A Convening
Beneath the looming threat of climate change, Louisiana's specialty crop farmers are finding hope as a collective
Last August, in the thick of Louisiana’s hottest summer on record, with two thirds of the state experiencing “Exceptional Drought” (the highest classification on the U.S. Drought Monitor)—leaders of the Louisiana Small Scale Agriculture Coalition (LSSAC) were conducting wellness checks.
“It was such a physically draining summer,” said Marguerite Green, Director of Producers and Sustainability at SPROUT, a New Orleans partner of LSSAC. “But it was also very emotionally draining. The impact of climate change on farmers’ mental health—I think it can sound esoteric when you say it like that—but if you think about it, the impact of drought, the impact of heat, of hurricanes; those things are all very tangible.
“So, we were doing calls to check in on farmers,” said Green. “And when we asked them what sort of support they needed—well the answer is almost always money, right?”
Farmers were losing their crops, and the crops they were harvesting suffered in quality. To save what was left, they had to invest extra money in increased watering—in some cases even installing small-scale irrigation systems and digging out wells. In November the LSU AgCenter reported that the cost of 2023’s drought and excessive heat was a $1.69 billion loss for the state’s agriculture and forestry industries.
Green and other representatives from LSSAC were quick to guide farmers to aid, including offering disaster grants—which distributed $25,000 to forty-three farmers statewide. But beyond financial assistance, farmers were asking for something else.
“What I thought was pretty profound, really striking,” recalled Green, “was that so many of the farmers were like, ‘While you’re at it, if there’s anyone else you’re getting on the phone who knows something about how to handle all this, or is feeling a little blue, or just wants to talk about it with other farmers, I’d love to connect.”
Leroy Conish, a farmer from Vacherie, Louisiana said it most clearly: “I think it would be great if you could find a way to get all of us together. We need a space to talk about this.”
“South Louisiana can look like this shining beacon of agriculture,” said Green. “But the reality is that we have an incredibly underdeveloped agricultural economy.” We aren’t growing enough food for ourselves, she emphasized. Of Louisiana’s roughly 30,000 farms, only about 2,000 of them are growing anything other than commodity crops like timber, sweet potatoes, sugarcane, soybeans, rice, and cattle—which will mostly be shipped to corporations across the globe. “I think we don’t recognize food crop production, designed to feed people here, as a part of our economic engine. And when you don’t recognize something as a potential economic engine, you don’t prioritize it with policy and investment.”
Louisiana’s specialty crop farmers—a classification which encompasses growers producing everything from lion’s mane mushrooms and micro greens to basic fruits and vegetables—typically operate on smaller scales than farmers of mass-produced crops, usually less than one hundred acres. This is the population represented by the Louisiana Small Scale Agriculture Coalition, which was founded in 2022 as a collaboration between seven organizations around the state conducting community-based work in support of local food systems. Members include SPROUT, the Acadiana Food Alliance (AFA), the New Orleans Food Policy Action Council (NOLA FPAC), Louisiana Central, Market Umbrella (MU), Big River Economic Agricultural Development Alliance (BREADA), and Shreveport Green.
“All of us at the heads of these organizations have a long history of addressing really complex problems in the Louisiana food system in a really comprehensive way,” explained Bahia Nightengale, the Executive Director for Farm and Food at Louisiana Central, an economic development agency in Alexandria that offers farmer training opportunities and statewide food systems leadership programs. “Thinking about how we come together as LSSAC strategically—it’s very unique, because we all have slightly different missions. We all have slightly different ways of achieving goals we are working on. But we recognize that if we can own that space as an individual organization, and co-create some of this work collectively—that’s what’s giving us so much strength and momentum right now.”
The challenges LSSAC and its partner organizations aim to alleviate for small-scale farmers are systemic in nature. Facing the inherent economic risks associated with agriculture, with only minimal support from government programs designed to sustain large-scale commodity farmers, or a stable market to rely on—these specialty producers operate in an increasingly precarious state.
Most small farms are not considered bankable businesses, and are thus unable to access business capital or qualify for most USDA programs that rely on bank partners. Only in the last fifteen years has the USDA begun to significantly recognize the ways small farmers have been left behind and funnel resources towards crop production at a small, regional scale. “So, since that is all still relatively new and unrefined, there aren’t a lot of bridge-building technical assistance providers available to connect farmers to these opportunities,” explained Nightengale. “The programs still don’t provide the most needed resources and support mechanisms that would build sustainable small farms for increased local, regional, and national food security.”
[Be inspired by this locally-sourced Baton Rouge dinner party by writer April Hamilton.]
In addition, the disconnect between small scale farmers and the 21st century consumer is vast. “Major buyers, such as wholesale buyers, schools, institutions, restaurants—they all got really used to ordering online from huge companies,” said Nightengale. “Now they don’t know how to talk to an individual farmer. And no farmer becomes a farmer because they want to go spend their time dealing with lots of different personalities of different food buyers.” As for the average consumer shopping for groceries, they too have grown conditioned by the systemic industrialization and commodification of food to expect an endless supply of any product on demand at any time of year, for prices that don’t necessarily reflect the cost of the food—and without any understanding about or connection to the food’s source.
“People don’t realize that even purchasing conventional produce locally is always going to be better for our environment than purchasing an organic product from a million miles away that had to get shipped here,” said Green. Darlene Adams Rowland, the Executive Director of BREADA, added “I want people to understand how important supporting local producers is, not only to our state economy, but to the health of our bodies. Anytime you choose local, whether it’s shopping at the farmer’s market, or choosing a restaurant that supports local farmers, it makes a really big impact.”
Another major issue facing farmers who grow non-commodity crops is the lack of research available regarding their crops’ relationships to Louisiana’s specific climate and weather patterns. “That research is simply not in existence,” said Green. “There are not a lot of resources available to farmers, particularly in the Gulf South, having to do with climate.” Nor are there potential solutions to climate-related challenges, which have increased in number and intensity in recent years.
As a result of these many barriers, combined with a nationwide migration from rural areas and an aging farmer population, today there are not enough food-focused farmers in Louisiana to fully support a thriving local food system. Lauren Jones, the Urban Farm Director at Shreveport Green, runs a program where the organization purchases food from local farmers at market rate, then distributes it to neighborhoods who don’t have
access to fresh produce. The problem is, there isn’t enough food to go around. “We have a few farmers, a handful, and they are coveted,” explained Jones. “We do everything we can to support them and make them happy so that they can continue to expand, and can continue to grow the food. The need outweighs the creation right now.” To help meet Northwest Louisiana’s need for nutrient-dense, local produce, Shreveport Green also runs a network of twenty-four community gardens.
Rowland added that often the markets in the state’s two most-populated cities, Baton Rouge and New Orleans, are sharing the same farmers. “So, farmers can’t add markets, because they’re already doing two cities,” she said.
These struggles and more are what the organizations that make up LSSAC hope to address together. And working as a coalition, rather than individual regional nonprofits, has enabled them to act as a more streamlined, comprehensive, state-wide resource for farmers seeking assistance.
“All the farmers we serve are busy farming,” said Rowland. “So they don’t have time to figure out grant opportunities, infrastructure loans, all the things they desperately need. So our organizations can try to fill that gap, and connect them to these federal resources, and some private ones too.”
“We try to support these farmers as businesses so that they can function in the business economy, and access that bank funding and USDA support that they need,” added Nightengale. “We also put our support behind farmer-led research—which might not be especially scientifically rigorous, but is absolutely creating applicable and duplicable studies about how we can continue to grow food effectively in the Louisiana climate, soil, and water conditions that we have.”
[Read about the challenges of Louisiana citrus farmers in this story from our December 2023 issue.]
LSSAC is also advocating for farmers on a policy-level through the New Orleans Food Policy Action Council (NOLA FPAC)—which is fighting for more investment in small-scale growers through research, on the ground technical assistance, and federal grants. “And we’re also advocating for crop insurance,” said Elisa Munoz, Executive Director for NOLA FPAC. “It’s currently impossible for small scale farmers to get whole crop insurance. So, we’re advocating very intentionally for things like that, and just investment in this specialty farming in the same way that these larger commodity farms are being invested in.”
LSSAC’s biggest initiative thus far has been the organization of the first-ever Louisiana Farmers’ Climate Convening. The Convening—held in response to farmers’ expressed desire to commune with one another in the wake of last summer’s unprecedented drought—invited small-scale farmers from across the state to come together for two days of community-building, seed-sharing, workshops, wellness sessions, and lectures.
The event was held at Chicot State Park in Evangeline Parish this January on a weekend following a deep freeze weeks before, and followed immediately after by extreme flooding.
“We had this beautiful gap of time, just right in the middle, where we were all able to come to Ville Platte together to talk about the things that had just happened, and the things that are about to happen,” said Jones. “And it just seemed so poignant.”
Since September, the leaders of LSSAC have been hosting farmer outreach and planning sessions for the event on a weekly basis—making it a priority to ensure it offered the connections and resources farmers wanted. “Farmers would drop in,” said Green. “They’d be like, building things in the field. We had one day where three farmers were together, and they had their Zoom laptop open, and were like building a seed winnowing machine while they all listened to the planning call, and would just pop in to respond to our questions.”
The people who attended the Convening are likely not what most people imagine when they think of who a “Louisiana farmer” is. In a remarkable testament to who is invested in feeding Louisianans, the farmers of Louisiana’s specialty crop sector are representative of the great diversity of the state as a whole: Black, brown, Indigenous, white; young, old; queer, straight; women, men, non-binary. “There isn’t great ag census data about people who grow vegetables and fruit,” said Green, “but intuitively, I would say that the people who grow food in Louisiana tend to be more diverse than the rest of the general farming population.”
“Biodiversity is key,” noted Jones. “Our group of people just reflected the biodiversity that is present in all healthy, robust, and resilient systems in nature.”
The ways these identities intersect with being a farmer in Louisiana were acknowledged through affinity group breakouts right at the start of the convening—opportunities for farmers to connect with people who could truly understand their particular experiences. The next day, a similar breakout took place, allowing farmers working in the same region to interact and exchange knowledge.
“The best thing that came out of all of this was like, we actually need to help people build these bonds,” said Green. “Because that’s who’s with you when stuff hits the fan, when climate catastrophes happen, when a flood happens or a fire. In America, farming is very isolating, and I think this was an exercise that helped people build connections with people they identified with and lived beside. It helped people articulate, ‘How can we find hope together?’ ‘How can we build stronger community, and how can we slow this crisis?’”
Grief associated with climate change was a major topic of discussion, said Iriel Edwards, a young farmer from Boyce, Louisiana who attended the Convening. “There’s all this pressure. Everything you do matters, and there’s not enough time to get it right. There’s already so much that’s been lost.” She said that it can all induce a sense of paralysis for her. “It makes me afraid, and I don’t want to be afraid. The best ways to process all of this is to be around people who get it. To remind us that we have tools, like our ancestors used, to help through situations that are unknown. It all gives me hope.”
Betty Chenier, whose husband’s family has farmed fruits, vegetables, and herbs in St. Landry Parish for four generations, said she came to the Convening hoping to exchange knowledge with other farmers. “We’ve been in this business for twenty-one years,” she said. “If we can help other people with their issues, see if we can help each other. We’re struggling, too. The temperature shifts from ninety degrees to forty-five—we are going to have to really study these seed catalogs to find plants that can handle it.” She said she was encouraged by all of the young people in attendance at the Convening. “They are the next generation,” she said. “We need them.”
At the end of the first day of the convening, everyone gathered around the bonfire to enjoy a meal and decompress. “And there was this tangible … like you could reach out and grab a hold of the joy that had been accumulating all day as everyone got to know each other,” said Jones. “There was just so much pride in the community, and also a sense of unity and collective resiliency in the face of this omnipresent danger.”