Committing to the Horizon

Published: Nov 2024
By: Marbleseed Staff

As the team at Marbleseed sorted through all the posts and responses following last week’s election, this quote from Pui-ling Lew at the Food Culture Collective spoke to us the most. Let’s give ourselves permission to hold this moment little more loosely so that we can see the horizon more clearly”. We met at our annual staff retreat last week, many of us traveling the “day after.” We were eager to be in our organizational community and to hold space for the many of us that felt more unsafe in the rural places where we live. We have seen the empowerment of hatred, racism, xenophobia, homophobia and sexism over the past several years. It is easy to feel powerless and afraid. And not just afraid for ourselves and family members, but for the future of the planet that the Marbleseed farmers and community tends and stewards.

We are not a partisan organization. And we recognize that our annual conference in La Crosse, as well as other field days and educational opportunities we host throughout the year, welcome all who want to build healthy soil, biodiversity, and manage their farms organically. As we read more about election results and the beliefs of those that voted, it became obvious that the results were less a referendum on hate and fear, and more an outcome of misinformation and propaganda.

When we are ready, the way forward will be action. Marbleseed’s priorities and values will define the horizon. Our roles of ‘connective tissue’ and convener seem more critical than ever. These things will enable common ground. We need to stand up for the work we have been doing and the values that guide it.

All agriculture should be organic , and this should be accessible and supported by the myriad of USDA programs and structures that currently subsidize conventional, industrial agriculture. This will require action to create a farm safety net, land access, and funding mechanism to enable this vision.

Diversity in all forms is vital for organic farms and rural communities. From production methods, conservation practices, and our family, friends, and customers, organic systems thrive on building diversity. We need it in the crops we grow, integrating animals into our farms, being allies and upstanders for everyone in our communities.

Farmers are ageing and we need the next generation of farmers to be viable. With 86% of farm families relying on off farm jobs, often for health care, farming is not sustainable as a family business. New and beginning farmers are largely first-generation farmers without the benefit of family land or intergenerational wealth. We need to fund land access and explore unique collective models of farm enterprises. We need to support universal health care as a right not a business.

Nature replicates, it does not consolidate. Redundancy in a system is resilience. Local food systems enable farms at smaller scales to find markets and feed their communities. They reduce our carbon footprint. They create jobs in rural places. Let’s not forget the lessons of the pandemic; of food shortages, trampling workers’ rights, euthanized farm animals, empty grocery store shelves. We need to continue to fight consolidation in food and farming, where a handful of corporations own the land, seeds, inputs, processors, and markets.

Let’s not pretend that any particular party has truly addressed what we care about most. The last four years, emerging from the damage of a global pandemic saw the largest investment in organic agriculture in history. Funding for climate smart agriculture enabled us to engage with other large corporate grantees and allied organizations and companies, to be a voice for organic farmers and farming systems. There has been funding to support local food procurement, markets and infrastructure. And there were many other more consequential changes to uplift small and midsized farms in the food and farming system that could have happened and did not.

We need to continue to find these opportunities, to be in the kitchen and not on the menu. How can we use the conversations about tax cuts to benefit land transfer of farms to the next generation? In the talk of “American Made” and domestic markets, who will support the smaller scale, organically managed farms that supply our food? In the short window we have before January 20th, how can we convey our concerns and successes, to potentially limit in-coming damage while shaping future policies?

Power is the ability to achieve our purpose. There is so much at stake in this moment, for our personal well-being and for the planet we share. We need to build power, together as a community focused on the horizon.

Support our shared vision for a healthy food and farming system.