Sustainable Agriculture Coalition
“House Ag Committee Marks up Bill on 10-acre Payment Prohibition: On Thursday, the House Agriculture Committee marked up and passed H.R. 6849 by voice vote. The bill deals with USDA’s implementation of a 2008 Farm Bill prohibition on crop subsidy payments to farms of 10 acres or less, unless the farm is owned by a socially disadvantaged or limited resource farmer. Despite farm bill report language to the contrary, USDA will not allow farmers to aggregate their base acres and receive payments if the aggregated acreage exceeds 10 acres. As a result, thousands of small farmers would lose payments on tracts of less than 10 acres, or even an entire farming operation if it is made up of tracts less than 10 acres.”
For those farmers who rely on subsidies like most U.S. farmers do, this makes farming on smaller urban parcels difficult, if not impossible, to farm and supply needed whole foods to inner-city areas. Though there are other community grants and public service monies to be accessed by urban farmers, those monies are hard to attain and are affected by the larger agriculture industry, which favors large monoculture farms that are intimate with other large private farming industries, like Monsanto. The vicious cycle continues.
