Ronald Simmons, a small farmer in Duplin County, farms free-range hogs and sells pork products and other directly-marketed products on his farm, Master Blend Family Farms. The college's grant-funded project will allow it to expand its technical assistance to socially disadvantaged farmers, ranchers and veterans.
N.C. A&T’s College of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences will be able to provide additional aid to small farmers across North Carolina thanks to two new U.S. Department of Agriculture grants totaling nearly $850,000.
The larger of the two awards will establish the BeCAROLINE Coordination Hub to help the college and Cooperative Extension expand their technical assistance efforts to socially disadvantaged farmers, ranchers and veterans. The second grant will help CAES promote the USDA’s Farm Service Agency.
Together, both projects will advance equity, access and success in local communities, said Gregory Goins, Ph.D., professor and chair of the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Design and the principal investigator on both USDA grants.
“We’re expanding our stakeholder network,” Goins said. “This provides CAES a one-stop shop to help solve small farm challenges without excluding people of color.”
A $748,800 grant to be paid out over three years will launch the BECCH (pronounced “beach”) project to help N.C. farmers and ranchers who have experienced historical and systemic discrimination and might not have the resources they need to make full use of federal farming programs and the latest agricultural innovations.
BECCH will work with socially disadvantaged farmers and ranchers — a group that also includes Black and Native American farmers, military veterans and new farmers — to improve the likelihood that they’ll have sustainable and profitable agricultural operations.
The program will connect small farmers in the region with five key community partners whose work already helps people overcome social barriers. These partnerships will promote agricultural production, entrepreneurship, land ownership, youth involvement and other issues crucial to small famers.
Those community partners are N.C. Farm to School, an N.C. Department of Agriculture & Consumer Services program that provides new markets for North Carolina farmers and a source of fresh fruits and vegetables for schools; Help for Landowners, a nonprofit that helps farmers keep and use their land and pass it down to later generations; and Guilford County’s Peacehaven Community Farm, whose assistance to disabled persons also includes the USDA-funded AgrAbility program that supports farmers and ranchers with disabilities.
Other partners are the Victory Learning Center located at World Victory, a Greensboro church that will host BECCH project meetings; and SWELL Drone Academy, a Fayetteville nonprofit that will teach farmers as well as students 16 years and older to fly drones and help them get their federal drone certification.
BECCH will focus its efforts initially in seven counties in the Piedmont region of North Carolina: A&T’s home base of Guilford County, plus Alamance, Caswell, Montgomery, Orange, Person and Rockingham counties. The program will expand later to poverty-persistent rural counties to the south and east that have large numbers of socially disadvantaged farmers and ranchers as well as military veterans involved in agriculture.
A second grant, a one-year award of $99,984, will go toward building a new website to promote the USDA’s Farm Service Agency, which loans money to agricultural producers. This new web portal will more efficiently and effectively connect socially disadvantaged farmers and ranchers to FSA programs and services.
Both projects will be coordinated through the newly established Small Farms Resource and Innovation Center.
The center will be based at CAES and serve as a clearinghouse for numerous resources to help socially disadvantaged farmers in underserved communities. It will have two co-directors: Goins, and Mark Blevins, the assistant administrator for agriculture and natural resources with Cooperative Extension.
In addition to managing these two grant-funded projects, the small farms center will bring together growers, academic leaders, industry and the USDA to address the nation’s most pressing challenges facing small farms.
The center “leverages our strength here at A&T,” Goins said. “We have a lot of personal relationships with the small holders. We also have trust because they know us. And we’re familiar with the challenges that small-scale producers face.”
Goins noted that the USDA has many different avenues to help small and mid-sized farmers. But it’s a large and complex federal department, and many small and under-resourced farmers aren’t equipped to turn this flood of information into positive and meaningful change for their operations.
Moreover, this new round of assistance comes at a momentous time for small farmers. The COVID-19 pandemic interrupted supply chains across the country, and local and regional growers have played a vital role in keeping their communities fed. But Goins said they need help to do that.
“Small-scale growers want a straightforward on-ramp to gain access to technical assistance that is relevant and beneficial to their farm,” Goins said. “Our overall goal is for farmers to become better informed, connected and equipped to make meaningful, positive change to their farms.”
