State senate agriculture and food committee chair Michelle Hinchey has been celebrating the passage of a package of pro-farmer priorities in the state budget.
“This work has never been more important,” Hinchey said, with an eye to insulating the state’s farming sector from “federal funding cuts and harmful policy rollbacks threatening the survival of farm businesses nationwide.”
Perhaps the most promising bill of the bunch, from a farm-to-table perspective, looks to promote the establishment and expansion of regional farmers markets whose goal is sell locally produced farm and food products on a wholesale or bulk sales basis to large-volume purchasers. The hope is that healthy food will once again appear in the underserved communities of expanding food deserts — and that New York’s farmers can turn a welcome profit in the bargain.
“Agriculture is one of our greatest strengths in New York,” Hinchey said, “and by protecting local farms we protect our food supply and support a foundational aspect of our statewide economy.”
Other bills proposed tax credits for carbon sequestration, no-till farming, crop rotation and cover cropping land management strategies, property-tax exemptions for on-farm processing operations, as well as succession planning as well as succession planning for farmers looking to sell and/or to encourage the next generation, and summer farm jobs for young people.
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