New Report Says Federal Policies Discourage Farmers from Growing Fruits and Vegetables

Healthy Eating Research commissioned the Farmers’ Legal Action Group (FLAG) to perform a detailed legal analysis of the 2008 Farm Bill. The report, Planting the Seeds for Public Health: How the Farm Bill Can Help Farmers to Produce and Distribute Healthy Foods, highlights the barriers the agriculture community faces in ensuring that our nation’s children have ready access to healthy foods.

The report focuses on the ways in which federal policies discourage farmers from producing and marketing food crops, such as fruits and vegetables. Some key findings include:

Fruit and vegetable farmers lack a safety net to protect them from natural disasters in a manner comparable to programs that are available for farmers producing major commodity crops, such as corn, soybeans and wheat;
Fruit and vegetable price and yield data are not collected to ensure a robust body of knowledge to guide policy regarding these important sectors of agriculture;
Crop insurance, disaster assistance, loan and conservation programs are not designed to address the unique character of fruit and vegetable production and marketing; and
Nutrition program expenditures are not adequately directed to ensure children, including those from lower-income households, receive healthy food.

The report also identifies opportunities for the farm and public health communities to work together with other stakeholders in implementing policy changes to address some of the key challenges. Some program policy changes could be made by USDA without the need for additional direction from Congress, but in some cases Farm Bill action will be required. Key policy recommendations include:

Provide crop insurance and disaster assistance program coverage for fruits and vegetables equivalent to that provided for non-perishable commodities. Providing crop insurance to fruit and vegetable farmers would decrease the financial risk associated with producing these crops.
Explore policy changes to enable farmers participating in the commodity programs to use program acres for the planting of fruits and vegetables.
Encourage farmers, public health leaders, and consumer advocates to identify ways to increase demand for fruits and vegetables in order to keep pace with increases in supply. Develop strong and durable production and marketing chains to meet those demands.
Collect and use price and yield data for specialty crops by type, variety and intended use in order to better inform the development of federal policies and make the production and marketing of fruits and vegetables more attractive to agricultural lenders.
Ensure that USDA procurement decisions serve the two stated goals of most nutrition programs—improving program participants’ nutrition as well as providing markets for agricultural crops produced by U.S. farmers.
Incorporate a preference for the purchase of local foods in all USDA procurement policies.
Increase funding, education and technical assistance for farmers’ markets to adopt the use of Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) for SNAP and Farmers’ Market Nutrition Program and WIC Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Program participants.

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