiring people to take action.

So I have found that my background and my education has really been really useful throughout my career and where I am today and trying to translate what's happening on farms, to policy change to help farmers.

[00:12:15] Dominique: Speaking of that, I'll be honest, my background's in engineering and I'm so appreciative of the policy work that I know impacts like my work and my clients and things that I value, but I have less clarity into how some of those things really play out. Like can you share a bit about like an average day in Angela's life and maybe also like add in there the kinds of people that you interact with on a maybe like weekly basis?

[00:12:40] Angela: Absolutely. So as President of Farm Action, my day to day, it's really about leading our team and connecting our different pieces of our work. So first, the foundation of all of our work is research. So we are watching, we're a watchdog organization. We're tracking corporate power in the food system and understanding how that power influences government policy.

And then we spend a lot of time translating that research into something that people can understand. So whether that's, I could be talking with journalists or writing a blog or explaining what's happening in food and farming to the public. Another big part of that work, every day and every week is staying really connected with farmers.

[00:13:24] Dominique: So we have built and are growing a really great network of farmers across the country who inform us about what's going on the ground and we work to make sure that their experiences are part of the policy conversation. And then we take all of that, the research, the farmer perspectives, the engagement with the public and the press, and we work to turn that into policy change in Washington DC. I imagine aspects of that work maybe like brings you joy and fills your cup and like energizes you and aspects of that maybe are like really challenging. Can you give an example of both? I'm curious, like which conversations leave you being like, wow, I love this work, and which conversations you have to power through because you know it's important?

[00:14:08] Angela: I love it when we're able to change the narrative, and there have been different examples of that. But what we're really looking, working to do is uncover what's really going on, you know? So you might be hearing, for example, in recent years about rising egg prices due to the avian flu.

And something we did was we really researched why those egg prices were rising and we found that some of the largest and most dominant corporations in the egg industry had experienced zero cases of avian flu at all, but were making record profits. So that's an example.

We were able to do that research, get it out to the press and started seeing that become a dominant narrative in the press. The conversation became about price gouging and we quickly saw egg prices start going down under that pressure when once the public was aware. And that's probably the best example for me of something that just felt like we had done our job, you know? That was what we set out to do and were successful. And then I think, you know, the flip side of that, we're just up against so much power and there's a lot of misinformation out there about agriculture and farmers and even about our organization, we're often under attack.

Even right now, there are websites and there are social media videos that the opposition has created about us to try to hurt our credibility and try to stop us. And so we're just up against so much power. And I think whenever that becomes apparent at different times, it's discouraging, you know, but it's a David versus Goliath fight really. And sometimes that's really hard.

[00:15:40] Dominique: Definitely. I mean, if someone's listening, which all of us are navigating a world of misinformation right now and distrust and just like feeling frustrated, various reasons. But what would you recommend to someone who's like, okay, I don't wanna be caught up in like giving air to some of these like intentionally very negative flames.

What is your recommendation around how to look for the right information, especially just looking at agriculture and some of the research that you do?

[00:16:08] Angela: Yeah. Well first I would recommend our own information. You know, our website, farmaction.us, we are always updating our website, we put out a newsletter. So really we work to just keep people informed. I would recommend finding people like us that you could trust, you know, and being careful about where your information's coming from, you know, because the first thing is just being informed and then being able to have those conversations with people around you or on social media and help to set the record straight.

[00:16:37] Christy: I feel like when I'm listening to you and I'm listening to your story and I'm reflecting on those experiences, maybe even for myself, I think that as I became a professional, I never thought about the idea of, wow, I could start this organization and do some really great things that you've done. Can you tell me a little bit about how Farm Action came to be?

[00:16:59] Angela: Absolutely. Yeah. And I didn't necessarily have a plan to eventually go out and start an organization myself. But my colleague, Joe and I, he and I have been working together for about 15 years. We co-founded Farm Action six and a half years ago, so we have a history. We worked together actually at a couple of previous organizations. And what led us to co-found Farm Action, you know, as I've talked about, Joe and I really coalesced around this concern that we were seeing throughout our work around the problem with powerful corporations having too much influence over our agriculture markets and the policies that shape agriculture. So first it was really just about identifying this core problem and seeing an opportunity to do something about it.

And we really, you know, shared this vision that it wasn't just hurting farmers. Because Joe and I both come from farms, but we really saw that this was also affecting workers and animal welfare and rural communities and the environment and public health. So all of these pieces that are connected by our food system.

And so we felt that there was a real need to build an organization that could push back on that imbalance of power and that had a lens to looking at the entire food supply chain from the seed all the way to the consumer's plate. So, that's why we created Farm Action to bring together farmers, workers, and advocates around that shared goal of making the food system more fair, sustainable, and healthy.

That's kind of our official vision as an organization of a fair, sustainable, and healthy food system. And at the end of the day, we wanna make sure that the future of food and agriculture is shaped by people and communities and not just powerful corporate interests.

[00:18:45] Dominique: And it's so evident how deeply you understand this space. And we've talked a lot about how agriculture was in your vicinity as a young person, and then now you're obviously like so active in this policy space. What happened in the middle there? Like were there other roles that you served in kind of hanging out in the food system between where food is growing and the policy that shapes the farming experience?

[00:19:10] Angela: Yes. So kind of my entry point into this work, into advocacy was on a volunteer on a campaign in Ohio back in 2010. And, basically Ohio residents were working together to put a measure on the ballot, a statewide ballot during the election for voters to decide whether to end the practice of the extreme confinement of farm animals.

So what that looked like was egg laying hens confined in these small cages or pregnant pigs confined in, they're called gestation crates. It's a very narrow, individual crates where the animal's not even able to turn around and that's where, you know, many sows are spending their lives. So these certain, you know, production systems that were really developed for efficiency and to maximize corporate profits that also, you know, create an unfair playing field for family farms, you know, who don't raise their animals that way.

So that campaign, I learned that that campaign was going on and that I could get involved as a volunteer. So I was just out gathering signatures around Columbus at different events, and, you know, getting people to sign on to put this measure on the ballot. And it was so energizing for me.

You know, I had a day job, I was working at Ohio State at the time as a grants manager. I was pretty fresh outta college and didn't have a sense, you know, I had this interest in advocacy, but I didn't have a kind of a clear path or a vision in my mind about how to take what I care about and turn it into a career. But this was really the entry point for me, just as a volunteer and learning about how a single campaign could work. And I was so motivated and excited. You know, I was out after work gathering signatures. I was the number two top signature gatherer in the state. 

[00:20:57] Dominique: Wow. 

[00:20:58] Angela: I was all in, you know? And that led to an internship with the Humane Society of the United States, which was one of the organizations leading that campaign. So I became an intern there and eventually I went to work for them for a couple years full time. I moved out to Washington, DC for a while and that was my first advocacy job.

And I think that's a great way to kind of get your foot in the door, you know? There's a lot of competition out there for this kind of work. So not only it was helpful to me to even learn what was possible, but also it was a nice pathway into a full-time job, you know, by starting as a volunteer and then as an intern and kind of learning and working my way up.

[00:21:37] Dominique: What was the secret to getting some new signatures?

[00:21:40] Angela: I think it was just my passion at the time. 

[00:21:43] Dominique: Is it maybe hustle? Like.

[00:21:45] Angela: Yeah. And I think even it's different now, I bet it's even harder 'cause people are looking at their phones when they walk around. It was a little bit of a different time then, you know? So I think it was a little bit easier. People were very willing to, you know, if you were just very friendly and smile and have a really quick and compelling pitch and have a lot of energy. And I remember my petition, my clipboard, and on the back I had a picture of these animals confined on these, you know, factory farms and I think that helped too. When people see that, they're just like, "No, I don't want that. I'll sign my name real quick." You know? But yeah, I think it was really just having that pitch down and just staying at it and not getting discouraged when a number of people might keep blowing you off and then, but the next one might say yes.

So just trying to hang in there.

[00:22:30] Christy: I love through some of your answers, you gave some of our listeners that might be inspired by what you're doing. You gave them a pathway opportunity by sharing yours and some new information. I think that's really helpful and inspiring. But speaking of that, when you think back just to your younger self a little bit, what is some advice that you would give today? What would you give your younger self advice from the past?

[00:22:55] Angela: I think that, especially when I was in college, I worried about what, I didn't know what I was going to do. And I think that now, I would tell myself not to worry about it, you know, and just keep doing what feels right and that will get you to the right place. You know, I didn't know that at the time, but everything worked out even though I didn't know at the time kind of what that path was supposed to be. But now feel like I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing, and that feels really good. And, yeah, so I think I would tell myself not to worry and just do what feels right and just keep trying.

[00:23:29] Dominique: I think that's beautiful. And I think that is, I think needed for any point in your life, younger or not. So I think that's awesome and thank you so much for just sharing your story with us. I think the biggest thing that's gonna stick with me is just at the very beginning, I think the way that you framed all the variables that are affecting farmers and talking about like the impact of our disconnect from them.

Cause I do think that I, being in the sustainability space, talk a lot about wanting to feel connected on our end. And I think we don't even sit long enough to think about the fact that that's creating so many power dynamics for our food supply. So, thank you for the work that you're doing.

I'm so excited for next time. We're gonna get into the work that you're doing now and how that shows up and where you see impact and all that fun stuff.

[00:24:12] Christy: Angela, how can people get in touch with you if they wanna learn more?

[00:24:16] Angela: Yes. Visit Farm Action's website, that's farmaction.us. You can sign up there for our newsletter, which comes out every other Friday. I also have a Substack, so you can find me on Substack under Angela Huffman. And I publish about every other week there as well.

[00:24:33] Christy: Amazing. Thank you so much for that. Thanks for listening to Green Champions. Each guest brings a different approach to sustainability, and we're here to highlight the people doing the work that inspires others because climate action takes many forms.

[00:24:44] Dominique: As always, you can find all of our episodes and support the show at thegreenchampions.com. If you enjoyed the episode, please follow, 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 listening to Green Champions.

We'll be digging into the second half of Angela's champion story next week.