In the cafeterias of Red Hook’s public schools, a small revolution is brewing. Where far-off frozen meats, peas, and canned peaches once dominated, students’ trays are now filled with a rainbow variety of locally sourced watermelon radishes, paired with locally made pasta and tomato sauce, and meatballs made of beef raised mere miles away. 

This shift, in the making for years, is in part the brainchild of Red Hook Central School District Food Service Director Larry Anthony, a Hudson Valley native who has been on a mission to source locally at least 30 percent of the lunches of the three districts he serves. Red Hook is on deck to achieve the target for the second year in a row. 

To Anthony, sourcing locally is simply “the proper thing to do, especially in this area,”  chock-full of renowned farms. “Students and parents deserve to know where the food is coming from,” he said.

The 30-percent local initiative, commonly referred to as The 30 Percent, is not just Anthony’s personal goal, but part of a statewide effort. In place since 2018, the initiative incentivizes New York schools to source from New York farms, thereby promoting a stronger local economy and healthier meals for students. A 25-cent reimbursement for every school lunch versus the typical 6-cent remit, is provided to schools that meet the 30 percent goal. Each meal costs the district between $1.65 to $2 to produce. 

Red Hook is among only 7 percent of all districts in New York State that have reached the 30-percent local sourcing benchmark. Anthony is among only six other food service directors meeting this goal in the Hudson Valley.

After learning about the initiative when it debuted, Anthony worked for years to meet its stringent requirements, which require thorough documentation of every item in each lunch, from the milk – Red Hook’s comes from Hudson Valley Fresh Dairy, processed in Kingston – to the butternut squash, sourced through Germantown’s Hudson Harvest. All of this careful counting goes into the documentation Anthony sends to the state each year, which has to prove that he has spent at least 30 percent of total food costs on food produced in New York state. After meeting the 30-percent initiative in Red Hook last school year, and skating in just below the margin in Rhinebeck and Pine Plains, where he also runs the schools’ food programs, Anthony estimates that this year, at least 40 percent of his Red Hook menu is locally sourced, and the share is continuing to grow.

Anthony now juggles incoming crates of veggies, meats, and dairy from over 22 local producers to include in the 600 lunches his team serves to Red Hook students each day. Energetic by nature, he says that experimenting with what he serves keeps his, and his team’s, motivation, high. “Institutional food is not glamorous,” Anthony said, but “that shouldn’t take away from finding the freshest possible food we can.” A veteran and former cook for the Navy, and a cook at the Culinary Institute of America, Anthony found his way into school districts in the early 1990s and developed a love for working in schools and providing hands-on experiences with food for students. He has, for instance, become well-known for his tastings, through which he has introduced students to everything from fiddlehead ferns, a Northeastern delicacy that grows wild in spring, to live calves from local milk producer Hudson Valley Fresh Dairy of Arlington. 

Sourcing locally, instead of through large food distributors like Sysco and the USDA is, by every measure, harder, said Anthony. Anthony juggles 22 suppliers to source his meals, while schools relying on the USDA for fruits and vegetables have just two. On top of this, Anthony has to balance a budget with more inputs due to more suppliers. Local food also inherently has higher costs than food from major distributors delivering canned vegetables or pre-packaged meals. A 2020 article in the agriculture news website, Civil Eats, reported that in Buffalo, the hot dogs and hamburgers sourced from small New York producers cost three times the price of commodity meats. Anthony also needs to find distributors or individuals to move crates of food from local farms to school kitchens, which adds cost, as well.

The economics of school lunch through the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) have always been complex and have relied on cutting costs by providing low-cost food. The NSLP was signed into law in 1946 to provide low-cost, or free, nutritionally balanced meals for students, and has the same aim today along with the same constraints around keeping costs low. Last year, the government spent $10.23 billion on school lunches, according to statistics from the Education Data Initiative. There is “a lot of the red tape here,” to procure food from outside of the NSLP, Anthony said. “It is disheartening how little priority [the government] puts into school nutrition,” he added. 

Just across the way from Red Hook’s youngest learners at Mill Road Primary School, Four Corners Community Farm aids Anthony’s mission to get fresh produce into the hands of students at Red Hook schools. Founded in the early days of the pandemic, Four Corners is a community garden that features 42 community garden plots for seasonal adoption by local residents. Rose, who has two children at Mill Road Primary, said that farming less than half a mile from the school motivated him to consider ways to get Four Corners’ produce into school meals.  

In August 2023, Rose began dedicating parts of his garden to the production of salad greens just for Mill Road; he then harvested them and carried them down the road throughout last fall. “I literally go across the street and within an hour of harvest, they’re in the cafeteria,” said Rose. “It doesn’t get any fresher.” 

Rose said he has found the process of supplying produce to Mill Road easier than he expected. Due to the small size of his farm, there are fewer legal barriers and regulations than a large, 1,000-acre farm or grocery store might have to supply food to schools. “It’s really hard to trace a contaminated bag of lettuce back to its source unless you have these regulations – bar codes, handling procedures, protocols for record-keeping and so on that actually allow recalls to happen,” Rose said. “In my case, I am across the street and public-facing. I have every incentive in the world to run a clean operation.”

Four Corners’ partnership with Anthony also has encouraged Rose to look for ways to expand his operation to increase food production for the school. “Last summer we got Larry on the property,” said Rose, and an even stronger relationship was born. Now, Anthony said, “I can call Sam and say ‘I’ve got money,’ to spend” and see what Rose might have on offer. “He’s a small farm, which is a huge reason why this generates a lot of excitement,” Anthony added. “A school district that can get their lettuce right across the street is unheard of.” 

Local sourcing isn’t just a boon to schools, it’s an economic boost to farmers, a 2016 Cornell University study showed. According to the study, if schools were to source just one kind of New York-grown fruit or vegetable per week, this could increase cumulative yearly revenue for farmers by $9.2 million for vegetables and $5.3 million for fruit statewide In rural areas, this can be highly beneficial to local economies, according to the American Farmland Trust, an organization that advocates for local farmers nationwide. According to data from the Farmland Information Center online database, if 75 percent of New York schools reached the 30 percent goal, this would generate over $210 million in economic impact statewide and cost the state just over $94 million over five years in reimbursement and support. In 2023, the state allocated $134 for school lunches, 40 percent more than the projected cost of switching to 75 percent local sourcing. 

Four Corners could be a benefactor as well as a contributor. Rose is now looking to Cornell Cooperative Extensions’s Regional Farm-to-School Coordinator, Katie Sheehan-Lopez, for technical assistance to apply for grants to expand his operation. Currently, Four Corners does not generate sufficient proceeds from school sales to financially justify the labor and inputs, said Rose, although, he added “I don’t think that’s the intention.” With additional grants or community donations, Rose remains optimistic about the potential of creating a local food pipeline from his farm to the school. “I would love to think that one day we could supply salad bars in every single school and have fresh ingredients all year long,” he said.

Now, Anthony is working with his staff to teach them how to wash and dice carrots that arrive with soil attached and how to prepare raw local chicken. This level of preparation, which requires spicing, tasting, and developing recipes from scratch, replaces plastic-covered, pre-cooked meals, said Anthony.  The 40 staff members across the districts he manages, whom Anthony describes as “a handful of foodies that really enjoy preparing and cooking food,” also receive knife handling lessons and are trained in the highest level of food preparation through the ServSafe certification. 

Anthony says he finds delight in witnessing how students interact with his meals, which continue to be an experiment in coaxing vegetables, many a child’s worst enemy, into a delicious exercise. “If kids don’t like butternut squash, they don’t care where it’s coming from,” Anthony joked, but he noted there is growing enthusiasm now after the student taste testings. After all, he says hopefully, students’ palates can change over time. 

Even fifth-graders have expressed enthusiasm about the initiative, far beyond the amusement of being taste testers. Cooper H. is among them. “New York is my favorite state, and [it] has a variety of resources that I can trust as it’s grown in our local area,” he told The Daily Catch through Anthony. As a gardener herself, Olivia H. agreed. “I like that we are purchasing from our local farms. The veggies are safe, fresh, and very good for us.” She said she raises chickens, ducks, and other birds, as well. “We also grow our own vegetables so I can appreciate the efforts.” For these students, trusting their food was front of mind. “I know I can trust our local products. It’s fresher than getting it from far away, the supply is close by,” said Arlo M., who added, “I can drive by the local farms and know that I am in good hands.” 

Parents, too, have been surprised by the difference between Red Hook lunches and those they remember from their childhoods. “I grew up with the mentality of ‘Don’t eat school lunches,’ ” said high-school parent Dana Iova-Koga, who grew up in Asheville, N.C., and moved to Red Hook recently with her daughter, a high-school student. “I feel much more inclined to have my daughter buy school lunch knowing about this percentage of locally sourced ingredients,” she said. “There are so many farms around here. It’s a real asset to feed back into the community that way.”

Anthony is now working to integrate even more plant-based replacements in what can often be a meat-based menu. He bases this move on a growing body of research about the benefits of a plant-based diet. Anthony is also looking toward legislative changes that would give districts benefits for providing locally sourced breakfast, which is currently not a part of the 30-percent program. This year, school breakfast is provided free in the Red Hook district through a $20,000 donation from the Ascienzo Family Foundation. This year 40 percent of Red Hook students eat school-provided breakfast versus 18 percent in the prior year. 

To Sheehan-Lopez, who works to promote the 30-percent initiative in six counties, Anthony stands out. “There’s a wide range of levels of interest in farm-to-school because it is significantly more work to find these local products,” Sheehan-Lopez said. Anthony “has quite a lot of energy to talk to all these different local producers and distributors and to have the capacity to think about new and creative menu ideas.” Other districts have tried, Sheehan-Lopez continued, but to achieve the 30-percent benchmark remains a huge lift. “It’s a big accomplishment,” she said.

In February, Anthony is serving 12 of 19 meals using locally sourced ingredients, from cheeseburgers and pasta to tacos. He will also celebrate his thirtieth year working in the school lunch industry, where he says he continues to learn and experiment each year. There’s an “evolution and new perspective on where it’s going, and I don’t want to be chasing it,” Anthony said. I want to be “at least keeping up with it, if not ahead.”

The post Lettuce and Yams for Students An Hour After Harvest: 30 Percent of Red Hook School Lunches Are Now Sourced Local first appeared on The Daily Catch.

Like a reveler who chases each of many tequila shots with a seltzer, U.S. farm policy consists of comically clashing impulses likely to result in a nasty hangover.

The Department of Agriculture doles out substantial subsidies each year to entice farmers to maximize production of corn and soybeans. These commodities account for about 60 percent of U.S. farmland, are used to fatten animals on factory farms, and deliver many of the sugars and fats in our ultraprocessed diets. Unsavory side effects of their production include planet-warming emissions, soil erosion, and polluted waterways.

Since 1985, the USDA has also offered farmers cash to adopt conservation practices meant to help counter those troublesome impacts. Growers can make extra money by adding soil-stabilizing crops such as rye and oats to their rotations or by establishing filter strips of grasses or legumes, which are designed to trap chemical runoff. The catch is that a large amount of federal money—about $14 billion per year on average between 1995 and 2021—goes toward promoting commodity crops, compared with just $1.8 billion for conservation. So, for every dollar the department flashes in front of farmers to encourage them to grow to the max, it dangles just 13 cents to help them manage their land judiciously.

Congress has maintained this imbalance for decades through the farm bill—the twice-per-­decade legislative package that governs agriculture policy—a process that is replete with lobbying and campaign donations from agribusinesses that benefit. The gusher of cash for commodities production has been even more prodigious in recent years thanks to temporary subsidies to offset losses from trade wars and the pandemic: In 2020, commodity and crop insurance payouts dominated conservation outlays by more than 22-to-1.

A smarter approach, says Silvia Secchi, a natural resources economist at the University of Iowa, is to make conservation a prerequisite. Want goodies from the USDA? Then show us your plan for preserving topsoil, controlling runoff, and slashing greenhouse gas emissions. The safety net would be contingent on farmers helping to preserve the ecosystems on which their livelihood relies. In short, taxpayers would get more bang for their buck. Participation could be voluntary—farmers would continue to grow how and what they choose—but “if you do take government subsidies, you should do something for them,” Secchi argues.

This concept has precedent. In the 1970s, President Richard Nixon’s USDA secretary, Earl Butz, urged farmers to “plant fencerow to fencerow”—use every inch of land, hedgerows and riparian buffers be damned—to take advantage of what turned out to be a short-lived boom in corn and soybean exports. Prices soared and then tumbled, spurring farmers to keep squeezing their land to maximize output, causing massive erosion. Things got so bad that Congress felt compelled to act; the 1985 farm bill decreed that any farm that wanted federal help growing crops on land that the USDA deemed “highly erodible” had to come up with a plan to retain its topsoil. “Conservation compliance,” as this policy is known, became law despite “strong resistance from farm interests,” writes Jonathan Coppess, director of the agriculture policy program at the University of Illinois, in his forthcoming book, Between Soil and Society.

Want goodies from the USDA? Then show the agency your plan for preserving topsoil, cleaning up farm runoff, and slashing greenhouse gas emissions.

Those requirements remain in effect today, but enforcement is spotty, according to a 2016 report by the USDA’s inspector general. And the ’85 rules did nothing to slow the surge in corn production triggered by the government-backed ethanol program that began in 2007. Not surprisingly, erosion has continued. Farmland in the Corn Belt is now losing soil at least 10 times faster than the soil forms naturally—roughly one-third of this area has seen its topsoil fully wash away.

Secchi says it’s time to apply conservation compliance to all farmland that receives federal support and to dramatically ramp up enforcement. Such a program may be unlikely to pass in the current Congress, but Secchi has hope for the future. “Climate change is finally being taken seriously, at least in terms of the money we’re putting in,” she says, referring in part to the Inflation Reduction Act’s $19.5 billion for agricultural conservation programs. Aligning farm support and conservation goals would be a crucial step to ensuring that helping America’s farmers doesn’t mean degrading our land and fouling our water.

Like a reveler who chases each of many tequila shots with a seltzer, U.S. farm policy consists of comically clashing impulses likely to result in a nasty hangover.

The Department of Agriculture doles out substantial subsidies each year to entice farmers to maximize production of corn and soybeans. These commodities account for about 60 percent of U.S. farmland, are used to fatten animals on factory farms, and deliver many of the sugars and fats in our ultraprocessed diets. Unsavory side effects of their production include planet-warming emissions, soil erosion, and polluted waterways.

Since 1985, the USDA has also offered farmers cash to adopt conservation practices meant to help counter those troublesome impacts. Growers can make extra money by adding soil-stabilizing crops such as rye and oats to their rotations or by establishing filter strips of grasses or legumes, which are designed to trap chemical runoff. The catch is that a large amount of federal money—about $14 billion per year on average between 1995 and 2021—goes toward promoting commodity crops, compared with just $1.8 billion for conservation. So, for every dollar the department flashes in front of farmers to encourage them to grow to the max, it dangles just 13 cents to help them manage their land judiciously.

Congress has maintained this imbalance for decades through the farm bill—the twice-per-­decade legislative package that governs agriculture policy—a process that is replete with lobbying and campaign donations from agribusinesses that benefit. The gusher of cash for commodities production has been even more prodigious in recent years thanks to temporary subsidies to offset losses from trade wars and the pandemic: In 2020, commodity and crop insurance payouts dominated conservation outlays by more than 22-to-1.

A smarter approach, says Silvia Secchi, a natural resources economist at the University of Iowa, is to make conservation a prerequisite. Want goodies from the USDA? Then show us your plan for preserving topsoil, controlling runoff, and slashing greenhouse gas emissions. The safety net would be contingent on farmers helping to preserve the ecosystems on which their livelihood relies. In short, taxpayers would get more bang for their buck. Participation could be voluntary—farmers would continue to grow how and what they choose—but “if you do take government subsidies, you should do something for them,” Secchi argues.

This concept has precedent. In the 1970s, President Richard Nixon’s USDA secretary, Earl Butz, urged farmers to “plant fencerow to fencerow”—use every inch of land, hedgerows and riparian buffers be damned—to take advantage of what turned out to be a short-lived boom in corn and soybean exports. Prices soared and then tumbled, spurring farmers to keep squeezing their land to maximize output, causing massive erosion. Things got so bad that Congress felt compelled to act; the 1985 farm bill decreed that any farm that wanted federal help growing crops on land that the USDA deemed “highly erodible” had to come up with a plan to retain its topsoil. “Conservation compliance,” as this policy is known, became law despite “strong resistance from farm interests,” writes Jonathan Coppess, director of the agriculture policy program at the University of Illinois, in his forthcoming book, Between Soil and Society.

Want goodies from the USDA? Then show the agency your plan for preserving topsoil, cleaning up farm runoff, and slashing greenhouse gas emissions.

Those requirements remain in effect today, but enforcement is spotty, according to a 2016 report by the USDA’s inspector general. And the ’85 rules did nothing to slow the surge in corn production triggered by the government-backed ethanol program that began in 2007. Not surprisingly, erosion has continued. Farmland in the Corn Belt is now losing soil at least 10 times faster than the soil forms naturally—roughly one-third of this area has seen its topsoil fully wash away.

Secchi says it’s time to apply conservation compliance to all farmland that receives federal support and to dramatically ramp up enforcement. Such a program may be unlikely to pass in the current Congress, but Secchi has hope for the future. “Climate change is finally being taken seriously, at least in terms of the money we’re putting in,” she says, referring in part to the Inflation Reduction Act’s $19.5 billion for agricultural conservation programs. Aligning farm support and conservation goals would be a crucial step to ensuring that helping America’s farmers doesn’t mean degrading our land and fouling our water.

ITHACA, N.Y.— City officials are set to renew a $20,000 signing bonus meant to incentivize trained officers to transfer to the Ithaca Police Department as staffing challenges continue for the force.

Members of the Common Council will review the specifics of the lateral transfer agreement at their regularly scheduled meeting Wednesday. It was first approved in Nov. 2023 following discussions between the Ithaca Police Benevolent Association (PBA) and the city.

It was reported last summer that officers at the department said the force was “dangerously under-staffed,” which has been the case for many years now, according to PBA President Thomas Condzella, who also serves on the force.

The practice of offering signing bonuses to lateral transfers has become normalized nationwide, he said, as law enforcement agencies everywhere grapple with severe staffing shortages.

Since the department started offering the signing bonus, three lateral transfers have started working on the force. Condzella said there are “a couple” more potential hires he is aware of.

The bonus is “tipping the scales,” in Condzella’s words, and has been a significant factor in attracting experienced officers from other municipalities.

“They realize Ithaca is serious about bringing experienced talent to the department,” he said.

City officials have been criticized by all five labor unions in Ithaca, including PBA, for prolonging the process of approving their contract agreements with the city. As a result, workers noted widespread vacancies across all city departments.

In 2022, union leaders joined in writing a letter to former City Attorney Ari Lavine, claiming the city has an “anti-worker agenda” that has been “far-reaching and devastating.” The letter also claimed IPD staffing decreased almost 30% over the last decade while simultaneously, Ithaca’s population increased, which resulted in an increase in the demand for public services.

Unions respond to City Attorney’s comments as tumultuous month continues

IPD is struggling to maintain adequate staffing numbers, even with the signing bonus continuing for another year after council votes tonight.

Currently, IPD has 44 active officers, which does not include the officers in training who are unable to help fill scheduling gaps and those with long-term injuries, also unable to work.

The preferred minimum number of officers in a patrol division is 36 officers for the department, he said. Currently, 27 officers are rotating on schedule.

“A lot of agencies are competing for the same pool of applicants,” Condzella said.

Departments overwhelmingly prefer hiring lateral transfers over new officers, he said. This way, departments circumvent having to facilitate and fund training for new hires, which saves money and time.

“Getting an experienced applicant means less time training and less time to get that officer on the street actually serving,” he said.

While Condzella is optimistic, every successful hire seems to be followed by a retirement or another circumstance where an officer is taken off the streets.

“It’s a constant push and pull between hiring and attrition,” he said. “We hope in the near future we’ll get to a point where one or two retirements isn’t catastrophic for the department in terms of scheduling.”

The post IPD’s incentivizing signing bonus to be renewed, staffing challenges continue  appeared first on The Ithaca Voice.

Like a reveler who chases each of many tequila shots with a seltzer, U.S. farm policy consists of comically clashing impulses likely to result in a nasty hangover.

The Department of Agriculture doles out substantial subsidies each year to entice farmers to maximize production of corn and soybeans. These commodities account for about 60 percent of U.S. farmland, are used to fatten animals on factory farms, and deliver many of the sugars and fats in our ultraprocessed diets. Unsavory side effects of their production include planet-warming emissions, soil erosion, and polluted waterways.

Since 1985, the USDA has also offered farmers cash to adopt conservation practices meant to help counter those troublesome impacts. Growers can make extra money by adding soil-stabilizing crops such as rye and oats to their rotations or by establishing filter strips of grasses or legumes, which are designed to trap chemical runoff. The catch is that a large amount of federal money—about $14 billion per year on average between 1995 and 2021—goes toward promoting commodity crops, compared with just $1.8 billion for conservation. So, for every dollar the department flashes in front of farmers to encourage them to grow to the max, it dangles just 13 cents to help them manage their land judiciously.

Congress has maintained this imbalance for decades through the farm bill—the twice-per-­decade legislative package that governs agriculture policy—a process that is replete with lobbying and campaign donations from agribusinesses that benefit. The gusher of cash for commodities production has been even more prodigious in recent years thanks to temporary subsidies to offset losses from trade wars and the pandemic: In 2020, commodity and crop insurance payouts dominated conservation outlays by more than 22-to-1.

A smarter approach, says Silvia Secchi, a natural resources economist at the University of Iowa, is to make conservation a prerequisite. Want goodies from the USDA? Then show us your plan for preserving topsoil, controlling runoff, and slashing greenhouse gas emissions. The safety net would be contingent on farmers helping to preserve the ecosystems on which their livelihood relies. In short, taxpayers would get more bang for their buck. Participation could be voluntary—farmers would continue to grow how and what they choose—but “if you do take government subsidies, you should do something for them,” Secchi argues.

This concept has precedent. In the 1970s, President Richard Nixon’s USDA secretary, Earl Butz, urged farmers to “plant fencerow to fencerow”—use every inch of land, hedgerows and riparian buffers be damned—to take advantage of what turned out to be a short-lived boom in corn and soybean exports. Prices soared and then tumbled, spurring farmers to keep squeezing their land to maximize output, causing massive erosion. Things got so bad that Congress felt compelled to act; the 1985 farm bill decreed that any farm that wanted federal help growing crops on land that the USDA deemed “highly erodible” had to come up with a plan to retain its topsoil. “Conservation compliance,” as this policy is known, became law despite “strong resistance from farm interests,” writes Jonathan Coppess, director of the agriculture policy program at the University of Illinois, in his forthcoming book, Between Soil and Society.

Want goodies from the USDA? Then show the agency your plan for preserving topsoil, cleaning up farm runoff, and slashing greenhouse gas emissions.

Those requirements remain in effect today, but enforcement is spotty, according to a 2016 report by the USDA’s inspector general. And the ’85 rules did nothing to slow the surge in corn production triggered by the government-backed ethanol program that began in 2007. Not surprisingly, erosion has continued. Farmland in the Corn Belt is now losing soil at least 10 times faster than the soil forms naturally—roughly one-third of this area has seen its topsoil fully wash away.

Secchi says it’s time to apply conservation compliance to all farmland that receives federal support and to dramatically ramp up enforcement. Such a program may be unlikely to pass in the current Congress, but Secchi has hope for the future. “Climate change is finally being taken seriously, at least in terms of the money we’re putting in,” she says, referring in part to the Inflation Reduction Act’s $19.5 billion for agricultural conservation programs. Aligning farm support and conservation goals would be a crucial step to ensuring that helping America’s farmers doesn’t mean degrading our land and fouling our water.

TOMPKINS COUNTY, N.Y.— Kids at risk of developmental delay can qualify for care through the longstanding federally funded Early Intervention Program, but a dearth of care providers has created a backlog that keeps families waiting for care. 

County officials are hoping to change that. Tompkins County Whole Health Commissioner Frank Kruppa said the county will hire a team of in-house providers in an attempt to increase the number of appointments available locally.

Currently, families might see months go by before they can get an appointment with an audiologist, physical therapist or speech therapist through the Early Intervention Program. Children sometimes age out of qualifying for the program before they can receive care. 

It’s an issue that acutely affects New York’s rural and semi-rural counties, like Tompkins, where a limited pool of providers can spend significant portions of their day traveling from child to child, Kruppa said.

“We were given authority to hire two speech language pathologists, a physical therapist, and a special education teacher,” Kruppa said. “Those are the areas where we have some of the biggest gaps.”

Despite efforts by advocates and local governments, New York State has largely not increased the reimbursement rates for providers. Kruppa said these lagging rates are  driving an already limited number of providers out of the area or out of the early intervention field altogether.

“Our thinking was that by providing a stable salary with benefits, we might be able to encourage some people that have left that early intervention program to come back,” Kruppa said.

Kruppa said that when families miss out on early intervention services, it can have cascading effects — for both the child’s future and for local public health infrastructure.

“Kids [get] older. And the early intervention program is only [from birth] to three years of age, and then they transition into preschool services,” Kruppa said. “And then of course, when they hit five, they go into the school districts. So the backlog just moves along into other systems as the child gets older.”

Typically, early intervention specialists are employed by private organizations like the Franziska Racker Center or operate as independent practitioners. The four new providers would be the only publicly-employed early intervention specialists in Tompkins County, Kruppa said.

Kellie Hummel, a physical therapist and early intervention specialist at Racker, said the lack of providers has worsened in the last few years.

“Children and families end up waiting on a waiting list, and that is unprecedented really, in this county,” Hummel said. “It has not been the case since the last couple of years.”

Once children receive an initial referral from their pediatricians, families must first wait for an early intervention evaluation appointment. The evaluation determines which services, if any, the child could benefit from. After that, children often end up on another waiting list to actually receive those services. 

“There are kids who have waited a year, there are kids waiting six months and everything in between,” Hummel said. “There are [early intervention eligible] children who will come into preschool who never got [early intervention.]”

Hummel said local providers are having to make certain compromises, like asking families to bring their children to more central locations, such as a community center. These changes, while they may seem small, can make it harder for some families to keep their appointments. Some providers also feel that these compromises go against the original intent of the program, Hummel said.

Hummel said that while some of the problems in Tompkins County are regionally unique, many of her colleagues nationally are reporting a lot of the same strains. 

“COVID was tough on early intervention, because it was tough on children and working families,” Hummel said. “But early intervention had been critically underfunded before that. […] The program has been underfunded for a really long time.”

Hummel said she thinks the county’s effort to bring more providers into the area will help, but said statewide and federal change will be vital.

“The research is clear that when we intervene early, we can see lifelong change for children and their families,” Hummel said. “So why are we stuck here?”

Those interested in applying for one of the new positions can view a job description or submit their application on the county’s website here. Applications close on Feb. 19. 

The post There aren’t enough child development specialists, so the county is hiring its own appeared first on The Ithaca Voice.

FAYETTEVILLE, Ohio — Ghosts populate the campus of Chatfield College.

They’re in the fading photos on the library walls of students who, over 177 years, attended the college and the boarding school from which it sprang, and of the Ursuline nuns who taught them, in their simple tunics and scapulars.

Amid seemingly endless acres of tobacco, soybean and wheat farms in a village in southwest Ohio with a population of 241, the now-closed college sits at the end of a narrow entrance road flanked by Bradford pear trees, colorless and bare in the winter gloom. Just about the only traffic on the way is an occasional stray chicken.

Chatfield has been shut down for a year now, though the buildings and grounds remain so neatly tended that they look as if they’re ready for the students to return. It’s among a fast-growing number of closed colleges in rural America, stripping communities of nearby higher education options to which young people can aspire and eventually go.

In this case, however, something unusual has happened: The assets left by the defunct college are being used to help at least some local students continue their educations past high school.

It’s a story that underscores the role played by colleges and universities in rural America, what’s lost when they close and how advocates are trying to keep the proportion of rural high school graduates who go to college from falling even further than it already has.

“It was a really great starting point for me, and it could have been a starting point for other students,” said Anna Robertson, 23, who attended Chatfield until the end.

Related: Rural universities, already few and far between, are being stripped of majors

Locals once saw greater potential for the college, which was founded in 1845 as a boarding school by an English-born Ursuline nun named Julia Chatfield. In the early 20th century, it benefited from being close to U.S. 50, a heavily trafficked major east-west route. And in 1971, it evolved into Chatfield College, which conferred two-year associate degrees.

“It was the heart of the area,” said Amber Saeidi Asl, who grew up next to the campus. She took courses offered by Chatfield through a dual-enrollment program while she was still in high school, and eventually went there.

Just having a college nearby inspired her to go, she said.

“The people of the area really wanted a college,” Sister Ellen Doyle, president from 1986 to 1997, said in a video history.

“A lot of kids that wouldn’t otherwise go to college felt comfortable coming here,” Mary Jacobs, a Chatfield graduate who later worked as its director of finance, said on the video. “If it hadn’t been for this college, a lot of them wouldn’t have attended college at all.”

But the interstate highway system long ago supplanted U.S. 50. Even the village where the college was located, St. Martin, was dissolved in 2011, when the population had dwindled to 129; the campus was absorbed into Fayetteville.

Like other small, rural, tuition-dependent and religiously affiliated institutions, Chatfield grew even more imperiled as Americans increasingly questioned the cost and value of postsecondary education. There are only about 80  two-year private, nonprofit colleges left, fewer than half as many as just 30 years ago.

It’s also in a part of the country that has been among the most acutely affected by a decline in the number of high school graduates and their interest in going to college. The number of students in Ohio’s public high schools slid by 7 percent from 2012 to 2022, and the percentage of them going directly to college fell to 53 percent by 2020, the most recent year for which the figure is available — nearly 10 percentage points below its peak, and well below the national average of 62 percent.

Related: MIT, Yale and other elite colleges are finally reaching out to rural students

Even though Chatfield accepted everyone who applied, and charged a comparatively low $14,080 in tuition and fees, it was down to 129 students in its last semester, according to federal data. Nearly half took their classes exclusively online.

With an annual budget of around $4.5 million, the college lost $373,520 in 2020 and $850,202 in 2021, tax records show.

“We could see the enrollment trends,” said Robert Elmore, Chatfield’s last president. “We just didn’t see how we could sustain this and continue operating.”

So the school announced in the fall of 2022 that it would shut down at the end of that semester, taking 70 jobs with it. It barely made the headlines. But it had joined more than a dozen other private, nonprofit universities and colleges in rural areas or that serve rural students that have closed or announced their closings just since 2020.

Those include Nebraska Christian College, Marlboro College in Vermont, Holy Family College in Wisconsin, Judson College in Alabama, Ohio Valley and Alderson Broaddus universities in West Virginia, Magdalen College of the Liberal Arts in New Hampshire, Iowa Wesleyan University, Marymount California University, Cazenovia College in New York, Finlandia University in Michigan, Presentation College in South Dakota and Lincoln College, Lincoln Christian University and MacMurray College in Illinois.

Nearly 13 million Americans now live in places, mostly in the Midwest and Great Plains, where the nearest college or university is beyond a reasonable commute away, the American Council on Education reports. The nearest colleges to the Chatfield campus — a community college and a branch of the University of Cincinnati — are about 45 minutes away.

Related: A campaign to prod high school students into college tries a new tack: Making it simple

“For a lot of college students who are living in rural areas, it’s just not feasible to drive to one of the city universities,” said Robertson.

Helping overcome those kinds of obstacles is now the purpose of the nonprofit set up with the remaining Chatfield College endowment, which Elmore put at $4 million; the organization also claims the grounds and buildings as assets, valued along with the endowment at $11 million.

Called the Chatfield Edge, it has provided volunteer mentors, career counseling, assistance with admission and financial aid applications and other help to 21 students, and scholarships of about $1,500 per semester to 19 of them, said David Hesson, director of programs, who was an associate dean at the college.

It’s not only about getting students to college; the Chatfield Edge will also help with trade school and certificate programs. The target is low-income high school students who would be the first in their families to go to college and students who are older than the traditional age. Robertson, who now is finishing her bachelor’s degree at Asbury University in Kentucky, is among the beneficiaries.

“We said we don’t have to necessarily provide the education. But we could support them, and we know what that looks like, and we have the scholarship money to cover the gap,” Elmore said.

Other than Hesson and Elmore, the only employees left are a facilities director and the director of development. They work in the onetime student center. “We’re the whole gang,” said Hesson as he held open the door for some rare visitors. An Ursuline sister, Patricia Homan, has an office in a separate, otherwise empty building, and spends time in the library compiling an archive of the college’s history.

The small number of students it has helped so far speaks to the challenges faced by the Chatfield Edge and other organizations promoting access to college and other education after high school for young people growing up in rural places.

“A lot of the kids I knew grew up to do what their parents did,” said Saeidi Asl, who now volunteers as a mentor. “If your parents were farmers, you became a farmer. If your parents were truckers, you became a trucker.”

Related: Often overwhelmed on big campuses, rural college students push for support

That was not the case for Destiny Jones, who also was at Chatfield when it closed. “I didn’t think I was going to do well in the workforce without an education,” Jones said. “I’m a person who needs to be told how to do something.” Plus, “it was going to lead to a higher-paying job.”

Jones, who is 21, was speaking at a daycare center where she works during breaks to help make money for tuition at Mount Saint Joseph University in Cincinnati, which she now attends on her way to getting a degree in art education and becoming a teacher.

Going to Chatfield was much easier. “I didn’t feel like I had to stress about not being able to get there,” she said. Now, at Mount Saint Joseph, “I definitely get pretty homesick, especially in the middle of the semester.” As someone who is close to her family, “I didn’t want to be away.”

Chatfield’s very existence, Jones said, “made people think about college because it was close by.” Still, many of her high school classmates didn’t go. They took “blue-collar jobs, working in restaurants, doing mechanical work, construction — anything they can get their hands on.”

Rural high school graduates are far less likely to go directly to college than their suburban counterparts, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center — 56 percent, compared to 62 percent, respectively. That’s down substantially in just the last three years.

A big reason for that is a lack of confidence, said Hesson. “They don’t think they can do it. It’s unknown.” And without a college close by, “you lose accessibility.”

Related: Aging states to college graduates: We’ll pay you to stay

Rural students who do go to college generally prefer to stay close to home, research shows.

Robertson, for instance, had never driven on a highway before Chatfield’s closing forced her to transfer to her Kentucky university, nearly two and a half hours away, which has 1,395 undergraduates.

“She said Asbury is such a big college, and I cracked up, because it’s not,” said April Houk, a Fayetteville resident who is Robertson’s volunteer mentor. “She was kind of like a deer in the headlights.” So Houk sent her a bouquet of flowers and some words of encouragement at the beginning of the school year; two weeks later, Robertson had joined some extracurricular clubs, found a friend to study with and was majoring in equine science with plans to become a veterinarian.

Still, Robertson said, she misses having a college closer to home, which was also cheaper, since she could commute. Her new life “is a pretty different experience,” she said, “because I’m living away from home for the first time. It’s a much bigger campus. There’s more of a sense of anonymity. It can be a little lonely.”

Small rural colleges are more supportive, said Homan, the Ursuline nun and archivist, who also went to Chatfield and later worked there and at a tiny branch campus in Cincinnati that has also closed. “I was the cheerleader,” she said. “I found students if they didn’t show up. If they didn’t have bus fare, we would help them with that.”

Her experience of working in the area “is that the older generation says, ‘I don’t have a college education and I did fine.’ Students aren’t looking for a college education. It is not the aspiration.”

Many, when they’re older, find they do need one, however. That was the case for Jackie Schmidt, who got her associate degree at Chatfield and went on to a successful career as an office manager and accounting manager before helping start a contract manufacturing company. When she was laid off — “I was 54 and had the rug pulled out from under me” — she found “the jobs I thought I was qualified for required a bachelor’s degree.” But “I was intimidated at this age to be going back to school.”

Schmidt, now 56, found her way to the Chatfield Edge and with its help enrolled in an online bachelor’s degree program in business administration.

With rural colleges closing, she said, “I worry because not only for kids just getting out of high school but adults who decide they want to go back to school — what avenues do they have?”

Chatfield College created a sense of community not only for its students, but for the surrounding township, said Houk, who lives a mile from the campus on a 1,300-acre farm. Her husband’s grandmother worked there as a cook, and Houk went to summer camps at Chatfield and was married in the chapel. “We loved this place,” she said. “It really has a lot of history.”

She looked around at the all-but-abandoned campus. “It almost makes you emotional — the integrity it brought to the community.” Even though it’s no longer operating, she said, “I still say, ‘I live one mile from Chatfield College at the stop sign.’ It’s sad to have it gone.”

Without the college, “We lose that educational opportunity and the gifts that these young people have if they were educated,” said Homan, who is now on the board of the Chatfield Edge and Schmidt’s mentor. She, too, looked around the campus. “Oh my gosh, it’s quiet. But it lives on. It does. I know that.”

This story about rural higher education was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter.

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ITHACA, N.Y. — The EMS Rapid Response pilot program, designed to bolster Tompkins County’s volunteer-based emergency response infrastructure, will be funded almost entirely by a state grant, following an influx of $560,000 in unexpected funding.

New York State awarded $630,000 to the county, which covers 90% of the total estimated first-year operating costs of the program, through its Local Efficiency Program.

Funds will be distributed in the next few months, according to County Administrator Lisa Holmes. She told The Ithaca Voice a typo in the application materials led staff to believe the county could only apply for up to 10% of the total estimated costs of the pilot program.

“It should have been reversed,” Holmes said. Initially, the county applied for $70,000, which would be 10% of the estimated first-year operating costs.

Rather, the application materials were meant to instruct staff to apply for 90% of the total cost of their program, with the county to be responsible for paying for the remaining 10%.

Holmes said the Deputy County Administrator Bridgette Nugent was the first to alert the state of the typo after contacting state officials to clarify what she believed was a mistake when she saw the award amount.

“We’re thrilled about this funding,” she said. “There’s been widespread support for this program and the need for it to support our volunteer municipal ambulance services.”

Holmes announced the news at the county legislature meeting on Jan. 16.

County to cover start-up costs of new daytime emergency response service

The EMS Rapid Response program, also referred to as the Rapid Medical Response program, was created by county staff at the Department of Emergency Response (DoER) in 2023 after years of increasing pressure and strain on EMS agencies. The Tompkins County Legislature voted to approve the program the same year.

Nine fully-trained EMTs will operate three new SUVs, which will be outfitted with life-saving medical equipment.The cars will be stationed around the county to respond to emergency calls, particularly in rural areas where it takes the longest for a transport service to arrive.

While county legislators and municipal officials were unified in their support of the program from the start, they disagreed on whether or not the municipalities should contribute financially to it.

Municipal officials, particularly in rural areas in the county, were generally not receptive to contributing financially. Last year, Enfield’s town board filed a resolution in support of the county covering the costs entirely.

“We, the rural towns, are flat broke,” Robert Lynch, an Enfield Town Board member, said at a county legislature meeting in November 2023. “We can’t bankroll this. But you, Tompkins County, can.”

In November 2023, the Tompkins County Legislature voted to include a memorandum of understanding (MOU) in the 2024 Countywide Shared Services Plan to formally give Holmes guidance in negotiating financial arrangements with officials in the nine municipalities.

Holmes has an easier job now that the state is set to contribute much more than initially expected.

“We’re very glad to be able to launch [the program] and to know this early on in the year that we have the state funds to support it,” Holmes said.

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Editor’s note: This story led off this week’s Future of Learning newsletter, which is delivered free to subscribers’ inboxes every other Wednesday with trends and top stories about education innovation. Subscribe today!

In 2021, there was a sudden shift in how school board meetings around the country were conducted: Routine meetings turned heated, with angry community members often accusing educators of teaching their kids about critical race theory without their knowledge. That led to a firestorm of anti-CRT bans, intense focus on school board elections and partisan divides within local communities on education.

A new peer-reviewed study by researchers at Michigan State University and the University at Albany provides some insight into how the anti-CRT movement took hold — and the lasting consequences for how communities view their teachers and schools.

“We’ve seen debates about curriculum before but nothing that was so nationalized and spread like this,” said Ariell Bertrand, a doctoral student at MSU and one of the study’s authors.

The study examined the narratives that policymakers were using to justify CRT bans in the first 29 states that proposed them, she said. Based on the “narrative policy framework,” which scholars use to determine how policymakers and lobbyists use narrative storytelling to influence legislation, the researchers identified 11 key anti-CRT “narrative plots” being circulated.

According to the study, conservative think tanks such as the Manhattan Institute and Heritage Foundation and the group Moms for Liberty drafted specific narratives that brought CRT into the mainstream. The Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo, who is considered a key architect of the anti-CRT movement, tweeted his intention in 2021 to redefine CRT “to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.”

The study found that the narratives created by these groups — the most common being that CRT indoctrinates children in school to feel guilty about their race — quickly took hold, Bertrand said. According to the study, since 2021, 44 states have introduced more than 140 anti-CRT laws or bans related to concepts allegedly being taught in K-12.

“We found that these narratives were having this downstream effect on people’s likelihood to even trust their local schools anymore.”

Ariell Bertrand, a doctoral student at MSU and one of the study’s authors

In addition, a survey the researchers conducted of Michigan adults in fall 2021 found that individuals who reported hearing any of the anti-CRT narratives were less likely to trust their local teachers to teach any subject fairly. People who had heard all 11 narrative plots were 59 percent more likely to support a CRT ban than individuals who had not been exposed to the ban-CRT narratives.

In surveys, Americans typically express strong support for their local teachers and schools even if they don’t hold favorable views about the nation’s public schools as a whole, Bertrand noted. But this survey challenges that pattern, showing that the anti-CRT narratives began to unravel support even for the schools and teachers people knew best, she said. The survey also found that adults who’d been exposed to the anti-CRT narratives didn’t trust teachers to discuss race or racism or choose materials to supplement curricula, and overall were less likely to support instruction on fairness and equity, she said.

“In the United States we have these really strong macro-level beliefs about public education, such as this belief that education is this cornerstone to our democracy,” Bertrand said. “We found that these narratives were having this downstream effect on people’s likelihood to even trust their local schools anymore.”

The findings also point to partisan and racial divides. Republicans and white adults were more likely to embrace CRT narratives. For example, while a Democrat who had heard all the CRT plots had a 44 percent probability of supporting a CRT ban, someone who identified as Republican had an 88 percent probability. White individuals who’d heard all the CRT plots had a 73 percent chance of supporting a CRT ban, compared to 46 percent for Black individuals.

Now, as attention shifts from anti-CRT legislation to LGBTQ student rights and banning books, Bertrand said she and colleagues believe these narratives and attacks on public education will have similar repercussions. “For generations to come these narratives could undermine people’s support for public education and funding and things like that,” she said.

The CRT study is part of a broader research project led by coauthor Rebecca Jacobsen, professor of education policy at MSU, that looks at how school board meetings have changed since 2019 as a result of anti-CRT, anti-LGBTQ+ and other national narratives.

The researchers are finding that even in places where school board candidates weren’t necessarily running on these issues, school boards made changes to how meetings are run — for example, by limiting open comment periods, adding timers counting down how long speakers may talk, and enhancing security. While these changes are a way to control heated meetings, Jacobsen said they have the long-term effect of altering how the public interacts with its schools.

“This was really an up-close-and-personal opportunity to shape politics, especially around an issue that’s so important to many people: education and the future of their children,” she said of school board meetings. “What was a well-intentioned response has potentially further distanced people and only maybe fueled some of these claims, like ‘Look, our schools are not about you or your children. Look, these people are not listening.’”

Today, the people showing up to meetings include not just parents and families who have legitimate concerns and complaints about how they want their children to be taught, she said, but community members and outsiders who are sharing misinformation about what is happening in schools. While public education is far from perfect, she said, most Americans have shared a universal commitment to supporting education.

But as partisan divides deepen around the issue, she said, “I really think that that’s beginning to wane.”

This story about CRT was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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The Biden administration’s $3.1 billion Partnership for Climate-Smart Commodities grant program hopes to convince farmers and ranchers to adopt practices that will reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and sequester carbon in the ground. It also seeks to make amends for a century of discrimination by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), which administers the grants. In its program description, USDA said Black, Native, and other “historically underserved” farmers needed to be a key part of all projects in the climate-smart program.

It is a laudable goal, but one that faces many obstacles. The climate-smart partnerships are just underway, but it’s clear that some of the biggest projects—the ones that got the most taxpayer money and are led by giant for-profit companies and major agricultural lobbying groups—have not thought through in any detail how they will serve BIPOC farmers.

And while strict measurements are in place for quantifying climate progress, grantees will evaluate their own success or failure on matters of equity. Also, USDA’s definition of “historically underserved” farmers includes not just ethnic and racial minorities but veterans, young and beginning farmers, women, and those operating at poverty level—so it’s possible for a project to meet the USDA’s equity goal without serving any Black farmers at all.

Perhaps the biggest obstacle for meeting the equity goal isn’t structural, but a matter of trust. The USDA’s long history of discriminating against Black farmers and other ethnic and racial minorities—by denying them access to low-interest loans, grants, and other forms of assistance—resulted in significant financial losses for those farmers over the course of the 20th century, and in many cases led to the loss of their land.

Not surprisingly, there remains a significant lack of trust in the USDA, and government programs generally, among Black and other minority farmers. Some reject anything with the federal government’s stamp on it, while others may not even be aware of farm support programs they’re eligible for.

But the equity goal is consistent with what some see as a nascent effort by USDA to improve its relationships and foster trust in these communities. In the 2021 American Rescue Plan, the massive Covid relief package, there was $4 billion allotted to debt relief for Black farmers. Some white farmers filed a lawsuit claiming discrimination, and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act revoked the promised funds and created a race-neutral program instead. Many Black farmers eligible for the original debt relief felt once again USDA had broken a promise.

“This is an area that’s clearly been a challenge for USDA for a long time,” said Robert Bonnie, USDA undersecretary for Farm Production and Conservation. “And as we think about everything we do, including climate stuff, we want to make sure we build in equity.”

The climate-smart projects run for five years, so the verdict on whether they will meet the equity goal—and even how to measure success given the lack of clear metrics—will evolve. But some projects seem designed for success, while others have work to do if they hope to benefit minority producers in meaningful ways.

The climate-smart program has two funding tiers. The first is for projects ranging from $5 million to $100 million and the second is for projects up to $5 million. Of the 141 projects announced a year ago, so far 123 have been finalized, according to USDA.

Projects in the first tier are dominated by multinational corporations like Pepsi and Tyson Foods; land-grant universities such as the University of Illinois and Virginia Tech; large commodity groups like the Iowa Soybean Association and USA Rice; and nonprofits such as the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation and the National Association of Conservation Districts. The second tier, meanwhile, explicitly sought projects led by historically Black colleges and universities (HBCU) and other minority-serving organizations.

Critics saw this funding discrepancy as a tacit acknowledgement that the organizations most likely to engage farmers of color lacked the resources to manage a $90 million federal grant. “Can we do it? Yeah,” says Ibrahim Katampe, a professor and administrator at Central State University, a public HBCU in Wilberforce, Ohio. “But it will just be a lot of outsourcing.”

Bonnie said the two pots of money reflect the fact that HBCUs and nonprofits focused on minority growers would be at a disadvantage competing directly against the likes of the U.S. Cotton Trust Protocol or Truterra, the sustainability arm of Land O’Lakes, both of which are leading $80-$90 million projects. “The idea was, let’s try to build something that had equity that cuts across everything, but to provide a particular option for smaller groups, smaller landowner groups, historically underserved producers, minority-serving institutions, and others that may not get in the larger grants,” he said.

In other words, while anyone can say they will make equity a priority, a minority-serving university or organization of tribal growers will have an advantage when it comes to recruiting and retaining participants who USDA has historically not served. Even if they have fewer resources.

“There’ve been so many decades of persistent underfunding, which then leads to a state of not having capacity over a long period of time,” said Antonio McLaren, who spent some 20 years managing grants at USDA and is now vice president of programs at the 1890 Universities Foundation, which represents historically Black land-grant schools that were founded in response to Blacks being denied access to states’ original land-grant universities.

He said these schools tend to be much smaller than their original land-grant counterparts in terms of faculty, facilities, student enrollment, and other resources. But they also are deeply connected to their local communities of color, and exploiting that could benefit both the farmers and USDA. “The 1890s do play a large role in helping Black farmers,” McLaren said. Their outreach and technical support efforts—sometimes supported with federal money—lead to Black farmers “being able to trust them, but also to trust USDA as well.” Because of these connections, the smaller projects should be nearly guaranteed to achieve their equity goals, which according to their proposals are often more specific and ambitious. The larger projects, meanwhile, are primarily focused on big farms, where they see greater potential for climate benefits. But their equity goals tend to be fuzzy.

The Iowa Soybean Association, for example, received $95 million to “expand markets for climate-smart corn, soybeans, sugarbeets, and wheat” in 12 Midwest and Great Plains states and support “farmer implementation and monitoring of climate-smart practices.” For-profit partners include Cargill, JBS, PepsiCo, and Coca-Cola. It had enrolled more than 200 farmers through Sept. 30, and will not update its numbers again until January 2024. The project’s equity goal is for 20 percent of participating farmers to be women, veterans, and BIPOC producers, but the plan for meeting that goal is not spelled out. The situation at Central State University looks very different. It’s running a $5 million project that will convert manure from a woman-owned cattle feedlot into organic fertilizer and distribute it to BIPOC and other underserved farmers in urban and high poverty areas in Ohio and southeast Michigan. The project will reduce the feedlot’s methane emissions through an innovative manure management system that prevents the liquids and solids from separating. Without the separation, there will be fewer bacteria feeding on the manure and no need to agitate it before it gets pumped onto fields as fertilizer. The agitation, coupled with the bacteria feeding frenzy, is what leads to release of methane, a greenhouse gas more potent than carbon dioxide. The resulting nutrient-rich slurry will lower both the farmers’ operating costs and their carbon footprint, as they will no longer have to purchase synthetic fertilizer that’s produced using fossil fuels. Funding for the project was announced in December 2022, but Central State didn’t receive its final go-ahead until late November. So recruiting participants is barely underway. But the university’s extension program has built a network of Black farmers that gives project coordinator Ibrahim Katampe confidence that urban and small rural vegetable farmers will sign on when he is ready for them, “especially those that have a minimum of 1,000 square feet to up to an acre of land.” And that group is a sweet spot for meeting USDA’s equity goal, Katampe said, because “unless you have targeted programming, it will seem to fall through the cracks.” Sharifa Tomlinson, who runs Arrowrock Farm in Riverside, Ohio, is the kind of farmer Katampe hopes to enroll. Tomlinson, a 62-year-old African American nurse, came to agriculture later in life. “Being my age and being my race and being my sex, we did not think that we could be farmers,” she said. “No one said, ‘Oh, Sharifa, when you grow up, you could be a farmer.’” In 2021, she started selling tomatoes, cucumbers, pumpkins, blueberries, and other produce at farmers markets. Later, she added laying hens to her operation. This year, she joined Ohio CAN, a USDA-backed program administered by the state agriculture department, that buys, processes, and freezes chicken for distribution at food banks. Raising chickens for Ohio CAN quickly became a major part of Tomlinson’s business.

Through another USDA program, Tomlinson got funding to install a high tunnel—a semi-permanent structure that protects plants from severe weather and extends the growing season. “That’s going to be a whole new ballgame,” she said, enabling her to scale up her vegetable production. In this area of the corn belt, Central State University has played an outsized role in creating a network for producers of color. Tomlinson was pleasantly surprised when she discovered other Black farmers like her, and it was one of them who encouraged her to apply for the high tunnel. She says now she’s ready to help someone else tap into a USDA program. “USDA did do some junky stuff back in the day,” she said. “It’s trying to right its wrongs now. And, so, I’m part of that.” Jordan Roach, who grows herbs, garlic, and berries at Biddy Bobbie Farm near Yellow Springs, Ohio, said she’s interested in free fertilizer, but would want to see where it’s coming from to ensure that it meets her farming objectives. Hearing that Central State would be the catalyst to connect her with the product increased her confidence. “We already have really good established relationships so that would be something I would trust,” said Roach, who identifies as Black and Indigenous. Rosemary Galdamez would love to have access to that kind of network. She is responsible for signing up minority farmers for the Iowa Soybean Association project—but first she has to find them. She hopes to do that by “connecting with other organizations in the Midwest that work with underserved farmers to build those relationships,” she said in an interview. So far, she’s produced outreach materials in Spanish and met with groups that support women and veterans in agriculture. The premise of the Soybean Association’s program is to pay farmers for measurable emissions reductions, regardless of what strategies the farmers use to achieve them. Galdamez recognizes that across the Midwest and Great Plains states, where the project is based, and in the target commodities of corn, soybeans, sugarbeats, and wheat, most farmers are white men. “There are some underserved farmers who grow corn and soybeans,” she said, “but in the Midwest specifically it is somewhat limited.” Participating farmers are asked to complete a voluntary demographic survey, which is how the project is tabulating its outreach success. In a follow-up email, Galdamez said that as of Sept. 30 “we have 49 contracts (21 percent) with participants from underserved groups. The contracts are with beginning farmers, veteran (former military) farmers, women farmers, and socially disadvantaged farmers.” She declined to provide specific data regarding whether any of those contracts are with farmers of color. McLaren, the former USDA grant manager, said the equity goals for a project like this one may have been undercut even before it was funded because none of the project’s official partners focus on BIPOC producers. “The main driver for any successful collaboration or partnership ­is developing intentionality and making sure that there is trust established from the very beginning,” he said. A project led by the grain buyer and broker ADM, for instance, included the National Black Growers Council (NBGC) from the start. Paul Scheetz, who manages ADM’s investments and partnerships in climate-smart solutions, said that was a natural outgrowth of the company’s existing relationships with the council and with the Black farmers it does business with. “Prior to the grant, we were working directly with them,” he said, noting that the company has participated in field days sponsored by the council where it meets with farmers potentially interested in selling to ADM. Scheetz said that during a brainstorming session about how to structure the grant’s incentive payments to growers, a Black farmer noted that “some of the ground that we farm isn’t always the most productive ground.” ADM had been thinking payments would be based on bushels of grain produced, but that comment prompted a reconsideration. They decided instead that payments would be based on the number of acres a farmer commits to conservation practices; that way, lower-yielding fields are not penalized. Torre’ Anderson, an agriculture specialist with NBGC, said the council will connect grantees—ADM as well as a number of other big projects the council is participating in—to the farmers they need to meet their equity goals. Anderson said ADM will require farmers who participate to join the council, which will boost its membership and help it track the number of Black farmers involved. NBGC is still working out the details of how other projects it’s working with will recruit and retain Black growers. ADM plans to enroll 3,000 farmers over the five-year life of the program, and Scheetz says all $90 million of the federal grant will go directly to them. ADM and its partners, which include Costco, Field to Market, Farmers Business Network, and Keurig-Dr. Pepper, are putting up nearly $48 million in matching funds to cover all other project expenses. ADM said that of the 500 farmers enrolled as of December 1, more than 100 are members of NBGC. The range of approaches to equity amid a vast and varied set of climate-smart projects means this USDA investment will reach every state and territory in some way. How much of an impact it has on communities that have historically been mistreated, or ignored, by federal programs will become clear over the next several years. The advantage that HBCUs and groups like the NBGC have as trusted advisers in their communities makes them critical for getting funding to farmers who might not seek them out. “We’re a conduit to help alleviate some of the tension from USDA,” Anderson said. Farmers are more likely to engage in a conversation with someone from the Black Growers Council rather than with USDA, he added, even if the subject is how to get money from USDA. Donnetta Boykin, who owns Endigo’s Herbals and Organics in Trotwood, Ohio, is part of the Black farmer network in her area. She said even if they recognize that a bit of USDA money has trickled down to them in recent years, some Black farmers remain hesitant to engage directly, especially if that means a farm visit from a stranger. “I have to trust you to welcome you into my space,” she said. “There needs to be some healing done” between federal officials and Black farmers. “And that’s not happened.”