A third of the country's farmers are over the age of 65, so the United States Department of Agriculture is working to train the next generation while also making the industry more diverse.
The USDA announced that nearly $28 million would support this initiative nationwide, and some of that money is coming to Sacramento to support new education programs to support beginning farmers.
The USDA's investment includes $500,000 of funding for the California Farm Bureau’s nonprofit California Bountiful Foundation to offer an agricultural mentoring and education program to veterans or socially disadvantaged individuals to address the declining number of farms and an aging workforce in the country.
The money will facilitate mentorship, training, and outreach programs, aiding new farmers in acquiring essential skills, resources, and support for success in agriculture.
CapRadio Insight host Vicki Gonzalez spoke with Jim Houston, part of the California Farm Bureau and California Bountiful Foundation, and Michael O’Gorman, a first-generation veteran farmer and the founder of the Farmer Veteran Coalition, about next-gen farming, mentorship funding and diverse agriculture in California.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Interview Highlights
California was the top-producing agricultural state in the country in 2022. What are the top goods produced through California agriculture?
Houston: We are the largest agricultural state in the country. The numbers have not come out for this year, but preliminary estimates put them around just north of $60 billion. We have over 400 commodities that we grow here, and our top ones, interestingly enough, are dairy, … about 8 billion wine grapes and almonds.
People might not know a lot about the California Farm Bureau, but every county in the state, with the exception of Alpine, … has a county farm bureau. We actually just … introduced the San Francisco Farm Bureau to complete the state.
Each of those [county bureaus] helps the farmers in their network or their county with the problems of the day, the latest technology, the latest techniques, markets, etc., working with local governments. And the California State Farm Bureau helps those 54 county farm bureaus with their job.
The California Bountiful Foundation received $500,000 from the USDA for new farmer education programs and to offer them resources. How did the idea for this project come about?
Houston: The goal is to connect 200 farmers and ranchers with mentees.
As a statewide organization with only $500,000, to be honest, that's not a whole lot. And so what it really does is it helps support the time for the counties. So if a county is going to have a meeting, [this money will] pay for the room and materials there, [and] it'll help or pay for some of the consulting time for the mentors. But [for the] the mentees, the benefit they have is the knowledge. And then there are lots of programs at the state that we'll inform them about that will help them get some of that initial funding that might be required for capital purchase.
We are going to start in February, accepting applications, and then the program lasts three years. So [that involves a] one-year ramp-up time and then two years of operation. We expect to have two years of mentors, 200 a year, so 400 total.
We hosted …, two years ago, a forum at the California Farm Bureau headquarters. [This forum was attended by] socially disadvantaged farmers and ranchers.
But the [organizers] talked about, ‘you need to get this certification or that to sell to Walmart or Costco.’... I'm looking at this person, and they have 35 acres, and they're not going to be [capable of] selling to Costco and Walmart with 35 acres anytime soon. And so all this [effort of organizing a forum] was well intended, but I realized that there was this gap from the real sort of producer who's out there, from who's on the field, who's in the county, who's day to day facing the challenges.
We need farmers from urban and suburban lands to come in and make it as easy as possible. And we need to make it easy for them to see the steps you take. Here's where you can get a loan. Here's where you start. Here's where to get a cheap truck because you're going to have to haul stuff up from there. And so that's really what the inspiration was: how do we take our 20,000 farms, 80% of them are small farms, and connect them with this next generation?
How did you start farming and found the Farmer Veteran Coalition?
O’Gorman: I just started farming as a first-generation farmer, which gives me a little bit of understanding of our need for more farmers and how farmers can get into this career. In 1990, when the demand for organic production jumped overnight, I was there and was hired to manage the first organic farm in Salinas. And then, I spent the next 20 years building three of the country's largest organic vegetable companies as their production manager. Then, I went on to start the Farmer Veteran Coalition.
[It was] absolutely [a] steep learning curve, and I was lucky to survive some early-on crashes and mistakes. I've been working with the Farmer Veteran Coalition. I started with just a handful of veterans and it's grown into a national organization with 46,000 veterans who have either started to farm or are interested in farming.
There are a lot of organizations out there that have funding to help train them, but there's nowhere where they can get the training they can get from an existing farm.
I'm excited to help veterans find somebody to match up and learn from. The wealth of experience that those 30-40,000 farm bureau members have across the state is the greatest thing they could be tapping into.
It's not just the knowledge of farming. There's a pace to it. There are a million different things that they're going to learn from working alongside someone who has that experience and has an operational farm that has to pay its bills and survive.
The first thought is [veterans] need something to do … [Farming] is stressful and demanding. And what the veterans taught me was that the difficulty of it was part of the challenge. And the real reward came [because] it gave them a sense of purpose, something as important as serving in the military. And the sense of farming and feeding people for our national security, for our economic security, for the growth and health of our rural communities, where many of them come from. It’s really been a tremendous fit.
This program is really targeting and focusing on people who are veterans, but also people who come from socially disadvantaged backgrounds. What exactly does that mean?
Houston: We have the Farmer Veteran Coalition to get 30% of the mentees to be veterans. Then, we're working with the Black Agricultural Working Group headed by Michael Harris to reach out to black farmers in the area. Interestingly enough, at the 2017 count for USDA, there were only 599 Black farmers in California. And so we'd really like the 2022 count to go up from there. Then, we're working with a young farmers and ranchers committee to do outreach into the counties.
Sixty percent of our farms have female operators, not exclusively, but they have a female as part of their … senior management structure. Four thousand farms are run by Asian Americans, 2,000 Native Americans, as I mentioned, 599 African Americans, and then 568 Native Hawaiians. And so it is diverse, but certainly not reflective of the diversity of California.
When a small farm goes out of business, it generally gets eaten by a larger farm. And so one of the things that's important for us is to have that competition and that new innovative blood coming in their hunger. They've got ideas. They're also sometimes more attuned to their generation. So, having those ideas and having that competition is critical for us as consumers to continue to benefit from the food. And as California goes, so goes the nation and the world with its food supply.
I've been up here in Sacramento for almost 25 years doing ag policy, and it's almost sort of like every step that we take — it's not intentional — but it sort of disadvantages the small farm. … It's not to say that we don't need regulations, but it's just compliance with those input costs. The barriers to entry continue to raise. And so as a small farmer, you're sort of already a disadvantage.
