For many, getting the OEFFA conference schedule of workshops, keynotes, and networking events can make you feel like a kid in a candy store.

There’s so much good material to choose from and opportunities to connect with old friends and make new ones, all while working collectively toward a healthier future.

The 2022 conference will be no exception.

If you want to see real change in our food and farming system—changes that support organic and regenerative farmers and invest in healthful local and regional food choices—you’re going to want to be a part of these key conversations at the 2022 OEFFA conference, Rooted and Rising, February 12 online and February 17-19 at the Dayton Convention Center:

We recently survived one of the most contentious elections in recent memory. Whomever your preferred candidate, we now have a declared winner in Joe Biden. But what does that mean for sustainable and organic agriculture, local food systems, and conservation policy?

One of the priorities of President-Elect Joe Biden’s agricultural agenda is to strengthen anti-trust enforcement. According to the campaign website, “American farmers and ranchers are being hurt by increasing market concentration. Biden will make sure farmers and producers have access to fair markets where they can compete and get fair prices for their products—and require large corporations to play by the rules instead of writing them—by strengthening enforcement of the Sherman and Clayton Antitrust Acts and the Packers and Stockyards Act.”

Guest post from Jeff Schahczenski, National Center for Appropriate Technology (NCAT), Agricultural and Natural Resource Economist

Like many of our favorite movies, the sequel to the Coronavirus Farm Assistance Program (CFAP 2) is an expansion and improvement of the original. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Farm Service Agency (FSA) began taking applications for CFAP 2 on September 21, 2020. The program will end on December 11, 2020. About $14 billion has been made available to fund this relief effort for U.S. agriculture producers impacted by COVID-19.

While the highly consolidated global food supply chain has broken under the pressure of the COVID-19 crisis, our diverse and distributed local and regional food system has proven more resilient. Many OEFFA farmers have been able to adapt to the market disruptions that occurred as restaurants and schools closed, by pivoting to other strategies like online pre-ordering and taking advantage of strong customer demand. Farmers’ markets moved quickly to adapt to the new reality of social distancing by implementing drive-thru markets, online ordering systems, and other market modifications.

While these adaptations helped keep local food flowing, they did not come without cost, both financial and human. These changes included things such as recruiting and training more staff and volunteers, reducing the number of vendors at markets, purchasing personal protective equipment, setting up and managing new software for online ordering, and instituting new packaging and labeling requirements.

The COVID-19 pandemic is wreaking havoc, not only on human health, but also on our economy. And farmers are not being spared. The good news is that there are some tools out there to help.

Three disaster aid packages have been developed as of this writing and more are in the works. In this post, we will do our best to break down the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). This is one of two programs included in the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act for small businesses, and the only one available to farmers.

The CARES Act expands the PPP, which is administered by the Small Business Administration (SBA), to provide much-needed relief for small businesses, many of whom have temporarily closed their doors due to shelter-in-place and social-distancing directives. Congress allocated $349 billion to the PPP, which provides forgivable loans of up to $10 million to help businesses (including farm businesses) rehire or retain workers during the COVID-19 crisis. 

Today is “World Food Day,” an international day of action when people from around the world come together to declare their commitment to eradicating global hunger.

As we join with the state, national, and international community today, it is important to critically consider the ways in which our food system so often fails us. Millions of people suffer from obesity and obesity-related diseases and more than a billion people globally are overweight.

At the same time, 10 percent of the world—821 million people—currently experience chronic hunger. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has issued a report saying the impact of the climate crisis on agriculture will result in growing world hunger, unless there are seismic shifts in global land use, production methods, food waste, and human diets.