FSA Origins Pt. I
The current focus of my work demands an understanding of the USDA’s Farm Service Agency’s (FSA’s) priorities, mission, and vision. The USDA is embarking on an unprecedented campaign of support for urban agriculture, with the FSA leading significant new investments in dollars and people. My role in this campaign is to develop a training program for FSA employees focused on urban agriculture. The training will be relatively high-level: what is urban agriculture, who are urban growers and what are their motivations, how to manage and engage stakeholders, etc. The short-term goal of the training is to build an appreciation of and respect for urban growing and urban growers; the long-term goal is to create a cultural shift at the USDA that results in equitable support for urban growers through programs, technical support, and financial investment.
Achieving this long-term goal depends on an understanding of history. This new urban agriculture initiative does not exist in a vacuum. Its success depends on an alignment between the FSA’s historical context, the FSA’s current stated mission, and the ability of FSA staff at all levels to include urban agriculture into that mission. This post will likely be the first of a series of posts working to understand the FSA’s historical context in an attempt to illuminate how this alignment may materialize.
The modern Farm Service Agency (FSA) is one of many agencies within the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). According to a 2021 USDA organizational chart, the FSA is one of four agencies within Farm Production and Conservation (FPAC), and FPAC itself is one of 19 offices under the Secretary of Agriculture. The division of offices is notable because it suggests what the offices do not do. For example, this organizational structure suggests that the FSA, for example, does not administer rural development programs… when, in fact, the majority of the FSA’s programs support rural farmworkers and, therefore, support rural development quite directly. Similarly, “Farm Production and Conservation” could stand in as a summary for most of the work of the entire USDA.
In fact, a review of the USDA’s 2023 $261 billion budget clarifies that, besides nutrition programs (namely SNAP and related expenses), most of the USDA’s dollars support farm, conservation, and commodity programs (14%), the majority of which fall within FPAC’s jurisdiction.
Within FPAC, the FSA administers farm and loan programs to beginning and established farmers, emphasizing support for large-scale commercial agriculture, and is often the first stop for farmers on their way to other USDA programs. This is because the FSA provides farm numbers, a bureaucratic tracking mechanism that is necessary before farmers are eligible for most USDA programs, loans, and grants. In my interviews with dozens of FSA employees, I have come to understand the FSA fundamentally as a loan provider and record keeper for the rest of the USDA. For example, if a farmer wants to participate in NRCS’s high tunnel conservation program, they must first register a farm number and complete the necessary paperwork with the FSA to determine eligibility for the NRCS program. NRCS executes the technical support and administers the high tunnel funding, while the FSA manages the paperwork.
It is interesting, considering the FSA’s role, levels of funding, and separation from Rural Development, that the agency’s focus has almost entirely excluded urban agriculture to this point. Urban agriculture is largely seen as distinct from commercial agriculture, and commercial agriculture is the FSA’s explicit priority. Urban agriculture is small relative to commodity agriculture, so small that urban producers are not strategically targeted for inclusion in the 5-year census of agriculture. Urban farms struggle against a rising tide of obstacles, including higher land and labor costs relative to their urban counterparts, to stay afloat.
Yet, urban agriculture and commercial agriculture are not mutually exclusive; the USDA has not always prioritized production over people; and it could be argued that the disproportionate investment by the USDA in rural production, when compared to the lack of investment in urban agriculture until recently, could be a primary reason that urban agriculture has not developed at scale.
How much of the agency’s history determines its current scope of work? How might this influence the current urban agriculture pilot?
Origins
The complicated division of labor between USDA agencies can be explained, at least in part, by the FSA’s origin story. The USDA was founded in 1862 by President Abraham Lincoln and dubbed “the people’s department.” This post will not explore the USDA’s origins, but will jump to the dual Dust Bowl and the Great Depression disasters of the 1920s and 1930s.
Market conditions in the early 1900s, including a world war fought abroad (disrupting local food supply chains and creating shortages elsewhere) and government subsidy programs encouraged then-unprecedented agricultural expansion in the US. Supplies rose and prices fell after the war, sending the domestic agricultural economy into a spiral as farmers, many freshly saddled with debt from expansionist investments, sought to further increase their output to compensate for falling prices. This market activity, coupled with drought and the fallout from the Great Depression financial collapse, saw farmers foreclosing on properties and abandoning their farms. The “family farm,” in concept and in reality, was at risk as larger or more corporate agricultural operations survived the smaller operations. (As an aside: sound familiar?)
The USDA responded in a variety of ways, aligned with President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal program for American farmers. The Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA, 1933), which created the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, was one of the first. While the Agricultural Adjustment Administration was tasked with administering favorable loans to farmers to continue their business expansion, the primary goal of the AAA was to stabilize and return commodity prices to pre-WWI levels. The primary mechanism was a voluntary, paid program to take land out of production funded by a processing tax. This tax was later deemed unconstitutional, and the foundational elements of the AAA were rolled into the Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act of 1936.
Meanwhile, the Roosevelt administration needed to deal with the very real migration of farmers off of their land, especially in the parched, southern plains, parts of the southeast, and across the west. According to the USDA, the Resettlement Administration meant “to relocate entire farm communities to areas in which it was hoped farming could be carried out more profitably.” This was a costly and controversial undertaking, and the Resettlement Administration was renamed the Farm Security Administration in 1937 as it refocused on rural rehabilitation and supporting family farms and farmers by means beyond resettlement including loans and technical support. Subsequent policy and administration changes, another world war, and a re-imagining of the American agricultural economy wrought by globalization and industrialization resulted in a series of reorganizations within the USDA that combined many of the primary functions and mutations of this original New Deal programs. This post will focus solely on the New Deal origins.
By the USDA’s own account, the department sprang into action to address emergency in the 1920s and 1930s by focusing on the people. The creation of the Resettlement Administration is one such case, though it did transition to a more market-oriented position just a few years later. USDA programs “even provided medical care to poor rural families.”
The current focus of the FSA (market-oriented agriculture, rural and traditional farming operations) seems inherently at odds with supporting urban agriculture (often non-commercial, non-rural, “non-conventional” by USDA standards). But the FSA’s history paints a picture of an agency that is more progressive, more nimble, more concerned with community than the agency’s modern record keeping focus suggests. And if the FSA truly is an agency rooted in community first, and commercial support structures second, perhaps there can be a real home for urban agriculture at the FSA.
Farm Security Administration Photography Project
The FSA (the Farm Security Administration) went as far as to fund a years-long photography project to highlight the work accomplished by the Resettlement Administration and then to illustrate and build empathy for the plight of American farmers during this time. The project also sought to build a national consciousness around American identity and nationalism which centered the family farm. Iconic photographers like Dorothea Lange captured the gender and racial dynamics implicit (and often explicit) in this vision (doi.org/10.2307/4486410).
Underlying this work was a mission to “treat agricultural laborers as part of America’s working class” and identify opportunities to support these laborers who perhaps were once family farm owners, but were now displaced, possibly migrant laborers or tenant farmers. This focus on farm workers, while highlighted in FSA photograph’s like Lange’s, was not entirely successful; FSA and AAA programs are critiqued today for having directed funds into the hands of farm owners, rather than laborers, advancing the consolidation and mechanization that is now commonplace across American agriculture.
This especially impacted growers of color, including Black farmers still operating in a Jim Crow South. While the FSA advanced a policy of paying the poll taxes expected of the Southern poor, the administration still expected Black growers “to meet the same requirements as whites, even though the Jim Crow economy made [B]lacks poorer” (https://doi.org/10.2307/4486410). Criticism of FSA’s policies at this time claim that an urban, East-coast, technocrat influence on the USDA resulted in programs that felt ignorant of the issues underlying rural life and race relations (https://doi.org/10.2307/4486410). At the same time, the FSA photography program was one of the most inclusive and diverse government arts programs of the New Deal.
The Modern FSA
Today’s FSA (now Farm Service Agency, no longer the Farm Security Administration) was born from this progressive, technocratic history. Many, if not all, New Deal USDA policies emphasized not only the macroeconomic commodity market, but also the person, the family, and the community. New Deal agricultural programs funded resettlement, paid for rural healthcare, covered poll taxes, and commissioned a populist arts project to raise public awareness.
Urban dwellers also faced severe hardships during the Great Depression, but were not often the focus of USDA public awareness efforts. We are now in a post-WWII America. The USDA has been restructured and the FSA is not only explicitly not responsible for all Rural Development, but has also been statutorily tasked with providing equitable service to urban growers (at least, this is what I have been told; an examination of the 2018 Farm Bill will follow). Surely, the historical context and authorization exist at the modern FSA to successfully embrace and support urban growers.
According to sustainable agriculture advocates, today’s “urban, micro-scale growers, or agricultural operations using new and innovative practices (have) risked traveling to a service center just to be turned away due to a staff member not having resources to support them.” The FSA’s administrator, Zach Ducheneaux, released a memo in January 2023 acknowledging the lack of information that urban producers have about the USDA and urged newly formed urban service centers to embark on a mission of outreach to these producers.
The 2018 Farm Bill authorized these urban service centers, as well as the creation of the Office of Urban Agriculture and Innovative Production (OUAIP). While it took two years for the OUAIP to get off the ground, it now administers tens of millions of dollars in grants and coordinates technical support across the USDA (though it is housed under NRCS, another FPAC agency). The FSA’s urban service centers are also now in the process of opening their doors, though their outreach mission may be limited by a lack of programming designed specifically for urban growers (once outreach happens, what can the FSA offer to result in meaningful support?). Still, the launch of the OUAIP and the new FSA service centers underscores the significant investment that the USDA is making in urban agriculture, and, to quote Qiana Mickie of the Mayor’s Office of Urban Agriculture in NYC from a meeting of the New York City Urban County Committee, this investment opens a unique window of opportunity for all urban agriculture advocates to take advantage of to finally achieve sustained funding and support for urban growers.
However, the ultimate purpose of the USDA’s new urban ag focus is somewhat unclear. Is the investment in urban agriculture meant to increase food access, or to kick-start economic development for commercial urban agriculture? If to increase food access, is that focus restricted to urban areas or to all communities across the US? Are market-oriented policies the only policies to be considered, or will the initiative emphasize creating new programs for community-based and non-commercial urban agriculture? Further, will the initiative conflate urban and innovative agriculture, or distinguish between the two (acknowledging the substantial grey area)? These are still somewhat open, but important questions. While the contemporary FSA overtly prioritizes commercial, “traditional,” scalable agriculture, the agency’s leadership and urban agriculture teams appear open to discussion, inclusive even of a recognition that urban agriculture perhaps is not perceived as “traditional” and has not scaled in some part due to the lack of the kinds of federal investment that created the modern commodity agriculture economy.
Conclusion
The FSA’s history, rooted in New Deal policies intended to save and romanticize rural family farm communities, suggests that efforts to do the same for urban growers does align with the agency’s mission, even if the vision may be somewhat misaligned. As with all history, though, one hopes that we can learn from the mistakes of the past and avoid many of the unintended consequences of the early New Deal policies.
Future reading for future posts
An overview of the 2018 Farm Bill and its implications for urban agriculture: https://www.ers.usda.gov/agriculture-improvement-act-of-2018-highlights-and-implications/
FSA programs: https://www.fsa.usda.gov/Assets/USDA-FSA-Public/usdafiles/FactSheets/2016/farm_service_agency_programs.pdf