Thank You Joe: Big Leaps Forward at Valley Flora Thanks to Biden
As the new year gets underway on Floras Creek, we’re catching our breath, looking back, looking ahead, and feeling gratitude. A lot of big things happened this past year on the farm, much of which we didn’t have time or bandwidth to share with you in the hustle of the season. But as a new government takes the helm today, we wanted to catch you up on some big investments that were made possible by innovative USDA funding, and what that means for our business and our community moving forward.
Our kind of small, diversified farm has always had to scrabble at the edges for limited USDA resources. Farms that produce commodity crops like corn, soy, wheat, cotton, canola, tobacco, sugar beets, etc. receive government subsidy checks and crop insurance payments every year, equaling about 16% ($70 billion) of the total federal Farm Bill budget (see pie chart below). Meanwhile, “specialty” crops (i.e. fruit and vegetables - that’s us) are lumped into a category that receives less than 1% of total Farm Bill funding (that tiny slice of the pie that also includes forestry, rural development, research, credit, and the catch-all category, “miscellaneous”). All to say, Valley Flora has never received much money from the USDA, except for the conservation programs we’re enrolled in (like planting trees along our streambank, for which they send us a token $47 check each year).
Source: USDA Economic Research Service Based on Congressional Budget Office, Direct Spending Effects for the Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018 (2018 Farm Bill), December 11, 2018
While commodity programs and crop insurance have still been amply funded under the Biden administration, he also made it a priority to invest in local and regional food production, better food access for low-income communities, and clean energy/climate-smart agriculture. To this end, he empowered the USDA to roll out the most impactful set of grant programs I’ve ever seen for farms like ours. Realizing it might be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, I put my nose to the grindstone last winter and cranked out a slew of grant proposals for these new USDA programs. A number of our proposals were selected and so began a very exciting phase of opportunity and investment at Valley Flora. Here’s a glimpse of what we’re doing with these special federal funds, some of which are still coming down the pipeline.
$48,000 over Three Years to Supply Local Foodbanks and Community Fridges
The Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program is a whole lot of words, and it means a whole lot of veggies are flowing from Valley Flora to local food assistance organizations. Administered by the Oregon Foodbank, the LFPA grant pays us for produce that we deliver to the Common Good foodbank in Port Orford and the Coos Bay Library Community Fridge. We’ve always donated leftover and grade B produce to these outlets for free, but this grant has allowed us to harvest and pack them three times more volume, as well as send our foodbank partners perfect peppers, beautiful bunches of kale, and cases of lettuce. The Common Good serves one out of every four families in Port Orford and the Coos Bay Library Community Fridge serves hundreds of folks daily. We love knowing that VF produce is finding its way to far more families every week thanks to these funds.
$25,000+ for SNAP and Double Up Food Bucks
The biggest slice of the Farm Bill pie – and it’s a huge one – is SNAP (food stamps), accounting for over 75% of Farm Bill spending. Double Up Food Bucks (DUFB) is an innovative program that operates in tandem with SNAP to improve access to fresh fruits and vegetables by covering half the cost of any fresh produce that’s purchased with SNAP. It was founded as a non-profit pilot program in Detroit and quickly scaled as a national model for nutrition incentives. The Biden administration oversaw significant growth in this program, enabling us to quadruple our SNAP CSA membership at the farm over the last two years. For our CSA members who have SNAP, Double Up Food Bucks is the difference between being able to afford a CSA share or not.
In Oregon, our network of CSA farms is supported by the Pacific Northwest CSA Coalition (PNWCSA) to process SNAP payments and access DUFB funds. Over the past four years, PNWCSA went from processing about $70,000 in SNAP funds in 2020 to over $200,000 in 2024 (a 185% increase), and from accessing $34,000 in Double Up Food Bucks funds in 2020, to $190,000 in 2024 (a 459% increase). This past year 66 Oregon farms participated in the Double Up CSA program, Valley Flora among them, providing shares to 650 families statewide. The good news is that PNWCSA has secured Double Up funding through 2026, however there’s concern that SNAP could undergo deep cuts under the next administration. Our goal at Valley Flora is to continue to increase our SNAP CSA membership (please spread the word about this awesome program!) so that we can get fresh produce to every family that wants it in our community. Our hope is that we can eventually extend this program to our farmstand, not just our CSA, and keep improving food access on the Southcoast.
$20,000 for a Battery Backup for our Solar Array
In 2018 we installed a 12kW solar array on the roof of our barn, which runs all our core infrastructure at the farm: coolers, freezers, propagation greenhouse, irrigation pumps and lights. It’s been awesome to power the farm with the sun, but ironically we’re not actually energy “independent” because our PV array is still tied to the grid. This allows us to send any excess power we generate back to grid, and to pull power from the grid when we don’t have enough solar gain. All good, but unfortunately it also means that if the grid goes down (due to winter storms or wildfires), we don’t have power – despite all those solar panels on the roof.
We used to think of power outages as a winter problem, and not very worrisome since we have less perishable produce in our walk-in cooler and air temps are cooler in the winter. But with growing wildfire risk – and associated summer power outages – we’ve started to feel increasingly vulnerable to the possibility that our walk-in cooler might go down on a hot August day when it’s full of perishables. We applied for and received a REAP (Rural Energy for America Program) grant to cover half the cost of a battery backup system, which will keep our coolers running and our operation humming in the face of climate change. This is the first year that battery backups have been an allowable REAP project expense, thanks to forward-thinking, climate-smart policy under Biden.
$50,000 for a 60 hp Tractor with Forks and Macro Bins
For over twenty years we’ve been unloading 1 ton pallets by hand, lifting 50 pound bins of squash one by one, and borrowing neighbors’ forklifts when we’re in a pinch. Being low-tech certainly helps keep you in shape, but it also puts some bottlenecks on efficiency and innovation (and sometimes results in back injuries). Through the Resilient Food Systems Infrastructure Program (RFSI), we received grant funding to purchase a used 60 hp Kubota tractor with forks so we can now lift and move one-ton pallets. The grant also paid for a dozen “macro” bins, which will streamline our handling of various storage crops. The tractor arrived a month ago and there is only one way to describe it: total gamechanger.
All told, these grants and programs add up to around $150,000 in investment into our family farm and this community. To put that in perspective, that’s HALF of our total gross annual sales at Valley Flora! An infusion of capital at this scale has an impact that will ripple through our business and our little local food system for years to come. It’s allowed us get more good food to folks who couldn’t otherwise afford fresh veggies. And it’s allowed us to make purchases that never would have penciled out without grant assistance: a new tractor, a state-of-the-art battery backup system, and smart materials handling equipment.
There’s legitimate concern that many of these programs will disappear with the changing of the guard in Washington, and I’ll be sad for farmers and local communities alike if that comes to pass. Unfortunately, the Farm Bill extension that was passed in December with significant input from the incoming administration hints at what might be coming down the pike: plenty of funding for commodity programs but big slashes to programs that support conservation, small family farms, and community food systems.
No matter what, I’m grateful for what the Biden administration has made possible for our farm and many others like it. No other president has ever made this kind of immediate impact on our business, in direct support of all that we are trying to do here on the banks of Floras Creek – for our community, for the environment, and for the climate.
As the baton is passed today I say thank you, Joe, thank you. You've made a big difference at Valley Flora.
