Memo: Revitalizing Farm Communities With A Green New Deal
Lead Author: Charlie Mitchell
Contributors: Anthony Flaccavento, Frank James, and Ben Lilliston
Executive Producers: Greg Carlock and Julian Brave NoiseCat
A Green New Deal Will Allow American Farming Communities to Thrive in the 21st Century.
The Green New Deal is an ambitious plan to build broad-based prosperity and foster environmental justice while tackling the climate crisis. In a series of memos, Data for Progress is laying out a comprehensive vision for how a Green New Deal can transform food and agriculture systems in the United States. This particular memo focuses on the policies needed to support and nurture diversified, resilient food and farm markets for a thriving rural America.
Right now, America’s rural farm and food communities are in crisis. In the past 40 years, 50 percent of cattle operations, 90 percent of hog producers, and 80 percent of dairy farms have folded., The decimation of independent farms has distributed economic opportunity to a small number of players: Today, one percent of poultry and egg producers sell 99 percent of the industry’s output, and 17 percent of hog producers account for 96 percent of sales in the sector. Feedlots housing more than 32,000 cattle sell about 40 percent of finished cattle, and broadly, five percent of farms sell 75 percent of US agricultural products.
