Ag Adaptability Roundtable 3

The perennial challenge for farmers and ranchers includes how to make enough money to feed their own families while feeding their communities.

Colorado’s Commissioner of Agriculture told a virtual roundtable on How Agriculture Can Succeed in Tough Times that COVID has added a whole new array of challenges.

Greenberg: “ With processing facilities closing down or reducing operations and the ripple effect of that. Prices are tough for a lot of our sectors in ag, just the general cost of business, it costs more but you're getting less. There’s a lot of farmers of color and other farmers who deal with persistent challenges, financial challenges, access to financing. That’s another perennial problem that’s being exacerbated now.

Kate Greenberg told the group some relief dollars are coming. The relief payments for farmers passed by congress as well as commodity purchasing underway by the USDA.

Greenberg:Some of these things we have yet to see how much they’re going to help our producers so we’re not sitting on our heels expecting that will be the only solution a lot of this is market based and it goes back to what everyone has said that we've got to build a resilient economic foundation and that includes marketplaces it includes supply chain distribution, storage and what those structures look like and how they support folks up and down the supply chain.

Greenberg says the support includes a mental health piece which has shown to be especially important for ag producers.