Independent family farmers are being attacked by industrial food operations like Impossible Foods, which—simply to prop up the mass-production of fake food—is taking aim at regenerative agriculturalists.
Our country’s current administration is actively denying climate change by burying scientific research that could help to guide us in predicting and mitigating the destructive impacts of recurring extreme weather events and national disasters.
Our livelihoods are dependent on an American food system that prioritizes corporate agriculture, where animals can be shipped to our borders alive, or even after being slaughtered and packaged, but then labeled as “Product of USA.”
This is the world where we toil. As the market becomes saturated with more processed foods, as severe weather events continue to wipe out our crops and injure our livestock, and as consumers increasingly and unknowingly purchase foods with false labels, we, as independent family farmers and ranchers, feel the impact.
The land beneath our feet and under our fingernails is ours. This land is generational—many of us stand where our fathers, mothers, grandmothers, and fathers once stood. For others of us, we are beginning to build a legacy—one which we hope to one day pass on to our children and grandchildren.
But we cannot do this while billions of dollars are being pumped into the misleading marketing of food-like products that provide little health and nutritional value to the very Americans we are hoping to feed. We cannot thrive under a government that does not support us and—in many cases—actively works against us.
As independent family farmers and ranchers, we take pride in keeping our world healthy and in ensuring the health of the animals that graze on our lands. The food we produce is not filled with toxins, raised with “patents,” nor born in labs. We believe in family farm-based organic and regenerative practices that improve soil health and draw down and sequester carbon. We advocate for soil restoration as a solution to climate change, and we understand that we must return more than we take. We work to restore lands that have been degraded. We can and will grow food that will sustain us and our planet.
And yet we will continue to take a beating. If industrial food producers care for the earth, as they claim to do, they would care for and support the people and practices that are helping to restore it. Instead, they attack us, and—in the process—they attack truth and transparency in our food system. They attack the very freedoms that consumers should have to knowingly choose.
As independent family farmers and ranchers, we believe in the power of regenerative agriculture to heal the soil, and we will continue to do this important work—despite the forces that are against us.
For more information on American Grassfed Association, visit americangrassfed.org.
