Trump has wrecked local food/small farm initiatives

This administration is a pitiful failure in every conceivable way.

In March 2020, as pandemic lockdowns began, Americans accustomed to the most abundant, available food supply in history encountered empty shelves in supermarkets. With international supply chains scrambled, the narrative around “local food” shifted from “yuppie pipe dream” to “food security necessity.”

…While the (Biden) administration did little to upend the structure of the dominant commodity agriculture system, officials started listening to farmers and advocates that operate outside of it. They talked about the need for not just efficiency, but also redundancy and resilience, in case of another crisis.

In collaboration with lawmakers in Congress pushing through huge pandemic relief packages, Biden’s USDA then made historically large investments in new programs intended to support small farms and local food systems…

“The last administration was making a concerted effort to try to level the playing field to some extent for those smaller farmers, and a lot of farms and local food systems ramped up in response to that influx of funding,” said Farm Aid’s Tremblay. So, when things changed, many had already made investments they couldn’t simply cancel. Now, they’re stuck. - Civil Eats