Learn more and support the Massachusetts Farm Resiliency Fund here.

The widespread flooding that hit our region in mid-July illuminates many truths: the vulnerability of many local farms, the hard reality of climate change, and the amazing response that is possible when the community, non-profit and foundation partners, and government all step up and work together.

Paul Shoul photo

Current estimates are that more than 100 local farms were affected by the floods and that they lost a combined $15 million in crops but long-term effects are still being counted. The flooding came on the heels of two freezes that damaged peach, blueberry, and apple crops, and has been followed by continued heavy rains that have deluged even non-flooded fields. As our climate changes, these extreme weather events will become more common.

The response, from the generosity of individual donors to the speed with which our state government has acted, has been stunning. The governor just signed a supplemental budget that includes $20 million in disaster relief to cover crop losses. CISA’s Emergency Farm Fund is offering no-interest loans up to $25,000 to affected farms, and a recent disaster declaration will make low-interest federal loans available, too.

What is missing is money to cover all the other losses that farms have suffered, including the destruction of property and equipment. The new Massachusetts Farm Resiliency Fund can help fill this gap, and they’ve set an ambitious fundraising goal of $5 million to quickly get grants to farms.

Farmers are resilient and they are adapting to their new reality but they will need continued support and a robust emergency response system as the climate changes. You can support them, as always, by buying local, and you can help build up the MA Farm Resiliency Fund now so it’s there in the future.

Learn more at buylocalfood.org/helpfloodedfarms.

Philip Korman, executive director at CISA (Community involved in Sustaining Agriculture), South Deerfield

The Recorder, July 25, 2023

GUEST COLUMN: Farms, floods, and climate change

By Claire Morenon, Philip Korman, and Margaret Christie

On July 10, heavy rains led to widespread flooding alongside small rivers and creeks throughout our region. The next day, the Connecticut River overflowed its banks to levels not seen since Tropical Storm Irene in 2011.

Paul Shoul Photo

This flooding event was fast in some ways – the fields at Natural Roots Farm in Conway, along the South River, filled with water as farmers and their draft horses worked to save their deluged chickens and equipment. And it was slow in others, as farmers watched and waited over 24 hours to see how high the Connecticut River would rise.

Heavy rain has continued to fall, making some fields that didn’t flood too wet to access for farm work and increasing the likelihood of plant diseases that thrive in wet conditions.

Flooding is catastrophic for farms in many ways. The timing of this flood is especially damaging.

Flood waters sweep away plants, livestock, equipment and topsoil. Plants that survive generally can’t be harvested and eaten, because flood water is often contaminated with road runoff, sewage overflow, and other contaminants. Any edible part of a plant that contacts flood water or flooded soil can’t be sold or donated.

A flood that hits in early July has huge financial implications for the farms that were flooded: they have devoted immense time and money to growing and maintaining crops which are now unsalable, and they may not be able to plant and harvest new crops before the growing season is over.

Flooding impacted farms of all kinds: small start-ups, some of them operated by immigrant and refugee farmers; long-standing, diverse vegetable operations that sell directly to consumers through farm stands and CSAs; and large wholesale operations that supply supermarkets and corner stores across the state.

Farms of all sizes donate produce, too, so food pantries and food banks are also impacted.

Paul Shoul photo

The response to this disaster has been swift. Farmers have donated produce and young plants to flooded farms. Community members have contributed generously, and volunteers have turned out to help clean up mud and debris.

State and federal elected leaders came to see the damage and hear directly from farmers. Local legislators, the Massachusetts Department of Agricultural Resources, UMass Cooperative Extension, and nonprofits that focus on food and farms worked quickly and cooperatively to tally losses, address immediate needs and plan for a more comprehensive response to this and future climate-related disasters.

On Thursday, Gov. Maura T. Healey, in her second western Mass visit in three days, announced the launch of the Massachusetts Farm Resiliency Fund, a public/private initiative that offers a place to donate, a source of grants for impacted farms statewide and the beginnings of a safety net for future climate change events.

In addition, advocates are hopeful that state legislators will include a farm disaster fund in their supplemental budget.

Paul Shoul photo

Farmers are resilient and adaptable. Farming has always been a weather-dependent, narrow-margin occupation. But the weather extremes of our changing climate are bigger and more damaging than the everyday unpredictability of New England weather. This flood is the third weather event this year to bring widespread losses to local farms: peach buds were killed in February in a weekend cold snap during an otherwise warm winter. And a late frost in May greatly reduced blueberry and apple harvests.

These events match climate change predictions for our region, which include wild temperature fluctuations, increased precipitation and higher summer temperatures.

Local farmers have already begun to adjust their growing practices to increase resilience in the face of these changes. But to survive, they need more help. This must include more funding for research into climate-adapted farming practices, more financial support for farmers in making those changes and a more robust emergency response system.

Climate change will make extreme weather events more frequent. Recent flooding and freezes show the devastation these events can cause — and the response that’s possible. Farms saw an outpouring of community support. Massachusetts has begun to build the capacity for the larger response that will get us through this disaster and the ones to come.

Right now, funds are desperately needed. Go to buylocalfood.org to donate to the new Massachusetts Farm Resiliency Fund, individual farm fundraisers and CISA’s Emergency Farm Fund, which provides no-interest farm loans.

And don’t forget that using your grocery dollars to buy local food offers a two-part benefit: investing in local farms while enjoying summer’s bounty.

Claire Morenon is communications manager with CISA (Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture). Margaret Christie is CISA’s Special Projects Director. Philip Korman is the group’s executive director.

Celebrating 30 years of ‘Buy Local Food’

By Claire Morenon

The new year is an opportunity to reflect on the challenges, lessons and growth of the past year, and to prepare ourselves for and dream about what’s to come. For local farmers, that’s doubly true: most of them have put their fields to rest and they are budgeting, hiring, and making the crop plans for the growing season to come.

And at Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture (CISA), it’s triply true: we’re heading into our 30th anniversary year of supporting local farms and building connections between local farmers and their communities. This landmark year is an opportunity for reflection, dreaming and action on a vast, long-term scale.

Local farms, like many small businesses, have been on a roller coaster for the last three years, and 2023 brings many of the same uncertainties. While COVID is still a serious issue, especially for high-risk folks, the urgent response demanded of businesses in the early days of the pandemic have receded. But the many social and financial harms stemming from the pandemic continue to stress businesses of all sorts.

The most visible of these harms, to many of us, is inflation. Farms – along with restaurants, grocery stores and all the other businesses that make up our local food system – are dealing with a massive surge in input costs. For farmers, this is complicated by the seasonal nature of their businesses, where many expenses accrue in the winter months and aren’t recouped until the harvest begins in the summer. Then, because most of their products are highly perishable, they need to compete on price with products from around the globe with very different economics. This makes it extremely difficult to plan, to set prices, and to enter into contracts with any sense of comfort.

The difficulties of the current inflation cycle are connected to and compounded by the supply chain issues and labor shortages that have dogged businesses for the last year or more.

Climate change, and the increasingly extreme and unpredictable weather it brings, is another huge challenge for local farms. While farmers in the northeast are accustomed to variable weather, climate scientists predict a range of interconnected changes to come to the northeast. This includes rising temperatures, including more heatwaves, which stress humans, livestock, and many crops.

We’ll see more precipitation, including more extreme rainfall events, resulting in fields that can’t be worked, more localized flooding, more pests, more weed pressure, and more plant disease and rot. The last two years have brought first record-setting rains, and then months of drought. As one farmer shared with us, after 40 years of farming, “I now have no idea what I will plant, how much, or where, with the changing weather.”

This picture looks dire, and indeed the last several years have been uniquely challenging. Many small business owners are just exhausted, and we know that the years to come will bring new and serious difficulties. And still, 30 years into working to build a stronger local food system, we at CISA can see that this is not the whole story.

The first piece of good news is that local farmers are experts at resilience. They have ridden the waves caused by COVID, figuring out how to safely provide food to our communities during the darkest days of the pandemic and continually changing circumstances ever since.

They have jumped in as partners in the fight against hunger, which has only grown more urgent throughout the pandemic. And they are making changes to their crop plans, growing practices, and business plans so they can be more resilient in the face of a changing climate.

The second piece of good news is that they are not alone. There’s a web of support for local farms, including the state, local nonprofits, and the thousands of consumers who choose local. CISA works every day to strengthen the threads of that web by helping farmers secure grants and providing them with expert advice, building relationships between local businesses, and helping shoppers connect to local farms. Our work happens alongside, and often in partnership with, efforts that are focused on land preservation, fighting hunger, environmental action, and food justice.

Local farms are at the center of a healthy local food system, and a big part of why many of us love to call this place home. CISA is committed to supporting them, and we hope you’ll join us! Learn more about local farms and where you can find them, advocacy efforts, and more, at buylocalfood.org.

Claire Morenon is communications manager at CISA.

Many of us take a break from work and spend time gathering with loved ones at this time of year, providing an opportunity for reflection and contemplation alongside the merriment. As this year closes and we look ahead, we ask: What world will each of us work to create?

This past summer, local farms were again buffeted by extreme weather, one of the many challenging impacts of climate change in our region. After 2021’s record-setting rains, this past growing season brought months of drought conditions. Farmers in the Northeast are, of course, accustomed to variable weather, and they make their plans every year with a lot of uncertainty in mind. But climate change is bringing new and potentially devastating shifts, and farmers will need a lot of support to sustain their businesses in the face of it.

Climate scientists predict a range of interconnected changes to come to the Northeast. Rising temperatures, including more heatwaves, will stress the health of workers and livestock and reduce production of some heat-sensitive vegetable and fruit crops. We will see more precipitation, including more extreme rainfall events, resulting in sodden fields that can’t be worked, more localized flooding, more pests, more weed pressure, and more plant disease and rot. And more extreme temperature swings will damage crops in unpredictable ways. Some may remember 2016 as the year without peaches, when a cold snap destroyed early buds and decimated the crop throughout the Northeast. Similarly, temperature swings in the fall can affect fruit tree production the following year, while maple syrup production relies on a specific temperature pattern in the early spring.

It’s easy to feel like climate change is just too big a problem to even think about, and that there’s nothing any of us can do about it. And indeed, that list of challenges to local agriculture feels quite daunting. But we know two things: 1) local farmers are experts at resilience, and 2) they will need help, in the form of grants, expert advice, and community support.

Farmers are already adapting to the changing climate. They are expanding irrigation and drainage systems, adjusting crop plans, experimenting with no- and low-till growing practices, building greenhouses and high tunnels to protect plants, and some are even transitioning to new crops. If you want to read some of these stories, check out CISA’s recent special series with the Daily Hampshire Gazette and Greenfield Recorder at buylocalfood.org/climate-change-stories-2022).

At CISA, we are committed to supporting those efforts. In 2021, we added a full-time staff position dedicated to supporting farmers with climate change adaptation, and we recently expanded our Emergency Farm Fund loan program to be responsive to year-round weather-related losses. And we’re energized to be working with many peer organizations that are responding to climate change in varied ways.

Federal farm policy is the backdrop that shapes much of what individual farmers can do themselves and the support that small local nonprofits like CISA can offer. Next year, federal legislators will be renegotiating the Farm Bill, a huge piece of legislation that comes up for renewal every five years. This massive package is the primary force that shapes our nation’s food system. It addresses agricultural research, crop insurance, commodity payment programs, and federal nutrition programs (school lunch, SNAP and WIC, and other emergency food programs), among others.

The new Farm Bill is an opportunity for farmers and communities to demand the food system we want: one that is resilient, sustainable, inclusive, and just. CISA has endorsed the Farm Bill platform laid out by the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC), which places climate change resilience as one of its top three priorities for the 2023 Farm Bill, alongside investments in rural economic development and advancing racial equity in the food system. We need support for programs that help farmers adapt their operations to a changing climate, and for programs focused on identifying the ways that farmers can help mitigate the effects of climate change for us all. To stay in the loop and to take action, connect with CISA at buylocalfood.org/advocacy or find NSAC at sustainableagriculture.net.

And on a day-to-day basis, you can help farms stay afloat by choosing to buy local! Make a resolution to switch some of you purchases to locally grown, find a new farmers’ market or farm stand, and seek out restaurants or grocery stores that support local farms. You — and our local farmers — will be glad you did!

The Work and Family Mobility Act, passed this summer by an overwhelming majority in the Massachusetts Legislature, was a common-sense move towards safer roads and transportation options for everyone. It enabled all qualified state residents, regardless of immigration status, to apply for a standard Massachusetts driver’s license, thereby ensuring safer roads and transportation options for all of us. Now, this new law is under threat — and you can help save it by voting “yes” on ballot question 4 on Nov. 8.

The Work and Family Mobility act has a straightforward logic to it: If every driver is trained, tested, licensed, and insured, the roads will be safer for all of us. That’s why it garnered the support of the Massachusetts Major Cities Chiefs of Police Association, whose members lead two-thirds of the state’s total police force, as well as by Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey and a majority of the state’s district attorneys and sheriffs. Similar measures have been passed in 17 other states, and the results are clear: significantly fewer hit-and-runs (a drop of 10% in Connecticut, for example) and steep declines in uninsured drivers (80% in Utah, for another example).

Why is an agricultural organization like CISA (Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture) taking a stand on this issue? Because we know that our nation’s agricultural system and our immigration system are inextricably linked — and they are both deeply flawed. Most of the food grown in the United States is produced under physically demanding, unstable, low-paying conditions, and studies show that up to half of farm workers are undocumented. We know that much of the food grown in Massachusetts, too, is grown by immigrant workers. These workers put in long, demanding hours growing food that we all rely on, and they are essential to keeping local farms running. They pay taxes while being ineligible to collect any federal unemployment or retirement and while commonly being denied any pathway to legal residency. The right to obtain a driver’s license is a small change with huge impacts for these communities, enabling them to drive safely to work, to feed their families, and to live their lives without daily fear.

Our nation needs better food and farm policies and serious immigration reform. In the meantime, our decisions must respond to the current reality. Everyone who needs to be on the road — which certainly includes people who live and work in our rural part of the state — should be allowed to take the necessary steps to drive legally. This is a no-brainer step towards making the roads safer for all of us, as results from 17 other states show.

You can learn more about this campaign, and how to support it, by searching for Yes for Safer Roads on all social media platforms or visiting saferroadsma.com. And on Nov. 8, turn over your ballot to find question 4 and say yes to safer roads, yes to legal and regulated driving, and yes to common sense!

Philip Korman is executive director of CISA (Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture).

You’ve undoubtedly noticed that prices for many things you need to buy are much higher than they used to be. Each time we fill our cars with gas, pay our rent, or do the grocery shopping, we’re reminded that the U.S. inflation rate skyrocketed to 8.6% in May, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Although rising prices impact everyone, they are much more challenging for people with lower incomes.

Farmers, like everyone else, are trying to figure out how to manage their budgets given rapid increases in their costs, including seeds, fertilizer, fuel and labor. As we move into the height of the harvest season, farmers are making hard decisions about how much to raise their prices to cover their costs, while still keeping the food they harvest affordable to as many customers as possible. Hatfield farmer Harrison Bardwell explains, “Our input costs are up this year between 8% (for seeds) and 80% (for fertilizer). We try to make our products accessible and affordable to everyone, but we are in a very difficult position.”

In many cases, this decision is out of farmers’ hands — often, they are price takers, not price makers. Most of their products are highly perishable, and they can’t wait for a better price to sell. They’re competing with farmers from across the globe, many located in places where costs of production are much lower. And many shoppers have lots of choices about where to buy food and will quickly turn elsewhere if they feel prices are too high.

Farmers have been managing these pressures for a long time. This year, they are also contending with rapidly rising input costs, and are coming off 2021’s historically poor growing season, when many crops were lost due to extended heavy rains (a weather pattern we are likely to see more often due to climate change). Like other businesses, they are also juggling supply chain headaches and labor shortages. Many farmers really need a few good years to recover from last year’s losses.

Income and wealth inequality, already higher in the United States than in almost any other developed country, continue to rise. One percent of Americans control 32% of our wealth, and the bottom 50% own only 3% of the wealth, according to the Federal Reserve.

The federal policies that shape our national food system suppress food prices, and as a result, we pay less for food in the United States than residents of peer nations. These policies help to keep the peace by limiting the devastating impacts that our economic system’s wealth inequality has on low-income people but haven’t erased hunger. Cheap food policies put the squeeze on farmers, forcing them to make tough calculations to survive in a system that often treats fair pay and environmental stewardship as “externalities” rather than essential costs that should be factored into the price of food.

Many of us are making hard choices these days about how to cover our rising bills, and too many households face hunger or food insecurity — double the number from pre-pandemic levels, according to figures from Project Bread. There is some valuable assistance available to low-income families: if you qualify for SNAP benefits, the state Healthy Incentives Program (HIP) provides a monthly instant rebate of $40 per household for purchase of local fruits and vegetables from participating vendors, helping to stretch your dollars a little bit. Visit buylocalfood.org/HIP to find HIP outlets.

In addition to providing delicious, healthy food, local farms offer a host of additional benefits. They spend more of their income in the local community, contributing to a multiplier effect that creates jobs, supports local government services, and helps to sustain other businesses. In rural areas, farmers steward much of our open land. Urban farmers, too, offer more than fresh food, sustaining pockets of greenery and opportunities to learn skills and to see how food is grown. Many farms donate part of their harvest to address hunger: The Food Bank of Western Mass receives food from more than 50 farms, providing over 450,000 meals.

Local farms feed our families, care for our land, and offer beauty, fun, and education — sustaining not only our bodies, but our communities and quality of life. At CISA, we’re working to build a food system where everyone has access to nutritious, culturally appropriate food, and where farm owners and farmworkers can make a living. If you share this vision, and your budget makes it possible, support your local farms! These added benefits are worth every penny.

Margaret Christie is the special projects director at CISA (Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture).

Letter to the Editor:

This Thursday, every state senator in Massachusetts will have the opportunity to say yes to public safety, fairness, and dignity by voting in favor of the Work and Family Mobility Act. By voting “yes,” the Senate will move us one step closer to joining 16 states and D.C. in giving undocumented residents the simple right to apply for a driver’s license.

The more people know about the bill, the more likely they are to support it.

Yes, it does allow people with documentation from their home country, such as a birth certificate or passport, to take the test to get a driver’s license. No, it does not allow a person with a driver’s license to vote or use it for identification purposes when traveling (i.e., it is not Real ID-compliant).

Why do an overwhelming majority of district attorneys and county sheriffs support the bill? Because it serves public safety. When everyone who drives is trained and tested on the rules of the road — and insured — we are all safer.

From CISA’s standpoint, we know that many undocumented people work on local farms — growing food that feeds all of us. The right to obtain a driver’s license is a small change with enormous positive impacts, enabling them to drive safely to their jobs, raise their children, and live their lives without daily fear.

Please contact your state senator now and ask them to vote yes on the Work and Family Mobility Act on Thursday!

Philip Korman
Executive Director, Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture (CISA)

By Claire Morenon

The pandemic has brought a lot of new concepts and phrases into common understanding – and right now, what’s top of mind for many of us is “supply chain disruption.” Factory shutdowns and slow-downs because of pandemic protocols, worker shortages, and overwhelmed ports and trucking systems have crashed into increased consumer demand and created shortages of all sorts of products, and contributed to rising prices across the economy.

Small, locally owned businesses rely in part on the same supply chains as everyone else for what they need. So, though we may sometimes think of our local economy as separate from the distant churnings of the global economy, even tiny businesses that only sell their products locally or directly to customers are heavily impacted by these disruptions. From the boxes that farms use to pack products to basic ingredients at local restaurants, costs are going up or supplies are impossible to find. Some distributors prioritize larger buyers when they are unable to fill all their orders, which puts smaller businesses at even more of a disadvantage.

One small business owner, who sells locally made products in jars, told me that they dipped into their rainy day fund to buy extra jars when they saw the writing on the wall last year, which has allowed them to keep their production lines open. Of course, this type of forward-planning depends on access to funds, storage space, and information from suppliers, and isn’t always possible for smaller businesses.

At CISA, we talk often about building a resilient local food system. Part of that vision includes local farms and related businesses having enough options and enough resources so that they can survive unexpected demands and challenges like this. When farms can count on financial support from shoppers, retailers, and other buyers in their surrounding communities, they can weather challenges and provide meaningful food security to the region.

The ongoing COVID crisis and the related disruptions that have emerged because of it have highlighted both the existing resilience of our local food system, and some of the places that it needs ongoing support. Especially in the early days of the pandemic, as shoppers worried about supply shortages and looked for alternative ways to shop, local farms made huge adjustment to keep our communities fed.

New partnerships between farms, nonprofits, school systems, and others have helped low-income families weather the pandemic’s economic hardships. And local restaurant owners have told us that their years-long relationships with local farms are showing their strengths now — they can count on deliveries from farm partners even as sourcing from global and national outlets is disrupted.

Still, local businesses of all sorts are feeling the strain of the past 20 months and the new hardships that just keep coming. This is a great time to prioritize local businesses in your purchasing — whether it’s regular groceries, ingredients for upcoming celebrations, or gifts — and to be kind to the people working hard to meet your needs in sometimes impossible circumstances.

It’s also an important moment for much larger investment in our local food system and in the local infrastructure that supports it. In 2020, the state established the Food Security Infrastructure Grant (FSIG) program, which invested $36 million to help farms, markets, anti-hunger agencies, and other food system enterprises address vulnerabilities exposed by the pandemic. This funded 369 projects in 182 municipalities, all designed to help local food businesses keep producing food and to ensure that state residents have access to it.

Currently, the state is making decisions about how to distribute another $15 million in FSIG money. And right now, state legislators are debating how to allocate $5.3 billion in federal ARPA (American Rescue Plan Act) funding. Advocates, led by the Mass Food System Collaborative and including CISA, are calling for legislators to support full funding of FSIG as written into the House version of the bill: $78 million, half of which should be dedicated to the emergency food system and half to farms, retailers, fisheries, and other food system businesses.

Stronger local food and farming infrastructure builds our region’s resilience, the importance of which has never been more clear. Wise investment of ARPA funding in the food system, and specifically in the FSIG program, presents an opportunity to come back from the challenges of COVID stronger and better prepared for the next crisis. Visit our partner at mafoodsystem.org for updates on this important budget priority, and opportunities to get involved.

Claire Morenon is the Communications Manager at CISA (Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture).

Farming is a tough business — that’s no secret. Farmers work long, physically demanding hours and farm businesses run on extremely narrow margins, with their crops — and therefore, their incomes — at the mercy of the weather. Farmers have a reputation for stoicism, but these stressors can carry a real mental health burden for the people who juggle them.

Financial stress is at the core of this issue. This is true for all small businesses, but especially so for farmers because of how long it takes to see a return on their investments and because of how reliant they are on the weather. Each spring, fruit and vegetable growers buy supplies and hire crews — often depending on a seasonal line of credit — to begin growing crops that they can’t sell until many months later.

Each growing season brings weather-related perils that can seriously limit, or even wipe out, the yield of each crop. Meat and dairy producers, similarly, have heavy up-front costs, and they rely on good weather to grow and store animal feed.

When it comes time to sell their crops, many local farmers are stretched thin across every possible sales outlet: farmers’ markets, farm stands, CSA farm shares, and wholesale. This is a strategic decision that many of them have made in the face of global competition and artificially suppressed food prices, but it makes for an extremely complicated business model with a million details to manage every day.

It’s easy to talk about all of this in bland terms that don’t really capture the stress, anxiety, and loss that can come along with it. Farmers can spend months growing a crop, just to see it — and the income it promised — destroyed by rain or disease. They make their plans each winter knowing that the weather, changing markets, or a thousand other unknowns can derail them.

For many farmers, there’s not much space between their businesses, their family structures, and their own identities. Many family farms support multiple generations, so the entire extended family’s financial well-being — and often their very homes — depend on it. Farmers feel a responsibility to previous and future generations to steward their land and keep their businesses healthy, regardless of how circumstances around them change. This is both a privilege and a heavy emotional burden to carry.

COVID-19 has brought new stressors. From the moment that COVID-19 shut down winter markets and threw all of 2020’s plans up in the air, sales for local food have been on a roller coaster. Farmers have been hustling to stay on top of rapidly changing circumstances and to make plans in the face of countless unknowns. The pandemic has also intensified long-term problems — the Valley is experiencing an affordable housing crunch, which makes it harder for people who work on farms to find places to live. Many businesses are having a hard time finding workers, which points to much bigger problems in how labor is valued and compensated.

On top of all of that, 2021 has been a very wet growing season, which has caused increased disease pressure, crop losses, and unworkably wet fields for many farms. July was the second wettest on record for western Mass, with almost 12 inches of rain. Farmers have been telling us at CISA that this is the worst growing season in decades — and with climate change bringing more rain and more extreme weather events, this pattern is likely to continue in future years.

We will be opening CISA’s Emergency Farm Fund in the fall to offer no-interest loans to farms that have seen losses due to this year’s excessive rains, which can help relieve the financial burden and, hopefully, some of the stress.

This year, the USDA announced a new Farm and Ranch Stress Assistance Network grant program. The Massachusetts Department of Agricultural Resources successfully applied for a $500,000 grant to establish a network that will better connect farmers and the agricultural community, including service providers, to mental health resources and address existing gaps in available support. This is a great, and necessary, opportunity to develop new resources to address this issue.

The farmers that we work with at CISA talk often about how much they love their work, how much farming means to them, and how grateful they are to be caring for their land and growing food for their communities. And we’re certainly grateful to them for all they do, too. Acknowledging the burdens they carry, and starting to break down the stigma around mental health, is just one step toward helping farming to be healthier and more sustainable work.

Claire Morenon, Communications Manager, Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture

Local businesses of all sorts have been through the wringer over the past year and a half — and at CISA, where we work with local farms, food producers, restaurants, and retailers, we’ve seen their immense flexibility and resilience. Local farmers’ markets, which exist as part business, part community space, part event, and always as a labor of love, faced distinct challenges because of COVID-19. Now that we’re back in the height of the growing season, it’s a good moment to consider the factors that make farmers’ markets a unique and vital component of our local food system.

Our region boasts 29 summer farmers’ markets and four winter markets in 26 towns, bringing together farmers, food producers, chefs, artists, and more to feed their communities. Most of these markets are independent— some have nonprofit or city support, but most are run by farmer committees, super part-time market managers, or volunteers. When COVID-19 hit, every business had to scramble to figure out how to adapt: how to keep staff safe, how to keep customers safe, and how to apply changing regulations to their daily operations. For farmers’ markets, the shifting circumstances were especially tough. Farmers’ markets are transient, dependent on their host locations to exist, and the winter farmers’ markets that were operating in schools, senior centers, and other community locations in March 2020 had to shut down abruptly as their sites closed or sharply limited access to the public.

That spring, summer market managers hustled to figure out how their outdoor markets could safely open. Farmers’ markets were declared essential businesses by the governor, but each market had to work closely with their local health department and other town or city officials to establish what safe re-opening would entail. Many markets operate on city property and need permission to open, and health departments in Massachusetts have a lot of autonomy to set the rules for food sales in their own cities. During the early months of COVID-19, guidance for and oversight of farmers’ markets was just one of a million priorities for these officials, so market managers had to advocate hard for their markets. Most summer markets had delayed openings in 2020.

As markets opened, the additional time and money needed to set up signage, keep hand sanitizer stocked, and manage the number and flow of visitors was significant. Market managers, volunteers, and vendors create the market space anew every week, starting with an empty street or parking lot or field, and the demands of the pandemic compounded that labor.

Farmers’ markets are more than a physical location for farmers to sell their wares — they are also community gathering spaces, venues for music and art, and hubs for organizing and advocacy. COVID-19 demanded that markets be stripped down to just their retail function. This shift in the public sphere — away from leisure and connection and towards essential functions only — was one of the quieter sorrows of the pandemic, and it’s been a joy to see music and fun coming back to the markets in 2021.

Markets are crucial access points for HIP (Healthy Incentives Program), a statewide program that offers an instant rebate of up to $80 per month when shoppers use SNAP to buy produce directly from participating local farms. This program means a significant increase in grocery budgets for low-income families across the state, many of whom don’t have the transportation or schedule flexibility to go to participating farms which are largely located outside of city centers. Farmers’ markets (along with urban farms like Gardening The Community in Springfield) bridge that gap.

For the first time in its five years in operation, HIP was fully funded by the state in 2020 and was able to run year-round without any interruption. This was part of the state’s response to rising hunger rates because of the pandemic, but advocates (including CISA) led by the MA Food System Collaborative have been pushing for year-round funding for years — it is crucial to the people who rely on it for food and to farmers who are counting on HIP sales. Stay tuned to mafoodystem.org for opportunities to support this vital program.

It’s July, which means that markets are full of all the most exciting crops: fresh corn, juicy tomatoes, and peaches and berries, and everything else you need for dinner. They have weathered a tough stretch to be there for you every week, and this is a wonderful time of year to visit them. Find a market near you at buylocalfood.org.

Claire Morenon is the Communications Manager at CISA (Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture).

The COVID-19 crisis was impossible to ignore because of the speed with which it upended every facet of our lives, along with its duration, and the global scale of its devastation. We are living through the early stages of another crisis — one with no end and which is going to be global and all-encompassing in its scale, although its creeping impacts on most American’s daily lives makes it easier to ignore: climate change.

Of course we shouldn’t be ignoring climate change, and many of us are not — climate scientists and activists have been ringing alarm bells for decades, and global leaders are focused to varying degrees on taking action. And climate change is becoming more visible as extreme weather events become more frequent — just this month, news sources brought warnings about severe drought in the American West and the terrible forest fire season that is likely to come.

Here in the Northeast, farmers can see and feel the impacts of climate change. At CISA, farmers tell us how things have changed: shifting planting seasons and growing schedules, increased pest and disease pressure due to warmer winters, and more extreme, damaging weather events.

The federal government’s Fourth National Climate Change Assessment, released at the end of 2018, supports these observations. Average annual temperatures in the state have increased nearly 3 degrees over the past century, and over the next two decades, the Northeast is predicted to experience the most significant warming in the contiguous United States. The past 10 years have been 13% wetter than the long-term average, and the number of extreme precipitation events (days with more than 2 inches) is up 30%.

Before COVID-19 hit, we were warned that a new pandemic was likely — until 2017, the Department of Homeland Security ran an annual analysis of pandemic models and their likely impacts. Still, when the crisis came, we weren’t ready. The Trump administration’s inadequate response failed to control the spread of the virus, provide necessary equipment to hotspots, and limit the effects of the pandemic on the economy, small businesses, and especially low-wage workers.

While the former administration’s response to COVID-19 was extreme in its dishonesty and inaction, what indication do we have that the Biden administration, or any future administration, is prepared to fully address the crisis that climate change promises to bring — either to mitigate its extent, or respond to its impacts?

COVID-19 losses were not borne equally in the United States. The AP reports that “the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, adjusting for population age differences, estimates that Native Americans, Latinos, and Blacks are two to three times more likely than white people to die of COVID-19.” The Pew Research Center also reported in the early days of the pandemic that Black and Hispanic Americans were the hardest hit by wage and job loss, which were compounded by racial discrepancies in multi-generational wealth and savings.

Environmental issues also disproportionately affect Black and brown Americans, from air quality to clean water access, and research predicts that the poorest communities will suffer the most economic harm due to climate change. COVID-19 both intensified and highlighted the ways that race and class make people more vulnerable to a crisis — will those lessons inform climate change responses with an eye towards greater equity?

Local farms need to make changes to adapt to climate change, and they also have an important role to play in climate change mitigation — both of which require costly investments that farmers need support to make. The National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, of which CISA is a member, is advocating that the federal American Jobs Plan must include funding that will help farmers tackle the climate crisis — investing immediately in renewable energy and sustainable growing practices on farms while conducting large-scale research on climate and agriculture.

At CISA, we’re hiring (as in, the job is open! Details at buylocalfood.org!) a new Farm Business Support team member to support farms in the Valley with climate change adaptation and farm sustainability.

The past 16 months have been a trial, and a sobering glimpse into the future. While climate change doesn’t start and stop with agriculture, a comprehensive response to the looming crisis must include farms — both to reduce the impacts that farms have on the climate, and to ensure that they can survive a changing climate and keep our food supply secure.

Claire Morenon is the communications manager at CISA (Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture).