Six Questions for the Experts at Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems Funders

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Next spring, Congress will begin in earnest the every-five-year debate over where to send the hundreds of billions of dollars that guide what Americans eat, how it is produced, and who gets all those tax breaks and checks. In short, it’s time for a new U.S. farm bill.

For the staff at Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems Funders (known as SAFSF), the behemoth bill offers a vital opportunity to move the country’s food systems in a different direction, and is among the most pressing of the priorities facing the group’s 101 members and the field.

As usual, SAFSF has been hard at work mobilizing funders, both on the farm bill and beyond. It sees an opportunity with the Biden administration, which recently set up an equity commission within the U.S. Department of Agriculture to right past wrongs and begin to “level the playing field.” The network held a policy convening in February, along with meetings and calls with staff from the USDA and the Senate Agriculture Committee that continued into the next month. 

I spoke with two of SAFSF’s soon-to-be 10-person team — Renee Brooks Catacalos, vice president of strategy and impact, and Traci Bruckner, senior director of public policy — to get an update on what’s going on in the world of food systems and agriculture funders. 

The conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, covered the influence of new billionaire funders in the agriculture space like Jeff Bezos, growing activity around climate change, and three underfunded areas that the SAFSF team are urging their network — and the field — to pay more attention to in the year ahead. 

What do you see as the biggest trends among food systems and agriculture funders?

Renee: Within our network, we are seeing a couple of things. One, greater awareness of and desire to engage with underserved communities, community- and BIPOC-led organizations, and moving more resources to nonprofits that are really close to the ground and may traditionally not have been seen as fundable. We’re seeing a lot of energy around that. 

Another trend is funders wanting to talk more about alignment: What part of this work are you funding, and in what way? How does my part of that funding contribute to the same trajectory or direction? A lot of that came out of conversations around the pandemic, where funders who had been in different silos began to see how all those things were seriously interconnected in the way that they were impacting people.

Traci: The absolute failure of the food supply chain made it really real for funders — and how we need to get more support directly on the ground and in communities where they can have more ownership and control over their food systems. 

We’re definitely seeing more interest from funders in the policy space. They see the real systemic change that you can get from public policy versus their funding. The federal government just brings so many more resources to bear, and, if they aren’t directed in the right way, can do much more damage than good. We’re really trying to help our network engage in that process. 

USDA has been a source of some of the greatest discrimination we’ve seen in agriculture. But they’re really trying to correct their wrongs and move things in a different direction. Funders are engaging in that process — and are really interested in helping underserved communities access these federal grant programs. These organizations or communities have all the capacity in the world to do really good, good things for their communities. But government grants are really hard to write and manage. They need the resources to actually do that. 

Whether it’s the farm bill, the Census or other intermittent government processes, there have long been efforts in philanthropy to have more consistent policy engagement. How is that going among food and ag funders?

Traci: What we’ve seen in the past is the farm bill passes and funders forget about it for three years. Which is unfortunate, because what happens at USDA has all the same power of law as what Congress does. We’ve seen USDA really muck things up. We’re hoping this attention and trend of communities having their own say in the food system leads to funding year in and year out.

Renee: The things that have happened over the last few years have opened some folks’ eyes to the long-term nature of these different entrenched issues. A lot of foundations, you know, you just say the word “policy” and they want to leave the room. A lot of the work that Traci has done over the last couple of years within our network has been to dispel the incorrect understandings around what kind of policy work grantmakers can do and can fund. It has been a big catalyst toward more of these organizations deciding to do some more around this — and they’re starting to understand why it takes ongoing work.

One thing we’ve seen from our own members is a shift to providing multiyear operating support to expand the policy work we are doing. It indicates an awareness among our membership and the philanthropic community that we need to engage on policy.

What do you see as the most neglected issues within food and ag systems philanthropy?

Traci: One of the biggest gaps in terms of funding and advocacy is around going after where the resources are going right now. The farm bill does a really good job of sending millions and millions of dollars to very few farming operations. We’re over-subsidizing the largest and wealthiest farming operations. Yet we’re throwing maybe $50 million a year to local and regional finances, $50 million a year to increasing nutrition incentives, and so on. 

If we don’t get at the structure of agriculture, the system is going to continue to consolidate and concentrate into the hands of a few, and we’re going to continue to have the same problems. On the USDA equity commission call, one person made a comment that they “hope we don’t get into the debate about size of farm, because that never gets us anywhere.” I’m sorry, but that’s where the debate is. Policy is picking winners and losers right now, and it has been for decades, and it’s picking the largest and wealthiest farms as the winners. We have to address that. It’s not an area that is well-funded at all. 

Renee: A second one that we’re looking at is land access, which is, of course, related to consolidation, as well. The future of young farmers, new farmers, veteran farmers, BIPOC farmers, folks who don’t have access to family land, farms that are losing their land to these big, consolidating organizations — land access is at the bottom of those issues. You’re not gonna get any new thunder — new farmers — into agriculture if they can’t find land that is viable economically to farm. 

The third focus area we have this year is climate change. Admittedly, we are still figuring out how we get our arms around it and honing in on where the fundable solutions are. But one of the big ones is regenerative agriculture and other techniques that create climate resilience, rather than farming methods that are contributing to topsoil erosion, as well as who gets water, and where, and from where. 

Those three areas are one of the ways we have framed the gaps for this year and into the next.

How has interest in climate shifted within SAFSF?

Renee: It’s obviously been woven into the work of a lot of our funders for a long time. Twenty years ago, SAFSF came out of the Environmental Grantmakers Association. We started with environmental and climate funders who wanted to go more into food and ag. Then, over time, it’s been more folks who were already focused on food and agriculture coming to us. Now, the climate piece is coming on top of that. 

A lot of the work that’s been funded in this area has been around shifting to grazing, chemical input management, getting people off pesticides and herbicides, and things like that. People come at it from all sorts of different angles. Eventually, most of them realize there are some climate connections to it. Even some of the folks who are based in food systems, like urban agriculture, food access in cities, food and nutrition — we are trying to help them see, and sometimes it’s happening organically, the connections to what climate change means downstream for consumers and cities.

The connections are everywhere. Part of the challenge right now is harnessing where we can make the most progress.

Donors like Jeff Bezos have made huge pledges on agriculture and food systems, and other mega-donors, such as Walton family members, may expand such giving. How are these new entrants — or the anticipation of them — impacting the field?

Renee: They’re entering the field in different ways. There are some very large foundations who have recently come into our network without a lot of background in food and agriculture. Sometimes, there are conversations about things they may be funding that may actually be not helpful. We want to have them in the network so they can be exposed to the conversations we’re having and the work of others who preceded them — and hopefully, come around to some different understandings about the kind of work that they are funding. 

Some of those groups have come to us directly to say: “We’re new to this space, and we want to learn from the folks who are out there,” and have been very constructive about engaging others in our network to learn more. Many of them bring with them a willingness to use their resources to help expand what others can do. 

One of the areas we see this in, and we would actually like to catalyze more, is that a lot of these mega-donors are doing research on where major impacts can be made. That’s not in the purview of a lot of smaller foundations, or of us, at this moment, as a philanthropy-serving organization. 

One very exciting trend is that we are seeing funders coming to us over the last couple of years specifically to engage in some policy work. So the policy world is bringing more of those larger organizations into our network.

Parting thoughts?

Traci: When we think about climate and the impact of agriculture and its ability to mitigate climate, there’s a real risk of all the climate investment going in the wrong direction, that does nothing more than prop up the practices or systems that are causing the problem. We don’t need more [concentrated animal feeding operations] with methane digesters. We need more than just simple cover crops integrated into a corn-soybean rotation. We need more systemic solutions and approaches to climate mitigation through agriculture. The farm lobby and the mainstream farm groups have a real heavy hand in shaping what happens with federal policy. We need to tackle the elephant in the room and stop ignoring it.