Naima Drecker-Waxman is a law student in the HLS Food Law & Policy Clinic and a guest contributor to this blog. At the beginning of the month, the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, & Forestry held its first Farm Bill hearing of the 118th Congress. The hearing covered the trade and horticulture titles of the Farm Bill. Three experts testified: Alexis…
Alyssa Huang is a law student in the HLS Food Law & Policy Clinic and a guest contributor to this blog. This past week students and instructors from Harvard Law School’s Food Law and Policy Clinic traveled to Washington D.C. to attend the Food Not Feed Summit. The Summit was hosted by a growing coalition of organizations across a wide range…
Liz Turner is a law student in the HLS Food Law & Policy Clinic and a guest contributor to this blog. America’s farmworkers are a uniquely vulnerable group of workers. Farm labor is exempted from many federal protections, including the right to organize under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), many workplace safety regulations under the Occupational Safety and Health Act…
Valerie Marshall is a law student at Duke University School of Law and guest contributor on this blog. One of FBLE’s recommendations for the 2023 Farm Bill is to reform commodity programs to direct subsidies towards farmers in genuine need of support. Farm commodity programs support farmers who produce certain crops by subsidizing guaranteed income levels in the face of…
Valerie Marshall is a law student at Duke University School of Law and guest contributor on this blog. Supporting the wide adoption of perennial agriculture is one of FBLE’s top 2023 Farm Bill recommendations to support climate change adaptation, risk management, and natural resources conservation. But above all, FBLE posits that investing in perennial agriculture would be one of the…
Valerie Marshall is a law student at Duke University School of Law and guest contributor on this blog. In FBLE’s 2023 Farm Viability report, FBLE recommends establishing a system for reducing crop insurance subsidies to farms as their annual gross income increases. The National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC) recently released a report about the effects of placing caps on crop…
The 2023 Farm Bill presents an opportunity for the Biden Administration to address some of the key restrictions on the Supplement Nutrition Assistance Program (“SNAP”) that prevent those most in need of assistance from accessing the program. SNAP represents one of the most successful and essential parts of federal food assistance. USDA research indicates that SNAP reduces food insecurity among…
Though control of the House is still up in the air and Agriculture Committee Member Raphael Warnock is headed to a December runoff, we now have a reasonable idea of what the 2022 midterms will mean for the 2023 farm bill. Regardless of the outcome of Warnock’s runoff, Democrats will retain control of the Senate, and Senate Agriculture Committee Chair…
On a recent Saturday, my co-worker and I spent an unsuccessful five minutes trying to get a Healthy Incentives Program (HIP, a nutrition incentive program in Massachusetts) transaction to go through. We both work at a farmers market selling fruits and vegetables from a farm in upstate Massachusetts. The customer knew that she had $40 in HIP left (the full…
Luca Greco is a law student in the HLS Food Law & Policy Clinic and a guest contributor to this blog. Due to racist exclusions at the time of their passage, the many New Deal labor and employment protections that cover nearly every industry have long excluded farmworkers from their essential protections. Given that the agricultural workforce is now predominately comprised…