Is a State Program to Foster Sustainable Farming Leaving Out Small-Scale Growers and Farmers of Color?

Steven Cardoza can walk his 300-acres of organic raisin grapes near Fresno after a heavy downpour and come out with clean boots. His soil soaks up water like a sponge, barely a mud puddle in sight—a sign of healthy soil, Cardoza said. 

The third-generation farmer is committed to regenerative agriculture and two years ago, he eagerly applied for and received a grant from California’s Healthy Soils Program to further practices like planting cover crops and composting. 

Offered through the California Department of Food and Agriculture’s Office of Environmental Farming and Innovation, the Healthy Soils Program  is among a suite of programs that provide incentives for sustainable farming practices, and the HSP is the first state-led project to offer financial awards to adopt soil health as a way to reduce greenhouse gases and increase carbon sinks. Jeanne Merrill, policy director for the California Climate and Agriculture Network, calls it, “groundbreaking.”

Cardoza became disillusioned with HSP, which is also known as its acronym.

“It’s modeled after large-scale, monoculture agriculture,” said Cardoza. He added that the program is “massively disadvantageous” to small-scale farmers with diversified operations, as well as to those who can’t speak English fluently, while big, well-resourced operations can easily take advantage of it.

Cardoza is just one of many sustainable agriculture advocates who feel that the program needs to be improved. 

“It’s the law,” said Ruth Dahlquist-Willard, a small farms advisor with the University of California Cooperative Extension in Fresno.

The Farmer Equity Act was passed in 2017. It requires the California Department of Food and Agriculture to ensure that all farmers and ranchers who have been discriminated against racially, ethnically, or gender are included in the development of programs and policies. The bill categorizes this group as “socially disadvantaged.”

About 37 percent of California farmers are women, and 19 percent of the state’s farm operators are farmers of color, but that percentage may be undercounted, according to the California Climate and Agriculture Network (CalCAN.) 

Although the state agriculture department reserves 25 per cent of its funds to socially disadvantaged farmers and granted 27 percent of its grants to them last year, many people familiar with the soil health program believe it should be prioritizing this population. A CalCAN analysis revealed that another climate smart agriculture program had distributed 42% of its funds to the historically underserved population. 

It is possible that the first-come first-served award system is partly to blame. However, larger operations with staff or money to hire grant writers have been able secure more money quickly. “Those farmers who have fewer resources, and often those were farmers of color, got in their applications later. But the money was already gone,” said CalCAN’s Merrill. 

For the first four years, the program was primarily funded by money generated from the auction of greenhouse gas emission allowances in the state’s cap-and-trade program. This proved to be an unstable source of income, so California allocated general fund dollars for the program this year.

In addition to the 25 per cent of state agriculture department funds that are set aside for socially-disadvantaged farmers in the Healthy Soils program, the agency also steers money towards farmers based in communities that the state has identified as not being polluted by air or water. This is in accordance with a 2016 law regarding programs receiving funds through the auction of greenhouse gases emissions.  

Dahlquist-Willard said that allocating funds to those communities might make sense for some environmental justice programs, but it doesn’t serve as a good tool for guaranteeing equity to farmers, because low-income, small-scale farmers may live in those communities, but they do not necessarily farm there. In fact, Dahlquist-Willard said, a Healthy Soils Program grant awarded within a designated disadvantaged community is “more likely going to a large operation,” meaning one that’s several hundred acres, rather than the 0.5- to 50-acre farms she works with. 

DahlquistWillard recently studied the locations of small, diverse farms owned by Southeast Asian immigrants in Fresno County. She found that almost 63 percent were not within the boundaries of disadvantaged areas. Up to 94 percent were located in areas close to the California coast. 

The soils program can be difficult to access and make use of even when funds are available. This is true for both farmers who have many crops and immigrants who may not speak English fluently. It’s also hard for lower-income growers who lease their land year to year to successfully complete an application, because the program requires a three-year commitment for all who participate. And HSP takes a largely prescriptive approach—requiring that one practice be applied to the same plot of land for the entire time. Smaller operations are more likely to grow a wide variety of crops and need to be able to switch crops according to weather conditions, water availability, and other factors. “So if you get money to plant cover crops, for example, you might not always have the same section of your farm fallow from year to year,” said Jessie Kanter, a research assistant with the small farm teams at the University of California Cooperative Extension. 

Cardoza said that this can make it difficult to keep track of all the paperwork required for the program each year. Even though the soil program’s online “paperwork” has been simplified over the years, he said he knows several growers who have started an application, only to give up in frustration.

“Someone who farms 5,000 acres of almonds, and they have a 150-acre block here, and a 150-acre block there, I could do their grant application in three or four hours,” he said. “But doing one for a 10-acre diversified farmer will take you 40 hours.” In 2020, 70 percent of Healthy Soils Program funds went to commercial orchards and vineyards, according to the CalCAN analysis. 

A spokesman for the state agriculture department stated that the program is accessible to low-income small-scale farmers because a portion of the money pays for technical assistance providers to help with implementation and applications. But Kanter, who has provided technical assistance, says the providers are often juggling a lot, and it’s easy to get buried and lose funding to other applicants who can turn in applications quickly, especially since demand for the program has increased six-fold since it started. 

“If you’re helping 15 different farmers who are growing upwards of 20 different crops, and English isn’t their first language, it can take longer, and then you risk not actually accessing those rewards,” Kanter said. 

A Greater Sense of Urgency

The soil health program, which was launched in 2016, has disbursed approximately $50 million towards 600 projects. This has led to a reduction of 107,000 tons of carbon each year, according the food and agriculture department. Most grants go to individual farmers for practices such as mulching, composting (the most popular) and whole orchard recycling, but some money pays for “demonstration projects.” Cardoza, for instance, partnered with a University of California Cooperative Extension office and split a $100,000 grant that turned 20 of his acres into an outdoor classroom for other farmers interested in learning about composting and the benefits of planting hedgerows. 

This year, California significantly increased funding to HSP, kicking in tens of millions of dollars from the state’s general fund and pledging $160 million to the program through 2023. This was in response to an executive order from Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2020 that urged the state to figure out how California’s forests, farms, wetlands and other landscapes could help achieve carbon neutrality. 

Jamie Fanous, a policy advocate with Community Alliance with Family Farmers, an organization dedicated to sustainable food and family farms, said that as the program scales up, there’s a heightened sense of urgency. “We want to make sure that this funding reaches small scale farmers and farmers of color,” she said. “Because historically, government programs have not reached those growers in the way and the scale that they have with larger operations.”

She and other advocates for sustainable agriculture would like to see an evaluation done of the program to better understand where money is going, and to determine if farmers who receive grants continue to use healthy soils practices after their three-year grant ends. Cardoza, an organic raisin grape farmer, said that he wonders if conventional farmers are choosing HSP for the long-term environmental benefits or for free compost at a time when nitrogen fertilizer prices are rising. “It’s about the bottom line,” he said. “I can’t blame them. In their position I’d do the same thing.”

The Healthy Soils Program accepts applications until February or until funds run dry. By December 31, farmers had submitted requests for 60 percent of the total available dollars to fund individual projects. Because the program has so much more money to award this year, there’s less concern that applicants might miss out on a piece of the pie. DahlquistWillard stated that the administrative process is still a problem for small-scale, less tech-savvy farmers. She’s heard from technical assistance providers who have had farmers’ applications get denied on minor technicalities. They can submit again, but that may mean they are further behind the rest.

California is often the leader in sustainable agriculture, and advocates want equity. “There are at least a dozen other states that have healthy soils programs or policies across the country, and they’ll look to California,” said Fanous. “I hope that changes get made before other states just copy and paste this program.”