This is the latest installment of our series Faces of the Farm Bill, wherein we set out to humanize the real-world impacts of ag policy.
The 2018 Farm Bill expired on September 30th, and it doesn’t seem likely that the House and Senate will have drafts of the new bill before the end of the year. But that doesn’t make the once-every-five-year piece of legislation any less important.
This time around, animal welfare groups have even stepped up their efforts to shape the bill. The nonprofit Farm Sanctuary, the first shelter for farm animals, is among the groups that has spent the past couple years calling for substantial reforms to the farm bill as part of a growing recognition that animal and human rights are connected.
“Animal-centered organizations have both an ethical responsibility to include and elevate impacts for people and the planet. And we have a tactical responsibility too,” said Aaron Rimmler-Cohen, Farm Sanctuary’s advocacy director.
Civil Eats spoke with Rimmler-Cohen about the divisions in Congress that threaten this legislation and the changes that he hopes to make it into the upcoming bill.
Farm Sanctuary has recently expanded to advocate for broader changes across the food system, beyond ending animal agriculture. Could you describe how this shift came about?
There has always been a recognition that while the beings that we center are farm animals, the interrelated issues caused by factory farming hurt all of us—animals, people, and the planet. And what we’ve tried to do over the past two and a half years is reach out to 2,500 national and local organizations working in various aspects of food, all across the supply chain: farmers, workers, environmental justice advocates, health advocates, doctors, and other animal-centered organizations. We’ve tried to understand where we have common ground. We believe it’s the next step in what the vegan and animal-centered movement has to do.
“We need a robust and vigorous debate over what a farm bill should do and how it can best support families, farmers, communities, animals, people, and the planet. And we’re not getting that.”
In the 1980s, when [founder] Gene [Baur] first got going with Farm Sanctuary, a lot of what he was doing was mainstreaming critiques of factory farming that had already existed within the environmental justice and social justice communities for decades. And he was mainstreaming those concerns and critiques around factory farming through compassion and empathy for animal beings. We can do the same thing in the 21st century, except instead of mainstreaming some of these critiques, we can also mainstream some of the solutions and actions being taken by environmental justice and social justice organizations.
While the central impact that concerns us as a movement is animals, we recognize that the way in which we collectively affect change is through food. And so we have to do a better job as an animal-centered movement of prioritizing food, elevating food, and integrating [those conversations] with a concern for animals and factory farming.
How does the current gridlock in Congress impact the farm bill?
We need a robust and vigorous debate over what a farm bill should do and how it can best support families, farmers, communities, animals, people, and the planet. And we’re not getting that. We’re getting the can kicked down the road.
This is very reminiscent of the Merrick Garland 2016 Supreme Court nomination—when the Republicans kicked the can down the road and eventually waited until the next presidential election to pick a Supreme Court nominee. If we have the same thing happen with the farm bill, then Donald Trump [if re-elected] could sign two consecutive farm bills [in 2018 and 2025]. We need a robust public debate, but we also need to make sure we get a farm bill across the finish line.
How do you see the farm bill shaping the U.S. food system? Why is this bill so important?
On the one hand, you have critical nutrition support for over 40 million American families and American consumers. The proposed Gus Schumacher Nutrition Incentive Program (GusNIP) Expansion Act, which would build on the programming that we have to grow [the purchasing power for] fruits and vegetables under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is amazing. But we have to better use those programs to nourish more people to advance health equity, and to support farmers who are growing crops that nourish our communities in the process. So, that’s 75 percent of the farm bill right there—that nutrition spending.
