The local food system was not set up for emergencies. This realization was catalyzing for Julia Van Soelen Kim, a social scientist and food systems advisor for the University of California Cooperative Extension in Napa County, who saw the great abundance available yet no systems to get it to people in need.

“The event magnified and intensified the inequalities in food access and the abundance that our local food system could provide in emergencies,” Van Soelen Kim says.

In typical emergency response larger relief organizations—such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Red Cross, Salvation Army, and state entities—take charge of large-scale feeding. They will use food that might be locally or regionally available from larger chains, but not food sourced directly from area farmers—and there’s no set way for these farmers to get their food to people in their communities.

What’s more, when outside organizations without the proper connections try to start moving food from farms to food banks, it often doesn’t work, Van Soelen Kim says. “They’re just picking up the food and don’t know how the farmer is going to get paid,” she says. While there is a role for these large-scale feeding organizations, she says, “we just want to make sure that they have access to local foods.”

To try to improve the system, Van Soelen Kim created the North Coast Emergency Food System Partnership to connect emergency management and local food-system professionals. The goal of the partnership is to enable the distribution of locally produced food in the wake of disaster. For both fields, this represents a novel collaboration.

A Landscape Vulnerable to Climate Change

While the region is popular with tourists thanks to its coastal location, wineries, and redwoods, the North Coast is very rural. Aside from the communities just outside the Bay Area, the median household income is well below the state average.

Alongside the ever-present threat of earthquakes, the region is especially vulnerable to the effects of climate change. Fires are a worry not just during the hot, dry summers, but year-round, and the coastal landscape is prone to landslides during heavy rains.

Nationwide, climate disasters are increasingly forcing communities to deal with large-scale emergencies, like the floods of Hurricane Helene, the wildfires that ripped through Los Angeles, and the floods in Central Texas after intense rainfall from Tropical Storm Barry. In such emergencies, food distribution is a major concern, and the model that the partnership is developing could serve as a solution across the country.

Suzanne Grady, program director at Petaluma Bounty, a food aid program and emergency food hub, says developing a resilient local food system prior to emergencies helps local food find its way to people after disaster.

“It just seems that we have been set up to rely too heavily upon groups and agencies that come in, potentially flood the area with resources that may or may not be needed, and then leave sometimes just as quickly,” Grady says. “It actually interferes with the local recovery efforts.”

While these relief organizations are necessary for disaster response writ large, she says, if there’s a resilient food system in place, the incoming groups could tap into that local system already in operation.

Transforming Regional Food Systems to Prepare for Disaster

The majority of the $1.5 million in funding for the project comes from the USDA’s Regional Food Systems Partnership Program, and the rest consists of local grants and matching funds from regional organizations and community foundations. As of this writing, the USDA funding has remained intact, despite the administration’s shift in priorities.

In mid-August, in fact, Van Soelen Kim received news that the program received a no-cost extension from the USDA, meaning that instead of having to scale back or end their activities, they have one more year to carry out their work using what’s remaining of their existing funding.

Van Soelen Kim and her colleagues are taking full advantage if the extension by focusing on three goals: building a “community of practice” among emergency management and daily food-operations professionals to collaborate on emergency feeding plans; establishing the technical assistance needed for food distribution systems to pivot after disaster; and shifting local government policy to incorporate local food distribution as central to emergency plans.

Van Soelen Kim has seen almost immediate results from the community of practice goal in particular. Partnership members meet by virtual calls quarterly and in person annually. While 250 people are on the member list, typically around 75 people participate in each meeting. Together, they discuss topics around local food systems and disaster response and build relationships with each other.

“This North Coast Regional Partnership has opened the doors for a lot of relationships and networking that is invaluable to the development of this local group,” says Robert Sataua, the emergency food response coordinator for Food for People, Humboldt County’s food bank. “It’s not something that’s a metric that you can put on paper, but I think the momentum is there.”

Most of Humbolt County, which is rural and rugged outside the port city of Eureka, is susceptible to disasters like fires and winter storms. Local producers raise and harvest livestock, dairy, a diverse array of crops, and oysters, yet a 2019 U.C. Davis report shows that one in five Humboldt County residents lives in a low-income area with limited access to food, especially fresh food. During emergencies, disparate relief organizations worked in a vacuum and most food came from outside Humboldt County.

Sataua, networking with colleagues in other organizations through the partnership, helped develop a multi-agency feeding plan to supplement regional and community disaster response. In Humboldt County, the new plan lays out strategies and guidance that will minimize duplication, coordinate resources, and deliver food and water efficiently.

With this plan, food systems and emergency management folks get on the same page before disaster strikes. Coordinated preparation helps farmers sell their food in a disaster and residents to more easily find out where and how to access it.

‘When Something Happens, We Know Who to Call’

The task force—which involved multiple parties including the Office of Emergency Services, the Department of Health and Human Services, two county food banks, and tribal communities—created a Multi-Agency Disaster Feeding Plan (MADFP), and now meets monthly to coordinate and discuss emergency feeding efforts and ways to strengthen resilience.

The plan is more than a document, Mahan says. “It’s a community-built roadmap for action. Developed by local organizations and government partners working side by side, it has strengthened relationships, clarified roles, and prepared us to respond quickly in a crisis.”

The relationships that members are developing are key, she says. “When something happens, we know who to call, and we know how to communicate with them—we’ve already built the relationship. So, we’re seeing a lot of strength in that soft infrastructure of relationship building.”

One example is the relationship between the DNATL Food Council and the school district’s nutrition services director, Julie Bjorkstrand.

That relationship showed its strength during the Smith River Complex Fire in August 2023, when the food bank, along with many homes in the area, lost power. The fairgrounds that was serving as a shelter had a hard time to keeping up with the demand.

“[Bjorkstrand] really stepped up,” says Mahan, refrigerating all the food from the food bank at the school district kitchen—and then going beyond. “She actually created a team that cooked and fed everybody at the shelter—[using] the school kitchens that she uses to serve 1,800 students breakfast and lunch every day.”

Bjorkstrand’s nimble response shows there’s room in a local food system to respond to disaster. The school district’s nutrition services team, which is actively involved in the task force, has now integrated lessons from the Smith River Fire Complex into the plan and laid out how the school district can help after another disaster.

Establishing Food Hubs and Bottom-Up Infrastructure

Humboldt County volunteer Jennifer Bell helps pack Harvest Boxes in 2020 for distribution during the pandemic. The boxes are a creation of the North Coast Growers’ Association food hub. (Photo credit: Megan Kenney)

Many Humboldt County business leaders revealed in surveys that they found building local and regional food systems to be a clunky process even in blue-sky times, says Megan Kenney, director of cooperative distribution for the county’s North Coast Growers’ Association (NCGA). In surveys distributed to local businesses, including local restaurants, food trucks, and food vendors, “everyone really wanted more local food,” Kenney says. “There just wasn’t an easy way to get it.”

The 100-member growers’ association supported the county’s farmers by coordinating farmers’ markets—but it didn’t distribute food. Now, thanks to participation in the North Coast Emergency Partnership, the group offers a food hub and a multi-farm CSA, too.

Kenney credits the connections and ideas she developed in the partnership for the development of the Harvest Hub in 2020. To make it easy for food buyers like restaurants and grocery stores to buy local food, the hub created an online marketplace that mimics a traditional distribution system.

Farmers drop off their local harvests at the cold storage facility in the NCGA warehouse, a key component of the food hub. From there, hub vehicles deliver the food to customers.

Currently, the hub provides food for 34 school sites, 11 restaurants, and nine community organizations that include two food banks, four tribes, and two community centers.

Though the hub serves the county year round, it has already proven essential after disasters. During the 2021 Monument Fire, NCGA put together no-cook boxes with produce and locally made soap for evacuees and people without power. Following a 6.4 magnitude earthquake in December 2022 and during subsequent winter storms, the hub collected donations from farmers for bulk food distributions.

And during the Smith River Complex fires in August 2023, its members sent food to Crescent City in Del Norte County, proving that the Partnership not only fosters cross-sectoral collaboration, but cross-county support as well. On-site at the hub’s warehouse, they’ve helped to coordinate emergency supply storage.

Additionally, to get around blocked roads after disaster, NCGA—with help from a USDA Resilient Food Systems Infrastructure (RFSI) grant and California Jobs First grants—is planning to establish “cooler nodes,” food drop-off sites with solar-powered coolers, in isolated communities.

During regular times, the nodes can keep food at safe temperatures until hub employees make the rounds for pickup and redistribution. After a disaster, they can serve as lifelines, providing a place for farmers to drop food to be integrated into an emergency feeding operation.

Farmers would still get paid through the same networks, but the recipients of the food would be food pantries or emergency providers like the Red Cross. They could use the same system and codes for the coolers to access food without having to have extra staff on hand.

Daniel Aldrich, director of the Resilience Studies Program and co-director of the Global Resilience Institute at Northeastern University, has found time and again in his research that connections among local people are important to building resilient communities.

“These bottom-up social infrastructure spaces [such as a food hub or community garden] give us the space where we can have agency,” Aldrich says. “The social connection, social capital, always tries to build these ideas of knowledge, of collective action.”

Bringing Local, State, and National Efforts Together

The event brought in 75 attendees from all the counties in the partnership, representing organizations including the Redwood Empire Food Bank, the Salvation Army, the American Red Cross, and the California Department of Social Services Disaster Services. It even brought in state and national representatives from large-scale food distribution and disaster response groups. The important factor wasn’t just that these organizations attended; it’s that their participation allowed for personal introductions.

“All the representatives from these large feeding entities . . . expressed, ‘If you need us, pick up the phone and call us,’” says Van Soelen Kim. “That kind of open-door approach was great to see because before, no one knew even where the front door was, and now they have an actual person to call.”

These connections matter, says Aldrich, of the Global Resilience Institute. “What it often comes down to, in the network that you formed, is how much information and collective action can you accomplish? If you’re alone, if you’re isolated, if you’re not engaged with other people, it’s much harder.”

Resilience, he emphasizes, is about human-to-human interaction, which the Partnership provides.

While the group has not replicated its work in other communities quite yet, organizers have started to disseminate information about the project at scholarly conferences and hope to begin training practitioners in other regions, Van Soelen Kim says.

With an upheaval in federal emergency assistance funding, Aldrich believes that communities need to step up for themselves. Traditionally, he says, we think about disaster response as having two pillars: government assistance provided by FEMA and the state, and insurance provided by the market.

“But the reality is what we see right now—both in California and with the ongoing mess in D.C.—is, it is really a triangle, not two pillars. The third part is community. What it often comes down to, in the network that you formed, is how much information and collective action can you accomplish?”

As the North Coast heads into the driest parts of the season and the Tubbs Fire’s eighth anniversary, Van Soelen Kim says the members of the North Coast Emergency Food System are increasingly appreciative of their group’s innovative approach.

“With time, we’ve found what we’re doing here on the North Coast is really special,” she says. “New people keep showing up to the conversation [and] we continue learning together about how layered and complex the emergency food system is. By collaborating in this way, we’re creating something unique that isn’t being done elsewhere.”

The post Disasters Block Local Food Access. One Groundbreaking Group Has a Solution. appeared first on Civil Eats.

In the process, his operation became a model for treating animals and the land well while building financial, community, and environmental resilience across America’s rural landscape. Along the way, he hasn’t shied away from positioning his approach as a means to take back power from global meatpackers and end harms caused by industrial food production.

It’s the kind of farming—and thinking—that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now the Secretary of Health and Human Services, has long celebrated as a health and environmental advocate.

So while Harris, who wears a tan cowboy hat and speaks with a soothing Southern drawl, says he’s generally “apolitical,” lately, he’s been engaging in D.C. discourse. That’s because he is “shocked and pleased at how much attention my kind of farming is getting.”

While Kennedy was still running his own campaign for president last year, his running mate, Nicole Shanahan, visited White Oak Pastures. A year later, with Kennedy a member of President Trump’s cabinet, Harris received an invitation to the White House for the release of the administration’s first Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Commission report.

“I’m not saying I was the only farmer there, but I was the only one there that looked like a farmer,” he said. On Instagram, White Oak Pastures posted a photo of Harris in his cowboy hat with his two daughters at the event, plus a photo of Trump and Kennedy. Comments on the photos were heated.

As everyone awaits the official release of the second MAHA Commission report, expected in early September, those remarks point to a divide that exists among farmers who typically agree on things like increasing organic matter, reducing pesticide use, and diversifying crops.

Like Harris, some farmers are thrilled to hear Kennedy using the word “regenerative” in the halls of power and calling out corporate influence on the food system, and are optimistic that real change is coming. Others question whether Kennedy will walk the walk, given his place in the Trump administration, which has been rolling back environmental protections, supporting increased taxpayer funding for chemical-dependent, commodity agriculture, and cutting support for the small, regenerative farms that the MAHA movement claims to support.

They also say the administration’s aggressive pushback on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives is hurting the young farmers who disproportionately run regenerative farms. The now-delayed (and recently leaked) second report from RFK’s MAHA Commission seems to confirm those concerns.

“We have had a major setback,” said Kate Mendenhall, an Iowa farmer who is also the director of the Organic Farmers Association, describing what organic and regenerative farmers have experienced since the Trump administration took over.

Mendenhall said many farmers fell behind this season because of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) funding freezes and are now reluctant to expand or invest in new practices. Many have also lost technical support due to program cancellations and staff reductions.

“I don’t think we can see the full impact now, but maybe next season we’ll see what comes forward or what we’re lacking this fall and winter,” she said. “I’m really delighted to see more conversation around helping people get access to more healthy food. We need that. And we also need to help farmers with the infrastructure steps they need to make it happen.”

Will Harris of White Oak Pastures.

A Resounding Message from MAHA

“Now all this MAHA talk makes me think that maybe, again, I might be an early innovator,” he said. “And I like that better.”

In other words, Kennedy’s attention feels like overdue recognition for some farmers who have been on the agricultural fringe for a long time.

While the Biden administration made some of the largest investments in history in paying farmers to implement conservation practices, rebuilding regional meat processing infrastructure, and shoring up the local supply chains that small, regenerative farms sell into, it also maintained the overall status quo and didn’t talk about transformation as loudly or as often as Kennedy does.

Harris said he heard talk of those investments but never saw impacts on the ground. What he remembers about the Climate-Smart Commodities Program, a signature initiative of Biden’s USDA, is not that it sent millions of dollars to small, regenerative farms through organizations like Pasa and Working Landscapes North Carolina, but that it directed huge sums of money to Tyson and other commodity ag giants.

Now, the thing that stands out to him about the current USDA is not that its actions seem to place the administration firmly on the side of Big Ag, but that Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins has repeatedly showcased her working relationship with Kennedy.

“I haven’t seen many programs implemented so far, but it’s still very early on,” Harris said. “I might get disappointed again, but the promise is better than it’s ever been in my lifetime.”

Steve Groff is similarly optimistic.

“The MAHA movement is a dream come true for me, because before I even heard the term, I was doing it,” said Groff, a third-generation farmer in southern Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where he farms 200 acres with his son. “We need to eat less junk food and more healthy food, and I think every American agrees that there’s just too much chronic disease. Something’s going on here. We have an opportunity here that is just unbelievable.”

Groff plants hemp on most of his land; he used to process the crop into CBD oil but is now getting into fiber production for textiles and building materials. He also grows heirloom tomatoes, squash, and pumpkins that he sells to Whole Foods. His farm is certified regenerative by Regenified, which requires farmers to implement certain soil health practices but is not organic, since it does allow the use of pesticides and synthetic fertilizers.

To that end, his fields have been 100 percent no-till since 1996, and he regularly plants cover crops. Because of his attention to soil health and ecosystems, he said, he’s been able to reduce the amount of chemical herbicides and fertilizers he uses over time.

“It’s mimicking nature as much as we can to grow food,” he said. (No-till farming and using cover crops also often rely heavily on pesticides, especially glyphosate, which many in the MAHA movement are opposed to and Kennedy has been critical of in the past.)

Groff said he’s always been a conservative but that he didn’t always fully trust Trump. When Trump joined forces with Kennedy, however, that started to change.

As an example of how farmers might begin to shift to more regenerative practices, he offers the example of how farmers in Maryland and Pennsylvania in the 1980s were initially resistant to no-till farming and planting cover crops, but increasingly adopted both as awareness grew about how the practices could reduce pollution into the Chesapeake Bay.

“In my area right here, 70 percent of the land is no-till and cover crops. Now, they don’t do it for the Chesapeake Bay, they do it because it’s a better way to farm,” he said. “And the same practices that we started to do for the sake of the Bay now are the same practices to grow healthier food.”

USDA Cuts to Funding

At TendWell Farm in western North Carolina, farmer Steven Beltram grows leafy greens, tomatoes, peppers, and other vegetables across several hundred acres to sell to grocery stores and other commercial distributors.  Not only is the farm certified organic, it’s Real Organic Project certified, adding an extra layer of regenerative cred.

“We really focus on trying to build and restore and make the soil better year over year,” Beltram said.

Hit hard by Hurricane Helene last year, TendWell was grateful to be participating in a USDA initiative called the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Program that offered funding to move fresh produce from small farms directly into food banks.

The contract was for about $5,000 a week, a significant amount for a business of their size. It was especially beneficial, he said, because unlike with grocers who demand a certain amount of kale or lettuce regardless of how the crops turn out, TendWell could send the food banks surplus produce, thereby reducing waste.

“That was a good thing for us, and that was a good thing for our neighbors,” he said. “Giving out local produce to the community—I can’t see how anyone could be opposed to that.”

But in March, the USDA canceled $1 billion that had been allocated to the program and another similar program that connected small farms to schools, ending that source of income for TendWell. At the time, Rollins said repeatedly that she was ending it because it was a COVID-era program and states still had plenty of money left to spend.

At the same time, Rollins’ USDA has also cancelled 2025 funding for the Patrick Leahy Farm to School Program, ended the Regional Food Business Centers program, and revised the Climate-Smart Commodities Program in a way that meant many small, regenerative farms and the organizations that support them have borne the brunt of the impacts.

“It’s interesting to see that the USDA is cutting funding for programs like [Local Food Purchase Assistance] while they’re increasing payments for commodity crop production, and of course all that commodity crop production is based on the use of glyphosate,” Beltram said, referencing the $67 billion bump that commodity growers got in the recent One Big Beautiful Bill. “It really feels like a divided administration. The USDA is for the most part implementing practices that are the exact opposite of the goals of the MAHA movement.”

At the Organic Farmers Association, Mendenhall said she also sees staffing cuts at the Natural Resources Conservation Services (NRCS) as potentially undermining MAHA agricultural goals, since NRCS employees in local offices can act as guides for farmers looking to improve their grazing practices to produce grass-fed beef or to get the help they need to reduce chemical use.

“They’ve lost a lot of local technical expertise at NRCS in particular,” she said.

At the same time, cuts to other programs mean agriculture support organizations that provide similar help have also let staff go. “That type of technical assistance that farmers rely on when they’re scaling up or expanding markets has also been lost,” she said.

What Mendenhall would like to see in the MAHA policy recommendations is a reinvestment in helping farmers scale up organic production and enter new markets like school food, hospitals, and the institutional markets that open new doors to wholesale.

“That is the avenue forward, and that’s a great way to increase consumption of organic food, but farmers can’t just do it,” she said. “They need support in order to scale up, and then they’ll be able to continue to do it, but we have to invest in the supply chain issues that are creating a barrier for them to doing that on their own.”

USDA Ends Support for Young Regenerative Farmers

Customers at the farmers’ market have already reported they were losing benefits that allow them to buy more healthy food from local farms using their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, Nelson said. She’s also seen a lot of her farmer friends lose jobs with support organizations, including at Pasa and at the National Young Farmers Coalition (NYFC), where she is an associate field director.

“It’s so powerful to know that you can grow food and preserve a future, so that keeps me going all the time, but I do have worries,” she said. “I really want to have hope that the administration will show how they can support smaller farms. It has been interesting to watch freezes happen and unfreezes happen and nothing feels totally certain or set in stone. Every day is wildly different.”

Things have been particularly fraught for young farmers who don’t fit the stereotype of the brawny white male American farmer. In its latest survey, in 2022, NYFC received responses from more than 10,000 young farmers across the country.

“Through that data, we learned that there are way more farmers of color who are young and way more queer farmers that the USDA data doesn’t reflect,” Nelson said. Eighty-six percent of the young farmers surveyed classified their approach as regenerative farming.

Biden’s USDA encouraged organizations and farmers applying for grants to emphasize whether they were a part of or serving underserved groups, such as BIPOC, women, or LGBTQ farmers. Now, as the USDA goes through grant contracts rooting out DEI initiatives, those farmers and organizations are the ones seeing their grant contracts cancelled.

To push back on that issue, NYFC launched a social media campaign last month dubbed #WeAreAmericanFarmers, calling on USDA to honor its contracts, given Rollins’ repeated statements around supporting American farmers.

“This campaign is to underscore farmers who are immigrants, farmers who are not white, farmers who are queer are all American farmers as well,” Nelson said. “It’s a call for representation and to call out that kind of dangerous language around who gets access to USDA resources or not and who feels like they belong.”

Pesticides, Climate Change, and Ecosystems: MAHA vs. EPA and USDA

“We’re definitely experiencing a change in climate here, and it’s making it more challenging to farm, even aside from just a massive disaster that takes out all the infrastructure,” said TendWell Farm’s Beltram, who still hasn’t received disaster assistance after Hurricane Helene destroyed roads, tractors, box trucks, and more at multiple farm locations and left his team to spend the entire winter cleaning debris out of fields.

On the environmental side, the MAHA movement behind Kennedy has been more vocal about its desire to see more regulation of pesticides linked to health and environmental harm, especially glyphosate, atrazine, and neonicotinoids. Prior to his appointment, Kennedy railed against agricultural chemicals.

However, at a press conference during the recent Great American Farmers’ Market, in response to a question about whether the second MAHA report would include recommendations to restrict the use of some chemicals, he deferred to Rollins.

“There is no question that the use of crop protection tools remains one of the most important tools, if not the most important, to our farmers to thrive and to remain prosperous,” Rollins said, adding that Kennedy has met with 130 farmer and rancher groups. “I’ve also heard him say, ‘We can’t compromise our farmers and their ability to feed and fuel and clothe the world.’ I feel very confident that his and our commitment to make sure farmers are at the table remains paramount, and that the report will reflect that.” Asked to weigh in, Kennedy said he had nothing to add.

Recently, a legislative rider has also gained steam among Republicans in Congress that would help shield Bayer and other pesticide companies from lawsuits claiming their products cause health harms.

White Oak Pasture’s Harris has spoken out about this kind of “pesticide immunity” bill, a version of which passed this year in his state of Georgia. While he acknowledges some worry about the impacts of climate change, he’s especially concerned about the ecosystem collapse caused by pesticide use and other factors.

“I think one of the things we got wrong is this thing of killing the pest,” he said. “I believe that every creature—plant, animal, or microbe—that lives in and is indigenous to an ecosystem has a role in that ecosystem,” he said. “I think we’re not smart enough to know what it is [for every creature]. And the fact that we have driven and are driving so many species of plants and animals and microbes into extinction or near extinction is worrying to me.”

Does he think, then, that a successful MAHA policy plan for regenerative agriculture needs to address that fact? “Absolutely,” he said. Like many others, he’s waiting to see what happens next.

Politico just published a draft version of the MAHA Commission’s policy recommendations, which are currently being reviewed by the White House and could change significantly before being finalized.

The last section of the report is titled “Soil Health and Stewardship of the Land.”  But not one of the four bullet points in the section includes concrete policy steps or positions.

For now, it seems as though not even the MAHA Commission will provide clarity any time soon about the administration’s plans for regenerative farming.

“We don’t know what the program is yet,” Harris said. “Powerful people have been instructed to come up with a program, so that’s promising.”

The post Should Regenerative Farmers Pin Hopes on RFK Jr.’s MAHA? appeared first on Civil Eats.

“The health and the vibrancy of American farms is critical to the success of the MAHA movement,” Kennedy said during his opening remarks. “We have the best farmers in the world in our country. We have people who are developing innovative techniques for restoring the soil, for restoring the microbiome, for producing the healthiest food in the world, and one of the purposes of this meeting is to get that message out to the rest of America: that there’s hope.”

Elisa Lane is one of those innovators. Lane owns Two Boots Farm in Northern Maryland, where she tends to a 200-tree pawpaw orchard, grows vegetable seedlings for home gardeners in the spring, and harvests endless varieties of flowers that get arranged into farmers’ market and bridal bouquets. She does it all without pesticides or tilling, while building soil fertility with a variety of cover crops and compost.

But on a sweltering day a week before the roundtable, with a heat advisory in effect, one thing she was thinking about—for the first time—was crop insurance.

Over the last decade, she explained while hanging freshly harvested garlic in her barn, it’s been getting hotter. Her crew starts at 5 a.m. some days to get field work done before the unbearable heat sets in. Summers are drier. The weather varies more wildly. When storms hit, they seem more intense than in the past.

“They come on so fast and so quick. I just remember that happening in the last three years or so,” she said. “That causes power outages, which is something I’m so nervous about. If we have a cooler worth of stuff, it could all spoil.” The thing that scares her the most, though, is the prospect of losing entire crops, which is what happened recently on two nearby farms during hailstorms.

It’s not just hail. In recent years, Hurricane Helene damaged or destroyed crops on close to 5 million acres of North Carolina farmland. Farmers in Vermont lost vegetable crops worth millions of dollars to unprecedented flooding. In the West, some farms couldn’t plant crops due to historic drought conditions; others lost crops and livestock herds to wildfires.

While it’s difficult to attribute any single weather event to climate change, the evidence is clear that more frequent and intense extreme-weather events are making it increasingly challenging for farmers to grow healthy food regardless of their ability to innovate, complicating the MAHA movement’s goals.

The last report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) offered two big takeaways, said Rachel Bezner Kerr, the lead author of a chapter about climate impacts on food, fiber, and ecosystems. Overall agricultural productivity has been reduced from what it would have been with less or no global warming, and more robust evidence now shows extreme weather events are diminishing food security and nutrition.

“Going forward, unless we’re able to significantly reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, those impacts are going to be quite severe,” Kerr said.

However, in Washington, D.C., the Trump administration’s actions are likely to increase U.S. emissions. During the first week of his presidency, Trump signed executive orders withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris Climate Agreement, rolling back electric vehicle subsidies, and directing his agencies to increase the production of fossil fuels.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has since proposed removing all limits on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants and overturning the finding that allows the agency to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has canceled programs and contracts that pay farmers to use climate-friendly practices and has stripped the word “climate” from its vocabulary. Trump’s sweeping tax legislation, which Republicans in Congress named the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” also dismantles Biden-era climate actions and boosts the fossil-fuel industry.

Trump has promised that the administration is fully invested in Kennedy’s MAHA movement goals to reduce chronic disease by, among other actions, getting Americans to eat more fresh, healthy, whole foods.

But in response to questions from Civil Eats, White House spokesperson Kush Desai said the administration is not concerned by the fact that climate change is compromising the country’s ability to produce that food.

“When nearly 70 percent of American children’s caloric intake comes from ultra-processed foods—contributing to obesity, diabetes, and other chronic conditions—the Make America Healthy Again movement has more pressing short term priorities to address than vague climate change concerns about agricultural yields and nutrient density,” he said in an email.

As a result, it’s unlikely that the second MAHA report—which will be submitted to the White House this week and is aimed at helping Americans eat healthier—will include climate policy directives, even if experts say they should undoubtedly be included.

“If you’re thinking about the importance of things like fruits, vegetables, nuts, and seeds . . . very important foods that prevent diseases in our diet, then you need to think about, ‘How do we address climate change so that food production, both quality and quantity, remains stable?’” said Samuel Myers, the director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Planetary Health. “That also will help with prices for Americans and protecting pollinator populations in the U.S. and abroad.”

Quantity and Quality of Food Impacted

At this point, the data from around the world is clear. “We can say decisively that productivity is lower than what it would be if there was no climate change,” said Kerr.

New research published in June identified yet another consequence of those reduced yields. As yields decline, farmers clear more land to grow food. As a result, more than 200 million acres of cropland in use today can be attributed to climate-change-driven yield loss. And as more land is cleared for farming, emissions increase, since forested land sequesters much more carbon.

“With a warming climate, we’re seeing a decrease in the productivity of our croplands around the world, and then as a result of that, in order to have the same amount of production, we are having to clear a lot more land, which then has an impact on the climate,” said Paul West, a senior scientist at Project Drawdown, who was an author on the paper. “So it ends up creating a vicious cycle.”

Myers’ research has also shown that the food that is being grown is not as healthy as it once was: Rising concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere affect plant growth in a way that reduces the nutrient content of many important crops.

“We’ve found that crops grown at CO2 concentrations we expect to see by the middle of the century have reduced levels of things like iron and zinc and protein, which are super important from a health standpoint,” he said. “And then we find that potentially hundreds of millions of people get pushed into micronutrient deficiencies because of just the CO2 effect alone.”

In the U.S., that’s unlikely to happen, because our diets are more diverse compared to those of low-income countries that rely heavily on staple food crops. But Myers said climate change also threatens a wide range of foods that provide Americans with important nutrients. For example, the size and distribution of fisheries are changing, and it’s getting harder to raise livestock in certain places as heat and drought conditions increase.

Myers also worked on another study that found many scientific and policy reports underestimate how much food security is likely to be threatened in coming years because they often leave out other factors that intersect with climate change.

Over the last 10,000 years, he said, agriculture was optimized to conditions that were almost entirely stable. Now, everything about growing a crop—from temperature and water supply to pollination and pest pressure—is up in the air.

“We’re changing those biophysical conditions at the fastest rate in the history of our species,” he said. “It’s the climate that we’re changing, but it’s also biodiversity loss and pollution and changes in access to water. It’s not just climate change, it’s everything change.”

In addition to backtracking on a transition away from fossil fuels, President Trump’s EPA is rolling back numerous regulations intended to prevent pollution and safeguard biodiversity.

Forced by Climate to Cut Back on Healthy Crops

Ela is a fourth-generation farmer, and his produce, grown in soil that has more than double the organic matter compared to the local average, is sold at seven Colorado farmers’ markets.

Steve Ela packs apples at Ela Family Farms, where he’s recently taken trees out of production due to concerns about water availability. (Photo credit: Regan Choi)

However, his farm’s viability is entirely dependent on the annual snowpack, which melts into reservoirs that feed his irrigation systems. Several studies have documented declining snowpack in Colorado over the past several decades, caused by rising temperatures and declining precipitation.

There have always been drought cycles, Ela said, but in the past several years, there have been more of them. Last year, after not enough snowpack accumulated, the runoff season was short. When rain didn’t come, he had to start using the reservoir water about three months earlier than normal.

“That reservoir only holds so much water, and if you have to use it for a longer period of time, it’s just like a bank account,” he said. “You can stretch it out, but there’s only X amount there.”

This year, after another dry winter, they’ll run out of water for some of his apple trees in mid-August, with the harvest not happening until October. “If you stretch them, you beat them, you malnourish them, they just don’t come back the same,” he said. “There’s a lasting scar. It’s something that causes damage for multiple years.” After a historic fall freeze a few years ago, for example, his apple and pear trees looked okay, he said, but then he didn’t get a good crop on them for three years.

As a result of his water challenges, he’s started taking acres of trees out of production. It’s the only obvious solution he can see at the moment, he said: If there’s going to be less water available, he’s going to grow less fruit.

“The interaction between MAHA and climate change, it’s an awkward dance,” Ela said. As a dedicated environmentalist, he’s worried about the changing climate. But he also sees the value in the MAHA movement’s message, because “I think we could eat a lot healthier,” he said.

Can the Soil Save Us?

In fact, a 2022 survey by the Organic Farming Research Foundation found that 80 percent of farmers transitioning to organic practices cited “greater resilience to climate change” as a motivating factor.

Kennedy is a longtime critic of pesticide use and promoter of organic practices, and his MAHA movement includes many farmers and consumers who are pushing for more support for organic and regenerative agriculture. These two approaches to agriculture, which intersect and overlap in different ways depending on how they’re practiced, can build healthy soil and biodiversity on farms, creating systems that are both better for the climate and improve the nutrition of the food produced.

But so far, the administration’s actions have done more to hurt organic and regenerative farmers than help them. The USDA retooled the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities Program in a way that led to thousands of farms around the country losing funding allocated to implement regenerative practices. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins has also canceled more than a billion dollars in funding for local food programs that primarily benefit regenerative and organic farms.

Instead, Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill will send more dollars to conventional, commodity farms that rely on large-scale, chemical-intensive farming practices.

Some farmers are optimistic that the upcoming MAHA report will include policy recommendations related to soil health and regenerative agriculture. However, powerful agricultural lobby groups have been pushing back on that front, especially on any provisions regulating pesticide use, and ultimately Kennedy is not in charge of farm policy. Still, he hinted at his desire to push things in that direction.

“We need to give off-ramps to farmers so that they can transition to biodynamic agriculture, regenerative agriculture, and do it in a way that is going to maintain the vibrancy of their farms,” he said at the July roundtable. “We have a president now who is not only absolutely committed to the survival and prosperity of American farmers but is also looking around the corners, who is looking to the future.”

The trouble is, even if farm policy bucks the Big Ag headwinds and takes up the IPPC recommendations to shift to more regenerative, diversified systems, it won’t be enough to guarantee a future filled with healthy food if the administration continues to roll the clock back on overall emissions, Kerr said.

“I think it’s very hard to adapt if we are going over 1.5 [degrees Celsius of warming], and if we are ramping up our greenhouse gas emissions,” she said. “The adaptation strategies that we’ve identified are not adequate in the face of that kind of global warming.”

Elisa Lane, owner of Two Boots Farm, with the solar array that sits behind her fields on the edge of forested acres. Installation of the system was delayed to the USDA funding freeze. (Photo credit: Lisa Held)

At Two Boots Farm, Lane is doing her part on all fronts. In addition to building healthy soil and keeping a biodiverse forest intact on most of her acreage, she recently installed a solar array to shift the farm to renewable energy. The project was delayed significantly when the grant funding she had received from the USDA through a program that helps farmers install solar was frozen. It has since been unfrozen, and she’s now close to getting it up and running.

The system will save her around $500 per month in energy costs, she estimates, but she’s not sure if tax credits she was hoping for were eliminated in the One Big Beautiful Bill. Next on her list is crop insurance, which is difficult for small, diversified farms like hers to qualify and apply for.

In 2022, crop insurance subsidies cost taxpayers a record $19.3 billion, up from an average that stayed under $4 billion in the early aughts.

“The government will hopefully help in one way or another,” Lane said. “They have the ability to help on the front end with resiliency, or they’re going to be helping us on the back end, when everybody’s screwed financially because we’re losing crops.”

The post The MAHA Movement’s Climate Conundrum appeared first on Civil Eats.

https://civileats.com/2025/07/28/could-child-care-centers-strengthen-local-food-systems/ https://civileats.com/2025/07/28/could-child-care-centers-strengthen-local-food-systems/#respond Mon, 28 Jul 2025 08:00:20 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=66072 Last year, federal stabilization grants provided to the child care sector during the pandemic ended, leaving many centers in “survival mode,” says Bloom, a local foods extension specialist who is diligently working to build relationships between child care facilities and small farmers. Through her research, Bloom, herself a mom, hopes to improve food access for […]

The post Could Child Care Centers Strengthen Local Food Systems? appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]>

Ever since the pandemic, the child care sector has grappled with tight budgets, staffing shortages, and low wages. Dara Bloom, an associate professor at North Carolina State University, has watched over the years as many of these centers have struggled to serve fresh fruits and vegetables to kids, especially when inflation and food prices soared.

Last year, federal stabilization grants provided to the child care sector during the pandemic ended, leaving many centers in “survival mode,” says Bloom, a local foods extension specialist who is diligently working to build relationships between child care facilities and small farmers. Through her research, Bloom, herself a mom, hopes to improve food access for underserved communities and economic opportunities for small farmers. She says the child care sector can play a key role—if given the chance.

“Those early [childhood] stages are so important, especially in terms of health and nutrition. It’s a chance to set children’s taste preferences early.”

Child care centers were set to receive a helping hand this year, after the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) expanded the Local Food for Schools (LFS) program last October to include child care sites. Under the Biden administration, the program earmarked $188.6 million for fresh, local produce for child care facilities already participating in the Child and Adult Care Food Program, which reimburses the centers for providing healthful meals and snacks.

Participating sites range from home-based ones serving up to 15 kids to large private daycare providers and programs connected to public school systems, such as Head Start and Early Head Start.

The additional LFS funding would have been a game-changer for the child care industry, Bloom says. But five months after the USDA expanded the LFS program to child care, the Trump administration terminated the program. The decision sparked extensive media coverage of the impact on schools and food banks, but child care didn’t receive much attention—because it had yet to receive any funding.

However, child care, an often-overlooked sector, could become a larger part of local food systems, Bloom says. Through a farm to early care and education (ECE) program at the Center for Environmental Farming Systems, where Bloom also serves as assistant director, she tests and evaluates local food supply chains for child care that help create better markets for farmers.

The center then creates resources to help others replicate these systems in their own communities—for example, a step-by-step local food-buying guide for child care that offers guidance on understanding ingredient seasonality, where to find farmers, and how to order and incorporate local farm food on menus.

Civil Eats recently spoke to Bloom about her research, healthy eating habits for children, and how the child care sector can support small and midsize farms.

Dara Bloom visits Locklear Farms in Pembroke, North Carolina, which sells produce to a group of child care facilities as part of a farm-to-ECE program. (Photo credit: Bhavisha Gulabrai)

What are some of the ingredients of a resilient local food system?

In North Carolina, one of the things that has helped our local food system and issues of accessibility is a strong food hub network. If you look at our food system over the years, as things got bigger, we lost some local and regional food system infrastructure.

Food hubs are produce distributors, and a lot of them, especially in North Carolina, are nonprofits, and so they have a social mission. This includes working with small-to-midsize farmers who often need training to produce for a wholesale market, in terms of scale and [compliance with] food safety requirements. Many of our food hubs are selling to schools, and we’ve worked with them to increase purchasing for child care centers. That middle infrastructure along the supply chain really helps.

What role can child care sites play in our food system?

We know from the research how important early childhood is developmentally, in terms of education and emotional, social, behavioral learning. Those early stages are also important in terms of health and nutrition. It’s a chance to set children’s taste preferences early.

Research shows it can take anywhere from eight to 15 exposures to new types of fruits and vegetables for kids to develop those preferences. And if you are a low-income family, it’s hard to put food on the plate that you know your kid isn’t going to eat, eight to 15 times.

You want to give your kid something they’re going to eat, that is going to fill them up, and that they’ll love, especially if you’re on a tight budget and maybe have to say no to a lot of things. So, there is this opportunity in child care to do what maybe some low-income families wouldn’t be able to do, which is to increase that exposure.