Whether urban or rural, each one of us is dependent on agriculture for far more than food and clothing, and we face two major issues. Local Farm Bureaus provide direction through an annual policy development process to their state Farm Bureaus and the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF). To accomplish this, it is best to be well-informed.
A proposed “Farm Bill” was recently passed by the House Agriculture Committee and will ideally be adopted by the full House later this summer or early Fall. It would help if as many Nevadans as possible encouraged our elected officials to pass the bill.
Not only does the Farm Bill support assistance to farmers in emergencies but also addresses other major concerns such as providing the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and school meal programs. It supports programs that increase access to nutritious foods that include low-income individuals, the elderly, children and other vulnerable populations.
Between 2017 and 2022, we lost an alarming 141,733 farms across the nation, a net loss of over 20 million acres (approximately the size of South Carolina) in just five years. Nevada’s share lost is 9 % of our agricultural lands. This was reported by the federal government’s latest census on agriculture, which is done in five-year increments.
This drop in acreage and the number of lost farms and ranches is alarming and revealing of the challenges facing the 1.3 percent of our nation’s population directly involved in agricultural production. Overregulation, rising supply costs, including fuel, weather disasters, and labor shortages, along with the fact that people in agriculture are “price takers, not price makers,” have made it challenging to be profitable to farm.
Another issue that is very alarming to me is the fact that it is alright for foreign individuals and countries to own large amounts of agricultural land and our own U.S.-based processing plants.
Churchill County Farm Bureau encourages you to contact our elected officials and ask them to pass the farm bill as written.
Sonya Johnson
Churchill County Farm Bureau
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