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| | | GROW FOOD. EMPOWER YOUTH. BUILD COMMUNITY.
FRESH New London is a small but mighty food justice non-profit. Our mission is to build momentum for food system change through local agriculture, community partnerships, and youth leadership training, in order to dismantle systemic oppression and ensure everyone has access to food with dignity.
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| | | | | | FRESH New London is having our final Adult Workshop on Friday, July 11th, focusing on the Farm Bill. Come out to learn about this important federal bill. A large portion of the funding goes to rural agriculture but what about urban farmers and urban agriculture? Isn't it time our communities get a bigger slice of the pie?
And further, the newly-passed budget reconciliation bill, commonly referred to as the “one big beautiful bill” comprises budgets across the entire government, including the USDA which oversees farm programs, and nutrition programs. Its budget is typically determined the Farm Bill.
The reconciliation bill pulls money from the federal nutrition programs to pay for federal farm subsidies, which analysts argued would go to “some of the wealthiest people in farm country.
Environmental Working Group reported that the USDA paid $279.4 billion in commodity subsidies in 2024, and that from 1995 through 2024, the top 10% of commodity farms received nearly 80% of those payments.
Joshua Sewell, director of research and policy at Taxpayers for Common Sense, said the bill further prioritizes larger commodity farmers by eliminating a current provision that restricts farmers with adjusted gross incomes of $900,000 or more from receiving certain USDA benefits.
“The bill violates one of the cardinal rules of Farm Bill politics by reducing food assistance to offset increases in farm assistance,” the researchers wrote. Researchers estimate that 3.2 million adults will lose their SNAP benefits and 420,000 children will lose free school lunches.
The Farm Bill, which is typically reauthorized every five years, was last passed in 2018 and Congress failed to reauthorize, choosing instead to extend the 2018 policies, in 2023 and 2024. You can read more HERE |
| | | | | | | | Arianna Riabov Hernandez
FRESH Fellow
I am a native of McAllen, Texas, a city on the Texas-Mexico border in a region known as the Lower Rio Grande Valley. I recently graduated from UTRGV with a degree in Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems. While earning my degree, I worked as a researcher in a farm food safety lab that also developed a workshop for local small scale farmers. I look forward to working with FRESH to put what I learned to work in helping create a local food system that is sustainable and just. |
| | | | Open to the public! Around Town Events! |
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| FRESH is fiscally sponsored by Third Sector New England, Inc (TSNE).
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Phone: 860-574-9006
P.O. Box 285 New London, CT 06320 |
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