by Andy Gricevich, Newsletter Writer
On July 8, Governor Tony Evers signed into law the 2021-23 budget for Wisconsin. There was a lot on the table, and an unsurprising amount of debate and negotiation between the Democratic governor and the Republican-led Joint Finance Committee (JFC). Among the issues at stake in this budget were many programs and provisions relating to agriculture, rural economies and food security—all matters that affect the entire state, and are of particular relevance to those of us who value a vibrant local food system.
With the JFC in favor of removing funding for many programs, Evers used his line-item veto power to preserve most of them, albeit in compromised form. How does the finalized budget play out for Wisconsin’s food system, from producers to processors to consumers? I talked with Nick Levendofsky, Government Relations Director for the Wisconsin Farmers Union (WFU), about the process leading up to the budget, some of its likely consequences, and how it aligns with WFU’s goals of promoting thriving rural communities, a strong family farming movement, and universal access to good, locally produced food, and quality healthcare.
The Wisconsin Farmers Union has long been a strong voice for everyday Wisconsinites. It’s brought that voice to discussions with Evers, his staff, and other government officials, throughout the process leading up to the budget. A member-driven organization, WFU annually decides on ‘special orders of business’ to guide its efforts. “This year,” says Levendofsky, “one of those was meat processing; another was climate change; another was on responding to the pandemic.” In response to the involvement of WFU and other organizations, all those concerns ended up with a place in “a pretty lofty and ambitious budget, for which many knew it was likely that (Evers) wasn’t going to get most, if not all, of what he was asking for. We needed to be realistic, and ready to negotiate and compromise, knowing that the governor’s numbers were going to have to come down.”
That’s indeed what generally happened. Nonetheless, the fact that a bipartisan budget was approved at all, in the current political climate, is an achievement. The budget as it stands also keeps important issues live for further work going forward.
FRAGILE SYSTEMS
Access to good food has never been guaranteed for everyone, and, as Levedofsky says, “It’s definitely something the pandemic exposed; our food system and the food chain are deeply flawed.” Along with reduced work forces throughout the industry leading to periods of empty shelves at the store, the widespread desire to stay out of public places led many people to seek alternative ways to get food—and those also came with challenges. “On Facebook, so much was happening with people asking where they could get this or that, could they buy directly from the farmer?” There were sudden spikes in demand for many local food products, and panic buying often wiped out supplies quickly. It’s taken a long time for our foodshed to catch up, and that’s partly because of the difficulties hard-working food producers themselves have faced.
In a time that highlighted all forms of our vulnerability, rural people, including farmers, have been particularly hard-hit. “A lot of farmers don’t have health insurance, unless they have a job on the side that offers that benefit, or a spouse with a job in town that offers it.” That’s one reason WFU—which, with the governor, also strongly supports expanding Badgercare—also pushed for a provision in the budget to fund farmer mental health assistance. “Farmers love to pride themselves on their independence. Unfortunately, that can also lead to isolation, and certainly the pandemic exposed that a lot. It changes things when you don’t go to town much anymore, except for the rare times you go to get groceries or pick up parts.”
“Also, markets took a major hit during the pandemic. We were in the middle of a trade war, and frankly still are. All these things—throw in weather, and the stresses of everyday life…again, $100,000 [the reduced figure in the final budget] is great, and it’s appreciated, but it’s not nearly enough to deal with the problems so many folks are facing. Mental health issues, depression, anxiety, and also suicide—we’re losing farmers every day to that. I wish there were better ways to handle it than throwing money at it, but money helps. Oftentimes there aren’t these mental health services in rural areas, or—if there are—they’re not funded adequately.” Our food system is a system of people, and the current safeguards we have weren’t built to handle the kinds of pressure they had to endure in the last couple of years.
MEETING PROCESSING CHALLENGES
One frequent theme on those Facebook discussions was the difficulty people had in sourcing local meats, especially early in the pandemic. It wasn’t so much that the animals weren’t there, or that livestock producers were unable to have them ready for market—rather, there was a bottleneck when it came to getting the animals processed. Especially for smaller producers (like those who bring us pastured, grass-fed, humanely-raised meat), processing “has been a major challenge, even before COVID—and COVID really heightened it as a priority; it exposed those vulnerabilities to the general public. Things were getting backed up because there were labor shortages, and there were issues with upgrades to facilities.”
The new budget includes a program to provide some funding for processors to upgrade equipment and facilities, and to hire more workers. “The governor had originally brought forward a plan for about a million dollars a year on that, and it got knocked down significantly to $200,000 a year. We’re grateful for every dollar we get; it’s nice to get any kind of funding for anything that’s new like that, because we were told early on that no new programs would receive any kind of funding. The problem, though, with a program that’s only $200,000 a year, is: now you’ve created a small pool of money for a group that’s fairly good-sized to compete for. How do you break up that $200,000? Do you only create a handful of grants? Do you break it down even further, and that way you can spread it out?”
“We’re going to continue to push for those smaller meat processors—small-to-mid-sized folks—because I believe, and from interviews we’ve done with them over the summer months, and conversations we’ve had over the last year and a half—they’re the ones that need the help, not the JBSs, the CargilLs—they’re not the ones who need that assistance, so much as the mom-and-pop shops. They’re the ones who are truly struggling.”
WATERSHEDS
The hard work of farming doesn’t always make it easy to put long-term ecological goals on the same level as getting a good crop to market. The Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection (or DATCP), which oversees many of the food-related grants and programs in the budget, will again administer the Producer-Led Watershed Protection Program as part of this budget. Focusing especially on traditional grain and dairy operations, it aims to help create a “win-win” situation that links profitability and productivity with care for our lakes, rivers, and streams.
Under the program, any application for funds has to include at least five farmers in the same watershed, working together with conservation-oriented organizations to form collaborative projects. Such projects might involve composting manure and “no-till” methods of producing feed on dairy farms—or, on corn and soy acreages, switching to less impactful plowing methods, leaving more organic matter in fields after harvest, or introducing more diverse cover crops. The documented results are a reduction in soil loss (via water- and wind-driven erosion)—which means less ecologically destructive phosphorus ending up in watersheds, and ultimately everywhere down to the Gulf of Mexico—and an increase in soil carbon, which means greater fertility, higher productivity, and improved economic, as well as ecological, health.
Levedofsky says, “That’s a program that’s very bipartisan in support,” and it’s a rare program on the budget that actually received more money than Gov. Evers had proposed. “It was originally at $750k per year and got increased to $1 million. It was always a hot topic with both WFU members and the JFC. Legislators see the benefits on the local level, and hear support from the folks that utilize those programs. We can disagree about BadgerCare and FoodShare, but when it comes to preserving our land and our watersheds, and protecting them, and making sure that we’re thinking about everything downstream from us, those are the things that truly bring people together.”
SUPPORT FOR HEALTHY EATING
Speaking of FoodShare, Evers also exercised a line-item veto to retain the Healthy Eating Incentive Pilot Program, despite the Joint Finance Committee’s move to cut funding. Since 2017, 2,000 households whose members benefit from FoodShare have received special discounts on fresh produce, and studies have been underway to determine the resulting demographic effect on food purchases (the Double Dollars program, operating seasonally at many area farmers’ markets, as well as at your Co-op, is a parallel effort). One in seven Wisconsinites benefit from the FoodShare program, and an overall push to restructure the benefit in favor of healthy eating could have positive effects on both consumers and, potentially, on local vegetable growers, whose high-quality product often brings in a higher shelf price.
The link between the FoodShare program and support for a local food economy isn’t lost on Gov. Evers, who connects it to his plan (also left out of the final budget) to increase funding for EBT equipment at all Wisconsin farmers’ markets. Levendosky points out that a strong family farming sector and a growing interest in locally produced food depend on one another, and that the link is right there in the way our food policy works in the U.S.: “Some form of food stamps has been around since the ‘30s, but didn’t get tied to the farm bill until the ‘70s, when Bob Dole and George McGovern—a Republican from Kansas and a Democrat from South Dakota—sat down and said, you know, we’ve got a lot of food and a lot of hungry people; let’s do something about this. Let’s start tying food programs and Ag programs together. That’s how we get a Farm Bill every five or six years—from the support for tying it together with food benefits.”
Farmers’ markets (both in-person and in the profusion of online home-delivery services for local food products) saw a boom during the first year of the pandemic, and one reason is that they became, for many people, the safest and most viable source of food. Though “it’s unfortunately taken a pandemic to highlight the challenges,” Levendofsky sees the potential for growing access to healthy, local food. “When we can focus on more programs like this, that are getting more food that’s locally grown here in Wisconsin into the hands and stomachs of Wisconsinites, it does two good things: it feeds hungry people, and it puts more of that money directly into the hands of the farmer, who then turns around and spends that money in their community. When farmers make money, they spend money, and they spend it down on Main Street, because they know they have to support their community businesses; otherwise they disappear. When you have programs like this, it’s almost a trickle-up effect, rather than a trickle-down. Give the money to the people who need it, and they will spend it, and it will get into the hands of the people higher up eventually; it won’t be long—they’ll get it.”
The juxtaposition of hard-working optimism and hard-nosed realism in Levendofsky’s comment crisply frames the significance of the latest state budget for our local food systems. We’ve been going strong in Wisconsin for some time when it comes to reimagining what a foodshed might look like. The budget also shows the limits of our current circumstances. How our taxpayer dollars are distributed through government allocations determines the access of all Wisconsinites to healthy, local, and (frankly) amazing food—because that, in turn, depends on the well-being of everyone in the supply chain. None of us eat well unless everyone involved in the food system lives well. It’s less a matter of separations between a food industry and its consumers than one of interlinked communities.
Recent times have shown us that everyone in that web shares similar vulnerabilities, and that we need social systems that can respond to those vulnerabilities in a moment of crisis. With another election year coming up, we’ll have more opportunities to make our voices heard, with the help of organizations like Wisconsin Farmers Union and other groups. By uniting urban and rural communities around the linked needs for food, healthcare and ecological health, we can not only keep what we’ve all made together from collapsing, but to help keep it growing stronger, season by season.
