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Local farmers are worn out by drought as a new farm bill remains distant — and potentially unhelpful for smaller operations
By: Theo Peck-Suzuki | Report for America
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ATHENS, Ohio (WOUB/Report for America) — It’s been a bad year for Lindsay Klaunig.
The co-owner of Trouvaille Farm started the spring with contracts for $30,000 worth of crops. As of late September, she said, she has lost two-thirds of that to the drought ravaging southeast Ohio. Now she’s wondering if she can even farm next year.
“We basically worked for free all year — worked three times as hard as we normally would to make half as much,” she said.
Klaunig is more outspoken than some of her peers, but the problems she’s facing are widespread. State and federal programs exist to support farmers through bad years, but they provide little to no relief to the small-scale farms that dot the Appalachian foothills. What aid is available comes with strings attached or pays too little to have much meaningful impact.
Meanwhile, Congress still has yet to pass a new farm bill — something it was supposed to do in 2023. A new bill could solve the very problems Klaunig and others are experiencing, but its passage remains far off. The delay is a source of profound frustration for farmers, who are finding it hard to meet the challenges of the present or plan for the future with the aging farm bill of 2018.
“Let’s look at anything from 2018 versus 2024. We have been through so much in the last five, six years … working on those numbers that might have worked in 2018 are not working in 2024,” said Karin Bright, who serves as a trustee for the Ohio Farm Bureau and as president of the Athens County Food Pantry.
Petruziello said the House bill would boost funding for commodity crop programs by 15-20%. That’s billions of additional dollars for farms — just not ones like Klaunig’s.
“If you’re growing (a) mixed vegetable operation, that increase in money does nothing for you,” Petruziello said.
The USDA considers “covered commodity” crops to be wheat, corn, sorghum, barley, oats, seed cotton, long- and medium-grain rice, certain pulses (legume seeds), soybeans and other oil seeds and peanuts. Commodity farms are typically large-scale operations, and their crops are often used as inputs in some other kind of production: For example, sorghum is typically used as livestock feed.
Klaunig said starting a commodity farm wouldn’t have been an option for her even if she wanted to.
“That’s very expensive. Land — it requires land we couldn’t have afforded. It requires equipment we could never have afforded. So you don’t just like, start up a little commodity farm on your own. Usually, that takes generational wealth, which we didn’t have,” she said.
Bright said most farms in the U.S. are not large-scale industrial farms.
“The vast majority of farms in the country are family farms. They are small family farms … and they will be doing a lot more of (those) specialty kinds of things,” she said.
A specialty crop is basically anything that isn’t a commodity. Potatoes, tomatoes, pumpkins, apples, cabbage — these common household foods are considered specialty crops. Such crops are especially common in southeast Ohio, where the terrain makes big commodity operations impractical.
“We don’t farm by the acre, we farm by the patch,” Bright joked.
“The money … could be cuts to programs that we greatly support,” Wolcott said, adding that it’s not clear whether the bill is affordable in general.
That’s why OEFFA has come out against the House farm bill — even as Petruziello acknowledges a new bill is desperately needed.
“Getting a bill that we know is bad now locks in five years of farm policy that we know is bad,” he said.
The alternative is to extend the 2018 farm bill — something Congress has already had to do after failing to pass a bill in 2023. Another extension would cause its own problems, Petruziello said, but at least then legislators could come back in a few months and try again.
Ty Higgins of the Ohio Farm Bureau took a different view.
“From our perspective, the way the farm bill looks now is very agreeable, and the most important part of it for us is that it’s bipartisan,” Higgins said, adding that the bill will likely evolve throughout the rest of the legislative process.
A handful of House Democrats crossed party lines to join Republicans in voting the House bill out of committee. The picture in the Senate is quite different: According to Petruziello, the Democratic proposal is more closely aligned with what he said is needed for small farmers, while the Republican proposal is similar to the House version. Details are scant because no Senate proposal has yet come out of committee.
Bright expressed frustration that the process as a whole has been so partisan.
“What galls me is … this is a bipartisan issue. This is not Democrats, Republicans. This is not, should not be that way. This should be something that is supported across both parts of the aisle,” she said.
In the meantime, southeast Ohio farmers are stuck with a bunch of aid programs that have barely made a dent in the losses they’ve suffered in this summer’s catastrophic drought.
Joanne Pfeiffer raises heifers with her husband on a farm that once belonged to her grandparents. This year, they had to sell roughly a quarter of their 60-cow herd due to the drought. That’s bad: They’re supposed to earn a return on those cows over several seasons.
Pfeiffer said her farm is eligible for disaster relief money, but the numbers don’t come close to covering their losses.
“The numbers I looked at the other day looked like it was maybe gonna be … around $50-$60 per cow. And before any of this drought, round bales of hay were probably $30,” she said. “That’s not gonna go really very far.”
As meager as the disaster relief is for Pfeiffer’s livestock farm, it’s better than what Klaunig gets for her lost seeds and vegetables, which is nothing.
“A lot of the structures that I wish were there simply don’t exist,” Klaunig said. “And a lot of them are sort of like — I saw someone call it ‘ghost support’ or ‘ghost networks of support,’ in which they seem to exist, and there’s whole websites about them, and then when you actually dig into it, there’s no help. It’s not real. It’s not actually for you, it’s for somebody else.”
In theory, Klaunig could have insured her specialty crops through the USDA’s Whole Farm Revenue Protection Program, but she said that wouldn’t have worked for several reasons.
“I could give details but overall- mountain of paperwork and recording keeping, premium cost that is too high considering low potential payout, long list of rules and exceptions that don’t allow flexibility for the way a small diverse farm actually operates,” she wrote in a text message.
Another option would be a low-interest disaster assistance loan like those offered by the U.S. Small Business Association. These loans defer repayment for a year and come with a maximum of 4% interest. That’s still not appealing to Klaunig.
“I don’t consider a loan to be actual help, since it’s just more debt. For that to be helpful, I’d need to assume that next year will be better and we’d be able to make enough farming … to pay for two years of operating (covering next year and this past year),” she wrote. “That’s unearned optimism- there’s no reason to believe next year will be that favorable. This drought could extent, or it could be the wettest year on record; I could have a health or family crisis- any of those possibilities could mean another season without income.”
“Because it’s not about climate change. It’s not this steady increase every year that we can count on or we can plan for or adapt to,” she said. “That’s the problem. It’s chaotic.”
Sure, Klaunig said, this year brought a record drought — but next year could bring torrential rains and a frost in July. The lack of predictability is wreaking havoc on the already risky business of farming.
“These conditions are … outside of what you could even plan for,” she said.
Climate change is also another sticking point for OEFFA in the House farm bill. The House version would retain funding for conservation programs but remove the stipulation that they be used on climate mitigation, according to Petruziello.
Klaunig expressed deep frustration toward Congress for, in her view, ignoring the needs of small farmers in favor of large agricultural businesses that can afford to hire lobbyists.
“I want to believe that these politicians want to help small farmers. I have no evidence to support that,” she said.
However, she praised Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, who introduced legislation last year that would revamp the Whole Farm Revenue Protection Program. Klaunig wrote that his proposed changes “make sense to me, and maybe those tweaks would make it worthwhile.”
Brown said he’s fighting to get those changes into the new farm bill.
“Small family farmers don’t always have access to the same tools and resources that are more readily available to large row crop farms,” he said in a statement. The changes he’s proposing, he said, would “ensure that small family farmers have access to crop insurance that works for their farm.”
Negotiations over the new farm bill are set to resume after the November elections. Klaunig said she would like to see more Americans advocating for small farmers.
“If other people care about keeping farms, you need to do the work,” she said. “Stop asking farmers to do it. We’re already tired.”