Farm Women United “Taking Back Our Food Supply, One Farm Policy Project at a Time”

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Farm Women United (FWU), a grass-roots association organized by farm women who are fed up with decades of being ignored and silenced by the powerful global, corporate politico-industry “special interests” currently controlling this nation’s agriculture, has kicked off its 2018 “Campaign to Reform US Farm and Food Policies” projects.

Recognizing that farm women bear the brunt of the stress related to trying to pay bills and provide for their families with farm income that is woefully insufficient to allow farmers to live with dignity, FWU tackles multiple aspects of the ongoing crisis engulfing rural America that matter most to farm women.

Working alongside their families in the fields and in the barns and often handling the farm accounts, farm women understand how hard farmers work physically, while at the same time they are keenly aware of the severe economic injustices being perpetrated against farmers, whose voices are still being ignored, as the great American rural depression worsens.

Still pressured to become ever more “efficient,” farmers are disappearing at an alarming, accelerated rate because they are coerced by government design to market their farm products below what they cost to produce on the farm, a situation that always ends with the farmers’ demise.

FWU demands that legislators, at the local, state, and federal levels, work for more effective government policies to support a family farm system of agriculture that promotes healthy rural communities and guarantees our nation’s food security, so that consumers can access an abundant supply of nourishing, fresh, local food.

FWU supports policies that put consumers and family farmers first, ahead of the global, corporate, “off-farm” business interests that have already established a food production system where food travels an average of 1500 miles before it reaches consumers. 

A major priority for the FWU 2018 “Campaign to Reform US Farm and Food Policies” will be to advocate for federal dairy policy changes on behalf of dairy farmers in the upcoming 2018 Farm Bill, with support for establishing dairy farmers’ “cost of production” in the federal minimum  milk pricing formula; eliminating the approximately $2 per hundredweight “make allowance” being withdrawn from farmers’ milk checks to pay dairy processors’ manufacturing costs; reforming the Capper-Volstead dairy co-operatives, where market consolidation has led to widespread domination and intimidation of farmers in a national milk marketing system that is showing all the signs of coercion and intimidation that are present when monopoly and monopsony economic conditions prevail; and allowing whole milk to be offered to children in the federal school lunch program.

FWU members will insist that farmers themselves be heard at listening sessions surrounding the 2018 Farm Bill to allow farmers to speak for themselves, not the hand-picked “establishment” talking heads who have advanced the global “Industry” agenda that has eliminated over 90% of this nation’s family dairy farmers since it became the policy of the land .

FWU will also be examining the voting records of elected officials, including members of Congress and the House and Senate Ag Committees, grading the legislators on the farm and food policies they support, releasing their findings to the public. “Years ago, many farm and dairy organizations published the voting records of legislators to keep farmers informed about the policies elected officials were supporting that affected farmers.

This will now be a top priority for FWU, because too many farmers do not know what legislators are up to in Washington and in the state capitals. Elected officials are not being held accountable for passing the bad legislation behind these failed agricultural policies, and that is going to change, ” said FWU founding board member Lou Ann Parish, dairy farmer, from Adams, NY.

FWU is also pleased to be kicking off a resurrection of the “Green Ribbon for Family Farms” Campaign, where a green ribbon is worn on the outside of clothing, over the heart, to show support for family farms.

Farm Women United welcomes support and involvement from farm women across the United States, in all commodities, for both current and upcoming projects. “We must act now. We can no longer be silent. Our nation’s food sovereignty depends on changing the current agricultural policies that have stripped self-determination from our farmers and consumers. A nation that cannot feed itself is not free,” said FWU Vice-President Donna Hall, a retired dairy farmer and current grain and hay farmer from Muncy. 

Indeed the wages of the laborers who mowed your fields which you kept back by fraud, cry out; and the cries of the reapers have reached the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth.” James 5:4

For more information, or to join FWU, please check out our website www.farmwomenunited.org and check us out on Facebook. Readers may also contact FWU Correspondence Tina Carlin Liaison at Farm Women United, P.O. Box 113, Laceyville, PA 18623

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