COLUMBUS, Ohio - A legal victory in North Carolina could open the door to reforms that would protect farm workers in the Buckeye State as well.

A federal judge has given preliminary approval to the last of three settlements in a class-action lawsuit against growers who used a farm-labor contractor to cut labor costs - a contractor who shorted the workers' pay.

President of the Toledo-based Farm Labor Organizing Committee Baldemar Velasquez said many labor contractors bring migrants to the U.S. on H-2A guest-worker visas, but aren't following federal regulations. He said those violations will eventually fall on the shoulders of farmers.

"They think they're distancing themselves from legal liability to hire these independent farm-labor contractors," said Velasquez. "But we've proven in the cases that we won in North Carolina, the 'joint employment' with at least several of the farmers. And I think the same thing is happening in Ohio. We just have to make the case."

The class-action lawsuit emerged after a failed attempt by FLOC members get the three defendants to agree to back wages, improved working conditions and collective bargaining rights.

The U.S. Department of Labor said the farm owners weren't responsible for the subcontractor's actions. FLOC is working now to collect money owed to the more than 200 workers.

Most farmworkers with H-2A visas are in the South, but Velasquez explained they're tied to networks all over the country.

"We know several big ones in Ohio that were here last year," said Velasquez. "One labor contractor had about 400 workers. Another one had over 200. And there were smaller ones, of course."

In 2019, the Labor Department found roughly 12,000 violations under the H2-A program, including about 5,000 workers cheated out of their wages . Velasquez predicted the exploitation could get worse .

"It just really underscores the fact that the Department of Labor doesn't have the capacity to enforce the law," said Velasquez. "That these fly-by-night labor contractors, they're hard to nail down, hard to track down their assets as a way to leverage them, to comply with the law."

FLOC is backing H-2A program reforms that would prevent contractors from exploiting workers.

Agriculture is the single largest industry in Nebraska and one that different administrations can impact differently. When Nebraska Farmers Union President John Hansen looks at the last two presidential administrations, he can see some of those differences, while acknowledging, "We work with whoever gets elected."

On two issues that impact agriculture, competition and climate change, Hansen sees significant differences between the Biden-Harris and former Trump-Pence administrations.

"In the competition arena, you got to give the Biden administration an A or an A+. I give the former Trump administration somewhere between an F and a D- on competition. Probably equal grades and differences in the recognition and treatment of climate change," he said.

Hansen says in 50 years of working on the issue, he's never seen an administration do more to address competition in the ag marketplace in a four-year term. When it comes to climate change, he says Trump's total denial of climate change causes him "really serious concerns."

Hansen called putting more C02 into the atmosphere tantamount to digging the hole we're in deeper, faster.

"We need to find creative ways to use American ingenuity and economic power to rethink energy production and maximize renewable energy development and minimize the release of stored carbon, which is what coal and oil is," he continued.

Hansen has extensive experience with trade and tariffs, having been a trade advisor with a top-security clearance under three presidential administrations. He said although they supported a lot of the "big picture" of what the Trump administration was trying to do with tariffs, it was hard to support the "go it alone" approach against China.

"Because we didn't round up our partners and our folks who have a common interest relative to trying to rein China in, a lot of what the Trump administration tried to do was ineffective," he observed. "It was ineffective because, among other things, Donald Trump doesn't even listen to his own advisors."

Hansen said the Biden administration's approach to tariffs, while not perfect, has been more selective.

"If you're going to turn the use of a tool that has this kind of impact loose, you really do need to have an informed set of public officials that help discuss these things and help calibrate what we're doing so that we're doing things in a thoughtful and coherent way," he added.

One of Hansen's biggest current concerns for the agriculture industry is the ongoing failure of Congress to pass a Farm Bill, which was a year overdue in September.

This October, schools in Georgia are celebrating National Farm to School Month by serving local produce in their meals.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture is offering $700 million in new funding for the Local Foods for Schools and Local Foods for Child Care programs, across the state and beyond.

Jenny Lester Moffitt, undersecretary for marketing and regulatory programs at the USDA, said the programs not only ensure students receive nutritious meals but also create direct market opportunities for local farmers.

"Farmers that are farming in the region, for them to be able to sell direct to schools, it not just provides healthy food for the kids but it also provides much-needed markets for producers as well," Lester Moffitt explained.

She pointed out there is a financial advantage for farmers. Direct sales provide farmers with more revenue and keep food dollars within local communities. In contrast, when they sell their products to major retail supply chains, they typically receive only about 14 cents for every $2.

Lester Moffitt stressed National Farm to School Month is about more than filling lunch trays, it is an educational opportunity. She added schools are encouraged to incorporate information about healthy foods and how they are produced into the curriculum.

"Farm to School is also about nutrition education, it's about agriculture education, it's about school gardens as well," Lester Moffitt outlined. "There is, of course, the important part about getting local foods into cafeterias but also it's about educating students about healthy eating, what's grown in their region, how food is grown."

This year, schools in Georgia have received about $195,000 from the Patrick Leahy Farm to School program for schools in Atlanta, Conyers and Covington.


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By Grace Hussain for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Terri Dee for Illinois News Connection reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration

Every five years or so Congress is tasked with renewing the Farm Bill, including subsidies, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and major farm conservation programs. The Agricultural Improvement Act of 2018 - the current iteration of the Farm Bill - expired last year. Yet thanks to Congressional extensions, the policy continues limping along.

Some food systems experts believe that there won't be a new Farm Bill this year with a presidential election looming. There's a chance the existing legislation could be extended far longer too, all depending on whether Trump or Harris wins in November.

One of those experts is Jonathan Coppess. Born into a family of corn and soybean farmers, Coppess has spent much of his career working on various Farm Bills - both as Chief Counsel for the Senate Agriculture Committee and as head of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Farm Services Agency in 2009. Today, Coppess teaches agricultural policy at the University of Illinois, where he leads the university's agricultural policy program.

Sentient's Grace Hussain interviewed Coppess about the Farm Bill, agriculture policy and how a Trump or Harris will impact the future of food policy.

Grace Hussain

Why should the average consumer care about the Farm Bill?

Jonathan Coppess, JD

Well, the average consumer should care about the Farm Bill for a lot of reasons. Firstly, the bill provides assistance to low income families and households and individuals to buy food when times are tough. Certainly with the cost of groceries that we've all been living through, that's very relevant to, frankly, and unfortunately, over 40 million Americans on average, every month are getting assistance through that program. I think that's probably the first and foremost thing. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program - which is reauthorized in a Farm Bill - is the biggest program helping put food on the table of households that are struggling. So that's one reason.

On the other side is the food system is farming, and this bill provides direct assistance to farmers, particularly when prices are low. This year, we're seeing crop prices take a nosedive because we expected a record harvest this year. The Farm Bill helps farmers manage risks like this through crop insurance.

Then what I like to think of as kind of the bridge policy is conservation - helping farmers do a better job on their land to avoid soil erosion or help clean up water and those sorts of things. Those policies all have varying degrees of direct impact on consumers and food prices and food availability. And of course, research and rural economic development. It's more indirect, but investing in research for food and agriculture is going to pay dividends down the road.

You know, often there's a bit of a misconception that Farm Bills have direct price impacts at the grocery store, and they don't. I mean, everything's much more indirect through the entire food system. But clearly, as we saw during the height of the pandemic, agricultural policy impacts things that, in turn, impacts different stages of the food system, and these can really influence what the consumer gets. We are in a constant state of trying to keep the wheels on the Farm Bill.

Hussain

The Farm Bill was up for renewal last year, but it still hasn't been renewed. Why do you think that is?

Coppess

That's not an easy question to answer. There's a variety of reasons that include the dysfunction in Congress and the partisan gridlock that we see in everything. One of the things that concerns people like me who spend far too much of their time on the Farm Bill is that it's long been bipartisan, and has long relied on this sort of strong coalition that moves it through Congress - even when Congress doesn't function on other policy areas. To see the Farm Bill stall is kind of a troubling indication of just how difficult things have become in Congress.

I would say that probably the single biggest barrier is that there's a really expensive demand being made by some in the sector. Some of the farm groups want to increase subsidy payments. The Congressional Budget Office scored that this summer, finding that would cost anywhere from 30 to $40 billion more over 10 years. The proponents of that policy don't have an offset for that cost. So that makes it really tough to move the legislation forward.

The partisan fight over the Food Assistance Program, coupled with this demand to increase subsidy payments to farmers, really just makes it impossible to keep the coalition together to approve the bill.

So the House bill came out of the committee, but it has no chance. The support for it is very narrow, and the votes aren't there, so we're not going to see it move. On the other side, the Senate, frankly, hasn't even started. They haven't even done the first critical steps of producing a bill to consider.

Hussain

So from your perspective, is either presidential candidate better on the Farm Bill and food systems?

Coppess

Well, I would say there are some important differences, but I think all of that has to be taken with a large grain of salt, in that farm policy doesn't rise to the level of the presidential campaign. If it even gets an offhand mentioned somewhere during the campaign, that would be a surprise. It's a big congressional effort, so the presidential campaigns, typically, they're not too wrapped up in it.

That said, it's also fascinating because, for example, Governor Walz - he's on the Harris Walz ticket, the Democratic ticket - was in the House of Representatives for the last three Farm Bills, so he's actually worked on the 2008, 2014 and 2018 Farm Bills. It's pretty rare to have somebody at that level with this much in-depth knowledge. I think that campaign certainly has more Farm Bill experience.

I have to tread lightly here, knowing all of the sensitivities that are in these discussions. I would expect a Harris-Walz administration to probably continue the Biden administration's policies in the agricultural space. Many of the priorities that we've seen in the Biden Harris administration - things like helping farmers manage the risks from climate change and manage the conservation challenges they face, in addition to some of the other risk management tools. I think their administration, particularly given the focus of Governor Walz and Vice President Harris, will be very supportive of continuing and maybe even improving the food assistance that working and low income families need. I would expect kind of a more traditional type operation of these policies without any major disruptions, and probably emphasizing some things more than others - like conservation and climate - which is what we've seen in the last four years.

We also have experience with the Trump campaign as an administration. When he was president, Trump signed the 2018 Farm Bill into law. What's probably most notable there was the trade conflict that the Trump administration started with China that resulted in retaliation. Then the Trump administration's USDA took a very unusual step, to create its own direct payment program to farmers, and over the course of two years, paid well over $20 billion in ad hoc payments to farmers.

That's an indicator of two things. First, a higher likelihood of more trade disputes and conflicts and challenges arising in a second Trump administration. Second, more payments to farmers, which can seem like a really important policy, but can have long term consequences in that this could turn out to be more bad medicine over the long run.

There's also been a lot of tension on Project 2025. If there's anything that could be rather uniquely concerning about a second Trump administration, I think it's in that mindset. He's disavowed parts of the document, but I think what it signals is a willingness to really shake up the executive administrative operations. That includes everything from clearing out civil service employees to making creative use of statutory authorities. The concern there is that we've gotten very used to having a largely functioning federal government. For example, the USDA does a myriad of things - everything from food inspection to farm subsidies and SNAP. It is entirely possible that - whether intended or not - the sort of disruptive efforts that seem to be outlined in Project 2025, and in the campaign rhetoric, would completely upend operations.

Without some of the agency expertise, how do you run some of these programs? For example, crop insurance is extraordinarily complex. If you get mad and fire everybody that runs crop insurance, it's gonna be hard to make the program function. I think bigger concerns are around any of the ideas around the Food Safety and Inspection Service and having inspectors on the meat lines. A Trump administration causing disruptions in that area would be, frankly, probably really problematic for many consumers. I would also expect them to go after the SNAP program, which further complicates the coalition, and really makes it hard to get Farm Bills done.

This is somewhat over-generalized, but what we have is one side that represents the standard in terms of Farm Bills and farm policy, while the other option has the potential to be extraordinarily disruptive, chaotic and, frankly, destructive. I don't want to make an overstatement, but let's be honest. The Trump administration is cause for that kind of concern across the board, so it wouldn't just be USDA. And I wouldn't expect them to go after USDA first - other than maybe SNAP, school lunch programs and other hunger assistance programs.

I also think that one of the things that maybe doesn't get talked about enough is just how that kind of disruptive and chaotic mindset ripples through all of government and how it functions, potentially creating a lot of consequences that may or may not have been intended, but certainly aren't going to be well received by the public.

Hussain

So you started touching upon this a little bit in your answer, but could you talk a little bit more about what the outcome of the election could mean, if, for example, we have a Democrat-majority Congress, but a Republican for President or vice versa?

Coppess

Which party controls which house of Congress and the gavels at the committee level - that's the biggest component for a Farm Bill. So, I mean, it's fairly clear, right? The Republicans in the House from 2012 through 2014 struggled to get a Farm Bill done. In fact, it was in 2013 that the Farm Bill was defeated on the House floor for the first time since 1962 - frankly, it has been all tied up with this fight over the food assistance programs. So I would say there are concerns with Republican control of the House.

In the Senate, typically, that's tempered quite a bit. We don't see even conservative members of the Senate go after SNAP the same way - certainly not at the committee level. Whoever has the majority is going to have a pretty tight majority, and so I wouldn't expect the Senate to be too radical in terms of the SNAP program. The caveat is, if you had both chambers in Republican hands, I would expect a budget reconciliation effort that would probably cut a lot of things. It could really upend the way the system operates.

The biggest challenge I would expect if there are Democratic majorities is that you will have new agricultural committee chairs in both the House and the Senate. I worked for Chairwoman Stabenow when she took over the gavel in 2011, and it was a lot of work getting the pieces moving in the right direction, let alone put together. The next Congress will really need some time, regardless of whether it's both houses or one house in the Democratic hands.

I think there's also a lot of potential policy differences between the two parties in either chamber. So again, the House has really emphasized paying farmers more - increasing payments to farmers. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party has been more balanced between keeping farm programs running, crop insurance up and functioning, but also investing in conservation and supporting the food assistance policy.

Hussain

Have you been keeping your eye on any Congressional races that you think could have an impact on this legislation?

Coppess

I'm an amateur political consumer, but I don't know that I have any great insights on races. One big issue is going to be leadership changes. Who's going to have the gavel? Who's the chair of each committee?

I'm in Illinois, so I've got to watch the Illinois congressional races. My Congresswoman is Nikki Budzinski (D-IL), and she has been very active on the Farm Bill and actually voted against it for a lot of reasons. I think she's done a really good job working on this. Any race I'm going to watch closely is going to be the one I'm going to vote in or vote on.

Outside of that, there's some big changes happening, particularly that Chairwoman Stabenow (D-MI) is retiring, so she's not up for reelection. Her seat in the Senate will be open. That'll be an important one to watch.

I think another really important race is in Ohio. Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH) has been in the Senate since 2006, and he's been a key member of the Senate Ag Committee. I'm a little biased, but I think he's an incredible legislator and has a really great handle on these things. He brings a lot of good ideas, knowledge, experience and expertise. If he were not coming back, that's another kind of institutional experience loss.

Hussain

Is there a world in which we don't get a Farm Bill passed at all?

Coppess

I mean, we're not going to get one passed this year. I think we're heading for an extension, and I actually think the biggest question is whether you extend it for a couple years to allow the next Congress a little breathing room as everything gets settled. If you're asking whether it goes away, that's highly unlikely. It's more likely we just keep extending.

I think the bigger risk in terms of how these policies could or would or should develop, is what we've seen with appropriations bills, in which they're just constantly extended and kicked down the road, because they can't get together on it. I think there's a scenario in which extending this just gets easier and easier to do rather than actually reauthorize things. I think there is some real risk that we don't see improvements in the policy, because it just gets into this extension habit.

I don't foresee anything just going away again unless there's a major change. A second Trump administration may be the exception - if they had both houses of Congress - where you'd see some really drastic changes pushed through under budget rules.

Hussain

What do you think the chances of the PLANT and EATS Act making it into law via the Farm Bill?

Coppess

I'm not as familiar with those acts specifically. I don't have a good read on their chances. I would want to know some of the political dynamics around them, but I don't think either of them are difference maker type legislation. They're not going to prevent a Farm Bill from passing. It really, at this point, boils down to the farm subsidies and the food assistance.

Hussain

So you've talked a bit about this coalition between conservation, food assistance and subsidies. Can you speak at all to the tension within the Farm Bill between farming and conservation, specifically, given the environmental impact of food production and the livestock that much of the subsidized grain and corn is fed to?

Coppess

The conflict isn't necessarily about conservation policy so much. The conservation policies are helping to reduce some of the environmental challenges and problems that we see with modern agriculture. The challenge is really around funding. In my personal opinion, Congress doesn't put enough money into conservation for the demand by farmers and the need that we have out there. Finding those additional funds seems really difficult.

Now the other side of that question is just the pressure coming down across the food system, whether that be for less of a climate impact or better efforts to address climate change. You mentioned livestock. Certainly, the livestock issues have been huge for a while, and they appear to be continuing to increase. Part of that is the consolidation issue. We just have a few large meat packers, for example, and the consequences of consolidated animal feeding operations with large amounts of manure and animals housed in very tight, confined facilities. You have everything from the challenges of antibiotic use to keep those animals healthy to the welfare of the animals living in those conditions.

California pushed for changes to the way we raise hogs for pork, which is very controversial with farmers. They don't like to be told how to farm, but they also don't like the idea that people think they're mistreating the animals. You will hear many talk about their care for the animals, and how this is the best system for them. It certainly hits pretty close to those producers.

The next piece was that there's a similar kind of tension and conflict, or issues around row crop production and the concerns that things like herbicide drift or soil erosion or overuse of water or nutrient pollution and waters. Again, those conservation policies are there to help with the practices that should help with those issues. But there's a struggle for farmers who are in a tight, tough and competitive market. Again, they don't want to be told how to farm, and they also don't like the idea that consumers think they're not doing a good job as stewards of land and resources. That's a real conflict. That's tough to work out. It's where we do find value in these policy discussions about what are the priorities for farmers and how best to help farmers during tough times and with things like natural resource challenges, but we're not really having that discussion at this point in time. That's one of the things lost when the Farm Bill is not reauthorized.

Hussain

Is there anything else that you think readers should be paying attention to?

Coppess

I think probably what I would end on is just reemphasizing, across the board, the importance of this effort, not just the policies specific to the Farm Bill, but of the ability of Congress to do these big, difficult, complex bills and work through coalitions. It's a basic function when it comes to the policy.

I also want to reemphasize that one of the things that we're really not doing a good job of is prioritizing and emphasizing the conservation needs and the demand by farmers for funding.

We too often allow prices and economic challenges to be such a driver and such an emphasis, because it seems more immediate. But we've seen over the history of this how not doing a good job with conservation policy - with helping farmers manage those risks and challenges at the natural resource level - really can have huge costs and cause problems later on. They may have more immediate problems, but ignoring conservation certainly can come back to bite us as a nation. In an ideal world, we'd not only have a functional debate and reauthorization process, but we'd also be having a real and intense conversation about the priorities for helping farmers and how those priorities impact things like soil and water.


Grace Hussain wrote this article for Sentient.


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