“We need more farmers. We need more food and fiber farmers. We need more farmers feeding their communities and the urban centers. And we need federal and state agricultural policy that supports that growth because our current trajectory is not good.

In a recent report by the American Farm Bureau Federation, the U.S has lost 200,000 farms since 2020. To provide a sense of this loss, the U.S lost over 300,000 farms during the 1980s Farm Crisis, one of the largest loss events in U.S. agricultural history outside of the Great Depression. As I sit in my combine harvesting corn and soybeans and watch all of my neighbors whisk back and forth getting the work done before the next rain I wonder who we will lose next in the neighborhood. Expenses are exceeding income in the conventional commodity world due to geopolitical events completely out of our control, yet we sit at a precipice of losing farmers or saving them. 

As a child of the 1980s Farm Crisis, when I decided to move back to Iowa to farm I knew I never wanted to be in a situation that I couldn’t get out of financially, I also knew that I wanted more control over pricing and to really feel free to farm, to farm with Mother Nature as a partner.

The writing on the wall was very clear, large scale commodity farming is a race to the bottom. This is why I transitioned to organic very early on. I was growing and raising products that companies and people wanted. This is how Jóia Food & Fiber Farm formed, creating a powerful connection to the land, the soil, the plants, the animals, the food, the fiber to end products that are delicious, nutritious, and good for people and planet. 

How we will grow farmers from a generation already once or twice removed from the land is one of the largest challenges we are facing today and into the future. The solution is, it starts with every one of us. Be a food and fiber advocate helping create the connections of where it comes from to how it can be prepared to the community building of sharing a meal together, and advocate to your political leadership the importance of more farmers on the land, not less, growing our food and fiber.”